Sunday Chris and Taylor, Todd and I went back out to the Broad Mouth Fire. We left the house at 5am, had breakfast and morning briefings and then headed to the fire grounds with our Division. Todd was the supervisor over the Hotel Division and I was riding as his second. Heres an idea of the area burned and the maps showing the divisions.
The job for the day was to go Cold Trailing. Basically you go through all the areas burned in your division and check the ground for hotspots. You get a lot in heavy ashes, or at bases of trees etc. There had been no flames (in our division) for over 24 hours by this point but hot ashes can hide really easy. We started working on central and western end of our division.
Todd and I took an end to cold trail on a section that was hit the day before while the crew worked on another section. We had (including us) a 22 man crew.
It started raining on us which was PERFECT
We made the rounds towards the western end and checked on a few places that had issues the day before. The rest of the crew was working on a spot theyd marked as a hot spot the day before (with a flyover plane and heat sensing camera). So while they were working we were checking on everything else around making sure we didnt have any other issues.
This is DUST and ASH blowing off the mountain. The winds were crazy. We had a pretty much constant 25mph winds with gusts a lot higher.
We dealt with good winds most the day. After lunch we were ordered to hunker down and get off ridge tops because massive wind storm was coming through with lightening. So we got off the hill top and waited for the very strong winds to blow through. We were feeling pretty good about the day. We hadnt found too many hot spots and the ones that were worked on were ones we knew about already.
It was just after 2 and we had the airplane doing fly overs checking areas looking for smoke puffs we cant see. She came across and told us we had a fire on a ridge top (it wasnt anywhere we could see from where we were at or the canyon we were working in) We were in Little Canyon and it was the next canyon over in Johnson Canyon. We lined the crews off the mountain and headed to safe staging spot because we weren't sure exactly where the fire was and by the directions it was blocking one of our ways out if it came off the ridge.
As soon as we started getting to the bottom end of Little Canyon we could see smoke and flames and knew it wasnt just a little smoke puff. The massive winds that had just came through found some little hot spot to stir up and started another fire.
We had to have the plane direct us in on roads (dozer cut lines and 4 wheeler trails) to finally find some access to where the fire was on the ridge. When we got there we had big flames and lots of smoke. Chris and I grabbed a line off his truck and a tool and headed down to try and put it out while we were waiting for the rest of the resources to get to us. Taylor was feeding us hose and Todd was running command. I guess while we were working on that fire we had 3 large spot fires start just to the south west of us and the crews coming to us had to stop and take care of those first. We got about half of our flames put out and looked to the east and with some of the smoke gone saw we had another fire that was rapidly spreading. The hot ash stirred up quite a mess on a windy hot dry day.
The helicopter launched and started bringing us in bucket drops. This fire bordered the black in one spot but had open unburned to the east and south of it.
and of course while were fighting this fire the winds pick back up like crazy
After a few hours we finally got all the flames knocked down, a line in around the fire, we had a dozer come in an dig a line and we were working on hot spots.
We were filthy and exhausted. We'd hoped to be starting off the mountain by 7pm and instead we were just starting mop up
Its hard to tell but this is just the very top of the fire. That drop off there goes pretty much straight down and thats where we were fighting the fire at.
From just over the drop off looking up and still towards the top of the burn
Tabitha (the EMT assigned to our group) and I took care of the entire first spot of the fire, hand dug a line around and mopped up all the hot spots. Once our side was done we went over and started helping the other side that everyone abandoned us for :) it was a little bigger.
We got another weather warning from the plane that high winds, lightening and rain were headed in and about 20 minutes out. That storm passed over with out starting a new fire thankfully.
We earned our money thats for sure!
We headed off the mountain just after 9pm.
Dinner was at 8pm so they held some over for us. We had some problems getting out of the area and FINALLY made it down to flat ground. One of the brush trucks from another agency was having problems and we had to tow it back to base. We had dinner, finished our paperwork, debriefed and finally it was time to go home just after 11pm. Plus Todd and I still had to stop and pick up Kennedy on the way home! We made it home just before midnight. Chris and I showered, crawled into bed and died for 4 hours before it was time to get up and go to work the next day.
It was a LONG 19 hour day but we got it done and worked hard.
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