More Mutual Aid
With all of the fires going on in Southern California, there’s been a huge drain of resources from Northern California, so Ferndale and other local communities are providing coverage and support for tasks that CDF would normally be responsible for. Saturday the FVFD got called up to provide a 3 person team and I went out with them. Our first assignment was to cover the Trinidad CDF station. Pretty easy task. We washed our truck in the morning, and then sat around and watched football all afternoon. We did get one call for a smoke check, but got cancelled before we got there. That evening we were told that we were going to be moved to Whitethorn but on the way down, our schedule was switched to Bridgeville, and then a few minutes later we were instructed to return to Fortuna, which is where we ended up spending the night.
Then Monday we went out for mop up on a fire that had started just outside of Eureka last week. The fire had been started by a disoriented man in order that someone might find him. He ended up being disoriented in more ways than one, and ended up being checked into local mental hospital. Our day consisted of hiking the perimeter of the fire, looking for any signs of smoke. I found one small spot that was still smoldering so I at least got to spray some water and foam. Then we went back into town to get another tank of water, and back at the fire scene we had lunch. Shortly after lunch we got called out to Blue Lake and got to drive for a little bit code 3 (lights and siren). But after a helicopter had a chance to check it out further we were reduced to code 2 and then shortly thereafter we were cancelled completely as it ended up it was just smoke drifting from some of the other fires that are going on up here. So we returned back to our fire. Did a final hike around it and one of the other firefighters found another area that was smoking so he put that one out with a big layer of foam. They can’t call the fire out until they go three consecutive days without finding smoke, so each new discovery resets the clock. After that we went back to Fortuna where we spent the night again, and then we were relieved in the morning by a fresh crew from Ferndale.