Local firefighters mobilized for large wildfires

MOSES LAKE — It’s been a long, hot, smoky summer throughout the state. It seemed like every other day there was a new wildfire starting somewhere and air quality got pretty nasty sometimes. But for some local firefighters, it’s been even hotter and smokier.

Crews from several local fire departments, including Moses Lake Fire Department and Grant County Fire Districts 5 and 6, have been getting an up-close-and-personal look at the Oregon Road and Gray fires that burned homes, closed roads, billowed smoke into our air and claimed lives.

“It’s hard work, dirty work,” said Moses Lake Firefighter Nigel McNeill, who returned Sept. 4 from the Gray fire west of Spokane. “Dust and ash and all that stuff.”

So what were McNeill and his colleagues doing so far from home?

When a big fire breaks out, McNeill explained, it’s likely to be beyond the resources of a small local fire department. So the state fire marshal can initiate a state mobilization, which brings in equipment – and the people to operate it – from other jurisdictions around the state.

The Gray fire was discovered in the early afternoon of Aug. 18, and within 24 hours had ballooned to 9,500 acres. The fire prompted Level 3 (“Leave now”) evacuation orders for the city of Medical Lake and surrounding communities, forcing thousands of people to flee and threatening homes, outbuildings and businesses. That’s a lot for Spokane County Fire District 3 to cope with. On Aug. 21, when the fire was well over 10,000 acres, the state mobilization call had gone out and seven crews of 400 personnel were on site, along with 47 engines, nine dozers and 11 water tenders, according to a statement from the state fire marshal’s office.

“Once these incidents check certain boxes for criteria, you know, estimated property at risk, size of the incident, life safety — obviously, that’s No. 1 — once they check all these boxes for state mobilizations, then they'll start activating strike teams. And that's how we get deployed. We'll get a request through state resources for departments to assemble and send out strike teams.”

A strike team typically consists of five apparatuses, McNeill said: brush trucks, tenders and other vehicles. The state actually asks for particular equipment, he said, and then takes the personnel that go along with them. Moses Lake Fire Department supplied a brush truck.

“A tender is two people.” he said, “A type 1 engine should be four. Our brush apparatus is three people. So it’s kind of specific to the apparatus as to how many personnel respond on those vehicles.”

McNeill and fellow MLFD Firefighter Doug Presta were deployed along with their brush truck to the Gray fire, in the process relieving MLFD firefighters Gary Lebacken and Rick Kelly, who had been fighting the Oregon Road fire for nine days. That fire had flared up north of Spokane, near the town of Elk, the same day as the Gray fire. When Lebacken and Kelly were sent to that fire, it was also well over 10,000 acres.

Presta and McNeill replaced Lebacken and Kelly due to time limitations for regional fire deployment, Lebacken said.

“Your deployment can be up to 14 days before you have to be removed from the fire for your rest days,” McNeill said. ”So, those guys were getting close to bumping up to their 14 days. So what I did, is I went up with Doug Presta and we did a crew change. The day we did that, they moved our brush truck, our strike team from the Oregon fire over to the Gray fire because they needed us on the strike team over there. So our clock started that day (and) they got to come home, get some rest.”

Lebacken and Kelly had been deployed with firefighters from all over Grant, Douglas and Chelan counties, Lebacken said, as part of the Mid-Columbia Strike Team.

“While we were up there, we were assigned to the structure division,” he said. “We were doing a lot of structure protection, mopping up around houses, making sure that houses had defendable space. There were some houses that were lost. There were some houses that got very lucky and came very close.”

The Oregon Road fire and the Gray fire each claimed one life, according to reports from regional firefighting agencies.

“Our strike team was in charge of mopping up in Division Zulu,” McNeill said. “They would fly the fire at night with thermal imaging to find hot spots throughout that 10,000 acres, and then we would go out in the morning with a thermal map where they picked up the hot spots. (It might) be a tree on fire, which was the bulk of the case. In 10,000 acres of a wooded area, there's a lot there that you’ve got to take care of. We’d find them on the map, we'd navigate, we'd find them and then we’d put out the hot spots.”

Part of McNeill’s team’s work was digging and rehabilitating handlines. Some containment lines can be dug by bulldozers, he explained, which clear away flammable vegetation in a line around the fire to keep it from spreading. Some areas, though, are too rugged to get heavy equipment into, which is when firefighters clear them the old-fashioned way, with shovels, sweat and the occasional blister.

“We call it scratching out a line,” McNeill said. “What they're doing is they're removing the top – leaves, sticks, debris, grasses — they're going clear down to bare mineral soil, and they're trying to use it as a fire break, should the fire come through there, to either slow it down or stop it. You just get in a line and one guy (after another) starts breaking it up and when the last person goes through it should be down to mineral soil.”

All the Moses Lake firefighters are home now, McNeill said. Command of the Oregon Road fire was returned to local firefighters Monday morning, and the Gray fire is down to 36 personnel. While there are still hot spots, he said, the fires are mostly out and it’s unlikely that anything will happen to require them to be called up again. Meanwhile, the other communities in the affected fire districts had to have protection because their entire department wasn’t off fighting a single fire.

“State mobilization is designed to bring in resources from outside of the area to provide relief for the local crews that had been fighting this thing since it started,” McNeill said. “It gives those local fire districts time to step back, take a breath, get some rest, repair any equipment they need. We come in and take over for them on the fire so they can take care of their communities as far as any further 911 calls, you know? Because it doesn't stop.”

Joel Martin may be reached via email at jmartin@columbiabasinherald.com.