Holding the line - #92

When fire comes home.

I was loading trash into the truck bed when I saw the flames. It was a cloudless Tuesday with a high-pressure wind, promising a week of sunshine. The wind held steady, up valley from the west, blowing toward the sunrise ridge. But it took a whip and curved around, mingling with the cat litter and old fish, the household debris bagged and loaded, and that’s when I smelled it: smoke. 

I looked over my shoulder and saw the plume, still small but too big to be from someone’s chimney. I jogged down into the street corner, out of the way of the big pine to get a better view. And I could see it clearly then: flames had burst from under the power lines, maybe a half mile east from my house. 

I looked at the garbage in the bed of the truck and did the calculations:

• This could be a prescribed burn. It’s in an area slashed last year in a joint effort by the power company and the Forest Service.

• If it wasn’t a prescribed burn, and there was a fire with changing winds half a mile from my house, I would want my truck bed empty.

• It would only take maybe seven minutes to drive over to the trash garage on the other side of town, unload, and come back. I could stop in the maintenance barn or town hall and see if I could ask about the fire. 

So I drove my trash away from the flames. 

As soon as I parked, I saw our town manager, hurrying from one building to another.

“Hi!” He waved, ever cordial. 
“Hi! Hey, Is that a prescribed burn?” 
“Nope, services are on the way,” he said trotting away. 

Well shit. I unloaded the trash, then whipped the truck around to head home. Pulling back up to my house, the flames were now climbing the trees to the south of the slashed area. People were coming out of their houses as I ran into mine. 

“Ben, come outside, there’s fire on the pass!” 

Our little valley, most of the year, is a dead-end town. But from late June to late October, the “pass road” is open. This is a dirt, gravel, and rock road maintained by the Forest Service. It is barely one lane in many places, and you need a capable vehicle with high clearance to comfortably navigate it. My mom won’t go on this road, even as a passenger. But many, many people drive on it as a form of summer recreation. Pass roads like these make you feel like you’re disappearing into the wilderness. But there’s one thing that shatters the illusion of remoteness: the power lines. 

From our house, the power lines are but wisps on the landscape, barely noticeable, but they run amongst the trees along the pass road, climbing up, up, up until they soar uninterrupted in the sky like massive zip lines to the reinforced poles on the peak, connecting us with another bigger but somehow more remote town. 

Last year, the power company cleared all the trees under the power lines as fire prevention. This area was mostly unutilized, not including path crossings and the winter nickname of “Christmas Tree Alley”. But perhaps clearing isn’t the right word: they chopped all the  “hazardous trees and potential wildfire fuels” down and then stacked them in piles. However devastating this was to watch (I actually cried when I saw an old pine chopped down, but I was also PMS’ing), it is actually safer to remove ignition sources under the power lines.

Last fall, after the slashing had been complete, there were town murmurings of a different problem: the power company and the Forest Service didn’t align on who was responsible for cleaning up this mess. Some of the slash piles were burned, but others remained. Burning rids the area of fast ignition fuel, and it also helps mitigate beetles. It’s an ongoing project, one with a three-year plan and a revegetation contractor focused on native planting. 

Even with the major ignition sources gone and the low native planting planned, fire still looms. Where there is nature, where there is power, where there are people, there will always be fire.

Ben followed me outside to the corner as the teenager across the street came out of her house with a shovel, her mom a few steps behind her. Another mom and daughter pair appeared with similar gear. In moments there was a cavalcade of various neighbors on foot and dirt bikes, fire extinguishers and shovels in town, heading up the pass road with no promise of sirens or lights to be seen. 

We hiked up the pass and took an access path down to the flames where the smoke clouded the scene. The fire whipped up the trees as we dug dirt to smother active flames and hold the line. The wind mercifully blew east away from the town, but it would swirl and taunt, engulfing us as we stayed focused on the task at hand. The sign-maker, the leatherworker, the arborist, the ex-CIA agent, the teenage girls with their shovels, the teenage boy with his extinguisher, the patroller, the former mayor, the ceramicist, and of course the writer and her town clerk. Neighbors kept pouring in, smothering fresh flames with dirt, watching the wind and watching the valley for help. 

“The smoke is coming from the ground.” That was the refrain. Over and over, as little chimney poofs flared up from ground untouched by the flames. We played whack-a-mole as the ground smoldered against our boots. 

This town was a storied mining town in its day, and you need only glance around to see several tailings fields. What you can’t see are the buildings lost to time, including several mills.

Where the power lines now hang, there used to be a saw mill. In its wake, it left a ground composed of densely packed sawdust. Atop it, the stumps of trees cut down last year and the debris left from the slashing. On a stormy Friday night, lightning danced through the skies, clapping to a tune of her own rhythm. We enjoyed the spectacle and we went to sleep. We couldn’t see her plans for the week ahead.

As the smoke licked my boots from below, it was clear the trap she’d left for us. Lightning had struck the ground on Friday, creating subterranean smoldering. Underground, there's little oxygen to feed the fire — but Monday brought a high pressure system of unrelenting high altitude sun and wind. It dried out the ground materials and fed the heat, igniting on a perfect Tuesday afternoon. 

The wildland firefighters arrived an hour after the fire had been called in. The line was held, keeping the fire to an area of maybe only 50 by 200 feet. It was compact, and the wind favored the direction away from the town almost the whole time. 

“Did you see any suspicious people?”

“Did you notice anything unusual?”

“Anyone driving through town you didn’t recognize?”

I’d seen some old women in a shiny new SUV with Texas plates. I didn’t mention it. The smoke was coming from the ground. The wildland team got to work, and the workers got back to town. The old-timers were quick to warn this area had burned before and it would burn again. History would always dictate this town’s future. We saw the helicopter overhead as we walked back to our houses, shovels on our shoulders. 

The next day, the town manager emailed to let us know the status. The firefighters had removed including the unburned fuel from the area, created a containment line, and poured some 6,000 gallons of water on the scene. The crew would monitor the scene through the week. “Duff fires” would remain — small pop-ups that didn’t warrant calling anyone. “No worries,” he said, followed quickly by a reminder: “if you do see the fire erupt into something that may cross the containments lines, then, yes, call 911.”

But many people had called 911 and were met with nothing. Despite the SOS feature on the iPhone, multiple residents reported attempting to call 911 from the cellphones, over their WiFi networks, and finding dead air. The only woman who’d successfully called in the fire did so from a landline, something that’s become cost prohibitive in the era of digital everything. 

I made a joke I meant, saying we should have some sort of flag this system:

This house has a landline.

This house has extinguishers.

This house has epipens. 

This house has a generator. 

It is easy to coordinate your efforts on a sunny day when you see people head into the streets. It is less easy when the emergency is yours and yours alone. 

I didn’t witness any duff fires. The smoke dissipated, leaving the valley peaceful and clear. The only remnants of the fire were the headache that followed me home and the awareness of that it took the firefighters an hour to get to us. When I lived in the Santa Monica Mountains, I was a volunteer for the Topanga Coalition for Emergency Preparedness. We were prepared in Topanga, but we were mainly prepared to leave, to evacuate, and to help others do the same. Preparedness here has a different meaning. It is a constant assessment of threat and a continual calibration against those threats. At home, I consider the natural fuel around our log house. I thought about the broken gasket, our only hose outlet, that would cost another $500 to fix. I thought about when we’d last replaced our tires, where the extinguishers were, and which boots of mine had the thickest soles.

Maybe it can seem daunting, to always be planning for catastrophe, but we’re not planning alone. That’s what makes this work, that when push comes to fire, we all work together.