Carson fire captain recalls firestorm

Wind-whipped blazes that charred 800,000 acres in Southern California last year were described by those who saw them as a "firestorm."

Despite the efforts of 15,500 firefighters, the ferocious orange torrent erased more than 3,600 homes and claimed 24 lives.

A crew from Carson City Fire Department joined firefighters from across the nation in the campaign to douse the flames. Twenty-seven-year veteran Capt. Dave Miller and three other Carson firefighters were assigned to the Guatay Strike Team along with engines from the Reno Airport Authority and the Reno Fire Department.

"The flames were going a couple hundred feet in the air, burning from those big oak trees with all their sap and oil," he said. "This was by far the most impressive thing I've ever seen. It was just very, very devastating."

Miller and the other Carson City men had driven a structure engine south, so they were assigned to protect homes and buildings off Highway 8 east of San Diego. He described whole neighborhoods burned to the ground - leaving only a fine, white ash and the skeletons of cars.

Fires around Carson City will usually leave trees blackened but standing, he said. Not so in Southern California last year.

"Down there, there was absolutely nothing left. You wouldn't think anything could burn so fast. It was just a tremendous amount of heat."

Despite facing the tallest flames he's seen in almost 30 years fighting fire, Miller said there was something else that struck him: The kindness of those in the communities.

"The biggest thing I noticed was, all the citizens always bent over backwards to help us out. We would go to a restaurant, wanting to buy our lunch, but the manager wouldn't let us. So it was very, very humbling."

In the town of Pine Valley, grateful residents made breakfast for the exhausted firefighters.

"These people had lost everything, yet they went ahead and pulled together their resources to give us a hot meal," Miller said.

At the Viejas Indian Casino, firefighters were invited to sleep in the bingo room because it was raining and there weren't enough tents. "And they fed us dinner late that night," Miller said.

He also gave credit to his engine crew, including pump operator and driver Dave Park, firefighter Dan Albee and firefighter and paramedic Jeff Davies, all of Carson City.

"Without these guys I couldn't do my job," he said. "I have to give them a big attaboy."

Others agreed.

"I think that the firefighters that dealt with that situation down there did an incredible job," said Mike Dondero, chief of fire and aviation for the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest.

"There were about 2,000 structures lost, but they saved about 150,000 - you have to look at it that way."

Lessons learned in Southern California last year could be put into practice here.

"We could have the same situation here. We're in a drought and we have a lot of the same burning conditions they have down in Southern California. We just don't have the same amount of people."

He listed drought-stressed vegetation, downslope winds blowing into an urban-interface area and very dry conditions during the fire season.

"And we have a lot of fires, both from lighting and human-caused. Catching 98 percent of those fires is our goal but there's still 2 percent of them that we're not gonna catch and they're gonna go large."

Some of the most dangerous, fire-prone areas in any community - Carson City, San Diego or anywhere else - are the urban-interface areas.

"Obviously we don't have the huge, huge timber here like they do there, but we've got a lot of urban interface around Carson City: Lakeview, Timberline, maybe Voltaire Canyon, upper Kings Canyon - anywhere you get up into the tree country," said Miller.

Those areas have been targeted for fuel management and prescribed burns, and will be under close scrutiny from firefighters like Capt. Miller and his crew as fire season arrives.

"Especially if we keep up with the drought we're having."

Contact Karl Horeis at khoreis@nevadaappeal.com or 881-1219.

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https://www.nevadaappeal.com/wildfire