Photo By Sgt. 1st Class Jimmy Norris | Task Force Rugged Soldiers assigned to 14th Brigade Engineer Battalion at Joint Base...... read more read more
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By Sgt. 1st Class Jimmy Norris
5th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment
UKIAH, Calif. – Three Soldiers lay on a berm somewhere in the woods of Mendocino National Forest’s Pine Mountain. The bright yellow of their Nomex shirts stand out in sharp contrast to the dark brown of the ground where they rest. Their attention is glued to the fire running up the trees 50 meters in front of them. It’s not the fire they came to fight. It’s the fire they came to start.
In the control-line areas where Soldiers from Task Force Rugged work to help fight California’s largest ever wildfire, geography at its simplest and most immediate is described as either “black” or “green” – areas that have been burnt and areas that haven’t.
The Soldiers of TF Rugged’s Team Four, mostly members of B Company, 14th Brigade Engineer Battalion, are currently sitting in the green. Their task today, is to watch the fire and make sure it doesn’t travel outside the lines they cut this morning.
This isn’t firefighting as many of them imagined it would be. The cinematic scenes that danced through many of their heads prior to the start of their mission – scenes of heroic figures directly confronting a raging inferno with water cannons and hoses – were false. Real wildland firefighting is more reminiscent of hard labor.
Ten crews of about 20 Soldiers each led by veteran wildland firefighters spend grueling 16-hour days laying hose, clearing brush and using a variety of hand tools to cut lines in the earth where, hopefully, the fires will find nothing to burn.
“It’s different than what I expected,” said Spc. Juan Mendoza, a combat engineer with B Co., 14th BEB. “There’s a lot of stuff I didn’t expect, like fighting fire with fire.”
Earlier in the day hot shots from Redding, California used drip torches – metal canisters filled with a mixture of diesel and gasoline – to set a few square miles of the forest ablaze. The idea, said Redding Hot Shot, Skyler Nilsen, is to burn parts of the forest before the real fire arrives, leaving nothing to burn and cutting off its advance.
Now the Soldiers of Team Four watch from the relative safety of the green, waiting to snuff out any stray embers that leave the pre-designated burn area.
To Mendoza’s left a handful of Soldiers rub hydrocortisone ointment on the poison oak rashes they’d picked up while clearing roadside trees and shrubbery and hauling them to wood chippers waiting along the roads. To his right another Soldier scratches a cluster of mosquito bites on his arms. Local flora and fauna are only some of the hazards the Soldiers of TF Rugged face.
Snags – trees and branches weakened by fire and barely standing – could fall from overhead at any moment. Rollout – flaming debris and rocks that come down hill in the wake of a fire – is also a threat. Safety is the paramount concern.
The Soldiers of TF Rugged received extensive safety training prior to leaving their homes at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington. They received even more upon arrival at the firefighting camp in Ukiah, California. They’ve been issued fire resistant shirts, pants and boots. Leather gloves, hard hats and eye protection are required on the line. As a last resort each Soldier carries a sleeping-bag-sized fire shelter made of aluminum foil, fiber glass and silica cloth in his or her backpack.
Even with all those safety precautions in place every Soldier, and the firefighters who accompany them, know to keep their heads on a swivel. As the old Army adage goes “stay alert, stay alive.”
A fire’s behavior is often hard to predict, Nilson said. Any number of variables – a slight shift in the wind, a change in relative humidity, a difference in the slope of a hill – can change a fire’s intensity and direction in an instant.
Just over the ridge from where Team Four watches the controlled burn, a handful of Soldiers from Team Five conduct mop-up operations on a burn completed earlier in the day.
Sgt. Da Hye Park, Pfc. Joshua Horton and Pvt. Tianna Nguyen, all from D Co., 14th BEB, walk through the black amidst the smoldering remains of pine and manzanita trees looking for hot spots.
Horton runs the back of his bare hand along the charred trunks and blackened ground searching for heat from live embers that could reignite and turn the remains of a controlled burn into an uncontrolled one.
“Found a hot spot”, Horton calls as he raises his hand away from the smoking remains of a fallen pine.
He steps back as Nguyen plants herself at the base of the tree.
“Swinging,” she says, to let her teammates know a dangerous and heavy hand tool is about to go to work. With a few well-placed swings she’s through the outside of the tree and has exposed the volatile center. The team breaks up the embers and covers them with cooler dirt. They’re about to resume their search when Aravaipa Hot Shot, David Creery tells the trio it’s time to go.
The wind has shifted. It’s blowing embers from some of the controlled burns into the green and causing spot fires. They’re needed elsewhere, and this area has the potential to get dangerous.
“If that fire makes a run, we’ve only got a few hoses here to fight it with,” Creery warns. “It’s just getting hotter and dryer and it’s better not to have people in front of a fire.”
As Team Five leaves for new operations, Team Four is back on its feet. The Ranch portion of the Mendocino Complex Fire is moving closer. It’s only a few hundred meters away.
The Redding Hot Shots are planning to stop it short with more fire of their own. As one hot shot pours drops of liquid fire from his drip torch, igniting new portions of the forest, others get to work with chain saws, hacking large branches into moveable pieces.
In the meantime, the Soldiers of Team Four are back at work with an assortment of picks, shovels and other hand tools. They work fast, clearing about 200 feet of line in less than 10 minutes. Undergrowth and shrubbery are removed leaving only mineral earth exposed.
This portion of the 360,000-acre fire will move no further.
Despite the hazards and the hard work, morale among the Soldiers of TF Rugged has not suffered. Most of the Soldiers are smiling throughout the day’s labor. Most say they love what they’re doing and believe there is true value in the mission.
“We sleep well at night, that’s for sure,” said 1st Lt. Liam Koenen, B Co., 14th BEB, as he runs a file across the blade of his axe. “But morale is high. This is like a vacation for us – a break from the normal battle rhythm at home station. And we’re having a direct, positive impact on the people of California.”
| Date Taken: | 08.18.2018 |
| Date Posted: | 08.22.2018 16:43 |
| Story ID: | 289881 |
| Location: | CA, US |
| Web Views: | 112 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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