(fire crackling) (dramatic string music) (light electronic music) (wood crackling) - I got up to Drop Point
76 around 12:00, 12:30, something like that, and I met George Poe, and he was operating
a private hired dozer. What I wanted him to do was
start working down the ridge from Drop Point 76, tie in with
the Lima strike team dozers, the three dozers working up, and then the four of
them to work as a unit along that ridge. So that was what our plan was. (light electronic music) - So we're coming in behind Clayton improving the line that was already there, and then pushing new line
when we got down there. George was just widening out the line that was already there. I'd go out ahead of him a little bit, looking things over,
trying to find a good spot for a safety zone. One of them was there
where we actually deployed. You kinda come down into a bowl-like area out of this plantation
that we'd first started in. The timber type got a little bit bigger, little bit thinner, and of course there's a big ole drain there, it'd
have been to the east of it. It was probably 30-40 foot
wide and 20-30 foot deep. - Then Tom, he was scouting ahead. I came down to that
spot and so I peeled off and just made a couple of passes. My habit as a dozer operator
from prior experience is whenever I see good
ground I try to at least throw a couple of blades
wide in spots like that on my way through. - Right below that was the cabin. I could hear somebody down
there talking around that cabin. So I go on down there and
it was the person owned it, and they were trying to get
an old wrecker truck running. I helped them there for
just a couple of minutes, and they decided they
couldn't get it going. They started getting their
tools and some other stuff, and they left out. Well I went back up
there to talk to George, and he was still pushing
on that area there that we was gonna try
to do for a safety zone. I hadn't talked to him
just a minute or two. Told him keep pushing like he was, and Clayton going down the
hill with the masticator, he hollered at me and said,
"Can you hear that noise?" Of course since I work with him everyday, when he said that I knew what he meant. I said, "Naw, I'm right here
by the dozer; let me back up." So when I backed up and
turned around and looked I could see the black smoke. Then I got away from the
dozer I could hear it. He goes, "I'm here by the cabin. "If you're close by, come on down "we'll have a face to face."
(fire crackling) So I jogged down there,
wasn't just a 100 yards or so, and he's still looking up at
the smoke column and stuff. He's like, "I'm gonna get my equipment, "and we're gonna go on down." I'm like, "All right, I'm
gonna get back up here, "and we're gonna make this
area as big as we can." He's like, "All right, sounds good." I mean we did that in about 30 seconds. So he went down the
hill, and I went back up. Since I'd seen that whole
line the day before, from about right there on down
for another half mile or so it was, that manzanita was thick, it was just real narrow ridgeback, and with an older dozer and
George being an older fella I didn't want to take a chance
if anything was to happen. We were at the best place you could be at in a half mile either
direction or further, so I just chose to stay there. Got up there and George was still pushing. I stopped him, and I just kinda pointed over my shoulder. I said, "You need to
hurry up and make this "as big as you can." That's the last time I remember
seeing the smoke column. It went from that smokey
gray to like a jet black in just that matter of
a few minutes there. - Tommy Strother ran back up
and says, "Make it bigger." And that's the end of our
conversation; I just went to work, 'cause we didn't have
to explain to each other what was happening. - Fire's intensity started picking up. We talked longer about where we were and what was going on. Really started getting picking up, started getting a lot louder. So at five o'clock, 17:00 hours, we made the decision to
evacuate the line and back off and take a different stance. I radioed the Lima strike team leader, and I said, "We need to back off the line, "RTO, or dive off into
fire camp wherever you are "on the ridge, whatever's
the easiest to do." I called Tommy and told
him the same thing. I said, "You need to evacuate the line. "Either turn off one of those roads "or drop into fire camp,
whatever's the easiest," 'cause I'm not sure how far
down the ridge they are. He said, "Well, we're
building a safety zone. "It's a pretty good spot. "I think we're gonna wait right here." So, Branch was in his pickup,
and he was right beside me, and I turned to him and I said, "I think I need to go down
and check on those guys, "make sure they're okay." I just backed up right out of the way, and I sent my dad a text to let him know the fire was gonna hit
the line pretty hard. I stuck it back in my pocket, and I felt it vibrate there
a minute or two later, and I pulled it out and looked,
he goes, "Okay, take care." So, I mean like I said there
was nothing he knew he could do to help sitting at the house in Arkansas. He said, "I knew you'd
do the best you could "with what you had." I started down the dozer
line toward George and Tommy. Partway down the line there was a crown fire that ran down
on the far side of me, so out my left window of my vehicle, and was running in the crown
and basically passed the truck. Just a short run, but it went
faster than I was driving. It turned and went down a draining, so it wasn't directly following my path, but it burned along the edge of the fire and then down the drainage. I thought to myself that that's
probably not a good thing. It's better for fire to burn
uphill and away from us, and not downhill and not
running in the crown downhill. - Well, we could hear the fire coming. We could hear it coming,
and we knew it was coming. So I figured I had about
15 minutes of headstart to knock out a deployment
site as big as I could make it with the time given till it was on us. Circumstances put us at that point, and as far as the deployment site, that was the best ground we had available. I was working when Tom Browning
showed up with his pickup. I was really surprised. - When I pulled into the safety zone, they were still working on
it, and it was quite small. I thought, "This is not
gonna be a good spot." My gut feeling was that
it wasn't big enough. So before I got out of the truck I hit a waypoint on my GPS unit, and I called communications
and I gave them our location. I couldn't say the actual minutes and seconds
of the GPS coordinates, because inside I'm thinking
this is where I'm going to die and I want to tell you
where to come find me. So I just read the
numbers north and whatever the numbers were, I just said, "Dot," and then the rest of the numbers. I couldn't say, I just couldn't
say decimal and minutes. It just wouldn't come out. I did that, and they repeated it. Said, "Yep, that's our location." So I started to get out and
the safety officer called me, and I've known him for eight
years we've worked together. - [Radio] RTO back down
the ridge together. - He said, "You know really
before you get too involved "into the task, you've got to
make sure you give yourself "enough reflex time that
you still have enough time "to evacuate the area." I just said, "Steve, this
is where we're gonna stay. "This is our location." He said, "I understand;"
no more discussion. So I got out of the vehicle, or Tommy had come up to
my window and I said, "Make it bigger." He goes, "How big?" I go, "As big as you can in
the time that we have left." - As the situation was getting dire, I was going as fast as was
practical to clear the spot. I wasn't worried about neat, just blasting out as
much material as I could in all directions. - I said, "Tommy, we need to
get my vehicle in the center of this area to give it
the best protection." So I said, "This is about where
this location's gonna be." I backed up, pulled into
what looked like the center, he said, "Okay, I think
that's what we have for now." I said, "All right, that'll do." I got out of the vehicle
and I took my fire shelter out of my pack and I put it under my arm. Tommy said, "You think
we're gonna need that?" I said, "Yeah, I think
we're gonna need these." He said, "Okay, I'll grab mine, too." At that point, now I
figured we might have to either get behind the
truck or maybe pull one out just to shield the heat. I wasn't thinking it was
gonna get as hot as it did. The fire kept working downhill towards us. So it's coming from the
north, working to the south, southwest off the ridge, and it's a loud, intense
crown fire working its way. Not just running right at us,
but working down the ridge and burning to the west. - [Radio] We need to boogie outta here. - The winds were very significant. They were outflow winds. Then they would turn
around and suck right back into the fire as soon as things were gone. There's a lot of things going
through my mind at this time. One, should I fire out? If I do, is that gonna create, change the intensity of the fire and draw it on to us quicker? So I'm weighing out those options. Should I deploy in the vehicle
to have more protection? Kinda had a gut feeling my
vehicle was gonna catch on fire, and I didn't want to be in
it while it was burning. So maybe the best option
is for the three of us to get under the dozer
or some other shelter close to the area. All this is going on, things are happening really, really fast. I turned to Tommy and said, "Tommy, I'm sorry I got you into this, "because I'm not having a good
feeling about where we are." - [Tommy] Aw hell, this is nothing. Woo! Dang! (wind rushing) (mechanical creaking) - [Radio] Charlie. - So I go over, we're talking you know and that's when he says he's
sorry for getting me into this. I told him it was fine. We're still sitting there
just spotting all the things out there as far as the
little spot over behind us. - The ember fallout was significant now. It was going everywhere it could. I'm just thinking every way
I can to kinda remain calm and think about the options
I still have available. George kept pushing. The smoke was black, we could hardly see, and he kept pushing, and
we kept standing there until it got too hot. It just got too hot that you knew you had to deploy the shelter. (wind blowing) - [Tommy] George was
still continuing to push. I could feel that the heat had
gotten a little bit hotter, but it still wasn't that bad. I ran around up there
closer to Tom's truck to get up that way, but I wasn't gonna get in mine until George had done stopped
and was gonna get in his. - Then about the time I
couldn't push anything anymore, 'cause like I said we were surrounded by, pretty much surrounded
by fire at that time, I backed up and my intent
was to dig the CAT in in the middle by the pickup and
get all of us under the CAT. So I made a pass to dig in,
and then I worked too long, I should have stopped
a few minutes sooner, but I worked too long trying to get all as much protection as we could. So I made a pass this way. Then I swung around to push
up on the dirt the other way, and that's when the
heat hit me like a club, and I had to grab my, hold
my breath, park the CAT, grab my web gear, rip it off, I had it bungeed to the
cage, inside of the cage. I tore it off and dove off
the running board head first. - I turned to Tommy, I said, "Now!" I grabbed the red tabs on my shelter, and I pulled them, and
I grabbed the shelter, and I dove to the ground. I had made the decision I was gonna deploy outside the vehicle and use
the vehicle as a barrier between me and the fire. I hit the ground with my head in it, and then I kicked my feet into it, and then pulled it over me. - Once I seen him get off and run around back of the dozer, I knew
he was getting up under it, so that's when I started
getting into my shelter. I don't know, I tried
grabbing that little red tab, and I couldn't get it to pull loose, so I just took my knife
I had there in my pocket, and just cut it loose. - I was scrambling to the back of the CAT. I threw my ballcap away,
put my hard hat on, crawled into my gloves
and then to my shelter, but absolutely had to have those gloves. Hit the ground to get out of the heat. By that time there was heat everywhere. There was no refuge from
the heat in any direction. So scrambled around ripping and tearing at that fire shelter. You know it's a confined space, so I unfolded it fold
by fold under the CAT and got in it.
(fire crackling) That's when I got my lower
leg scorched from the heat in the time it took to deploy that shelter underneath the belly pan. - It's all accordion pressed together, and I was having to pry it all apart. With that high wind we were having I'd have to kind of fold
it out in front of me and let it kinda blow against me. Once I finally got it
spread out good enough where I could get my head
and shoulders in there, I just laid down and started
kicking my feet up in it to get it spread out the rest of the way to shield me from the heat. Once I got inside the shelter
it was a lot more comfortable in there as far as temperature. So I mean I don't think I could
have lasted too much longer out there without actually
starting to get burnt pretty bad. - We waited too long before
we deployed our shelter, but we waited till the last minute hoping that the winds would
shift, the fire would die down. We were thinking if this
thing could just die down a little bit we'll be okay here. There's always that feeling
of you had to deploy shelter, what'd you do wrong? How'd you get there? So you're thinking every way
you can about how to avoid that and not put that shelter
on till you really have to. - Once I was fully inside of
it, it was like night and day. That shelter was extremely
effective to block the heat. It was even comfortable
inside that shelter. I didn't have the win issues
that the two Tom's did because the CAT was blocking the wind. - So I called communications
and I told them we deployed our shelter. They said they understood and asked what the conditions were. I said, "We're taking some
heat, but we're doing okay." Then I pulled the radio
back inside the shelter and made every effort I could
to try and hold the shelter over me and not blowing off of me. 'Cause it was going up and over, and at one point I had to lie
completely on my right side to hold that side of the
shelter on the ground 'cause it wanted to blow off of me. It's not just the wind
blowing in one direction, because it shifts as the
flame fronts move through. They hit us from three different sides, and we get wind effects from
that in both directions. So you're constantly moving and trying to hold the thing down. It was a struggle. - I remember being in there
and sitting in that shelter and you could hear the wind popping it and the embers and stuff
hitting it real loud. - Embers were bounding on us
like there was no tomorrow. So what surprised me the most
I think was that it got hot, really, really hot. This always kinda is a quandary to me, because I thought this is
the place I'm gonna die, but I didn't think I
was gonna be this hot. So I got hot, a couple of
things were going through mind. I'm thinking of George and I'm going, it's hot and he's underneath that dozer; I hope he doesn't panic and run. Because he was too far away
from me for me to talk to him. - I was mostly concerned
about those two guys, because I had my Bindix King, but I couldn't raise them on TAC. I tried TAC to command with no results just to notify everybody. I knew that Tommy had already
maintained communications, but just as a backup but was unsuccessful so I gave up on it. But I was mostly concerned
about those two guys, because I knew they were
taking more heat than I was. I was facedown for a while, head toward the back of the blade. The blade gives you lots of protection, especially if you, I was in mid-stride when the heat hit me so I didn't have a blade full
of dirt like I normally would, but that's your best protection
is that blade full of dirt. The blade that's a big heat shield. Then the tractor as a whole
is a heat shield for you. So then there I am in the fire shelter secure under the CAT, but my main concern was the
CAT burning down on top of me. - The other things that
were going through my mind is people that died in shelters. And it got really, really hot then. My instinct said you've got to get up, and you've got to get out of here because it's too hot to survive, and if you don't leave
you're gonna die right now. Then my training said, you
know, if it's that hot in here, you can't survive
outside, you gotta relax, you gotta calm down, and you gotta take some shallow breaths, and you gotta get close to the ground. So I remember shoving
my helmet into the dirt, and then putting my hand up
under my nose and digging a hole in the soft dirt so
that I could get my nose below the ground level, and
telling myself breathe slower, oh, that's better, and that worked. - I remember being in
there a couple of minutes and Tom talking to me, making
sure everything was all right, seeing how I was doing. I could hear him talking
to ICP on the radio. We talked a time or two more there to make sure everything was all right. So I just tried to
breathe as slow as I could and just kept my face down
in the dirt best I could. Like I said, all the smoke and dust, my eyes is watering, my nose is running, kinda hard to do that without breathing in some snot and tears, but
me and Tom kept talking. I had my handkerchief
in there to wipe my nose and face off every now and then, but that's what everybody's told us. We all stayed calm. That's the best thing I
think we could have done was stayed calm. - At one point I was worried
about my truck catching on fire so I thought, well, I'll
kinda peek out underneath the shelter to see if it's there. And the heat that came in was
so intense that I couldn't. I said, "Well, if it's
on fire, it's on fire. "It's too hot to go out there." Another point, I took the back of my hand and pushed up on the shelter
to, one, get it off of me, and, two, to feel how hot it was. It instantly burned the back of my hand, and I thought, woo, that's hot. So you know that was just
really uncomfortable, and it was really dry. My throat was aching and
hurt, and it hurt to breathe. Then finally the winds calmed down. It got quieter. We got less embers falling on us. I touched the inside of the
shelter and it was cooler. I peeked out underneath. I thought, oh, I gotta check on my truck. So I peeked out and there wasn't that blowtorch of heat coming in. I lifted up and looked, sure
enough my truck's on fire. Dang, gotta put my truck out now. - Tom stuck his head out and
he goes, "The truck's on fire." Of course, all the smoke
stuff, eyes is watering, nose is running. So I climb out and it was still breezy. I kinda looked around there
and found an old clob of dirt, rolled it over on my fire shelter, and we got to started
putting the truck out. We got that done right quick. He was like, "We need
to go check on George?" So he walks over there
and I'm right behind him. He's hollering, and we hear
George answering us back. He comes out. We walk over and sit on the
tailgate of his truck talking making sure everything's all right, drinking some cold water. Pretty much from that point
on we were just sitting there telling stories and
catching up on everything. - Then I called communications and I said, "All three of us are out. "Dozer operator George has a
minor burn on his lower leg, "but we're all okay." He said, "All right, we're
gonna check back with you "every few minutes." So they would check back. Like three minutes later they're calling, "How are you doing?" I said, "We're fine. "We're okay. "Go ahead with the rest of the fire, "we'll be okay till we get out of here." They kept calling back. So finally I said, "Look, we're all okay. "We're setting on a tailgate. "We're drinking an iced cold water. "Everything's fine." And that just kinda relaxed
the rest of the people on the fire, the folks that
I knew that I'd worked with. Kind of a joke, kinda
relaxing the whole atmosphere of what was going on,
and we were doing better. - Tom had a bag phone had
better service in his truck, so he called his wife,
George called his wife, and I called my dad to let
him know we're all all right. Once we called ICP and let them know we done out of our shelter
and everybody was fine, we asked them if they
wanted us to come on out. They said, "No, just stay right there," that they were gonna send
a shot crew in to get us. It took them three hours
because all the roads up there were compromised with the fire. So it, like I said, it took
them a while to get up there. It was like midnight by
the time we got back down to the base camp that evening. The line medics met us up
there after the hot shots got us up to that Drop Point 76. They checked us out. Sent us on into camp. We seen some medics there,
and that's when they decided to send us on to the hospital in Yreka. - We go back in to go back
down to the fire camp, the ICP, have a reunion with
the team and the camp medic, and my crew was there,
everybody that knew us was there to check on us and wish us well. Then we rode to Yreka to
the ER and got checked out. - Then the next day we had
the full SISM back in Yreka and that went really well. It was good for the
three of us to sit around and really talk about what occurred and what was going on. Then I packed up my stuff and went home. And it was like, they said,
"Are you coming back?" I said, "I don't know." (acoustic guitar music) I went home and for two weeks every night I'd wake up in the middle
of the night cold sweats, nightmares, what could
I have done differently? How could this have been avoided? What was going on? I put that down in
writing and it helped me kinda work through that. The people off the team called. Folks that I figured
doubted my capabilities for what had occurred, called me just to check
on me, to reassure me, to let me know it was all right,
and that was very powerful. One guy called, he said,
"I wasn't gonna call "'cause I don't know what to say, "so I decided to call and say
I don't know what to say." And that was enough,
ya know, just the call, and it made a difference. About three weeks
afterwards we had a fire, and did what I know how to do,
(fire rustling) and I didn't have to
stop and think about it, and it felt right. I felt confident that I could
still make good decisions, and that was important. That first fire was really
important to get re-engaged and do what you do without second guessing everything you're doing, because I didn't know if I could do that. (fire crackling)
(acoustic music) Number one, the biggest
thing is calm is contagious. You have to remain calm in
order to make good decisions. If you're calm, the people
around you will be calm. In order to do that, when
you're in a horrific event like we were, you've got
to compartmentalize things. Because your first instincts
are how in the world did I ever get here? Why am I in this situation? But you can't do anything about that. You have to put that in a
box and set it aside and say, "What can I do now in order
to make this situation "more survivable?" And start working on those tactics. (fire crackling) The second thing is
trusting your equipment. When I was in there and laying in that shelter alls I could think about
were the people that died in fire shelters: the Yarnells; the Thirtymile; the Esperanza, they
didn't even get the chance to pull their fire, their shelters. But I couldn't think of anybody that lived through a shelter. Those things work, and I'm
here to tell you they work, and that if you don't know anything else know that I survived this and you can too. (light guitar music) And probably the most important lesson is trust your instincts. Trust your instincts until they
conflict with your training, then trust your training. Up until that conflicts
with what you're doing, because that happened to me. My instincts told me to run, and if I would have ran
I wouldn't have survived. My training told me that I was better off to stay in there and stay in that shelter and do what I could do to
get lower and get cooler air. You have some experience
that's gonna give you some instincts that are gonna guide you in the right direction, but your training has got to be your core. (soft acoustic guitar music)
