Poomacha: The True Story of the Palomar Mountain Volunteers
It was hard to be a volunteer firefighter and a fifth-grade teacher, but for five years I did both. When I made spaghetti on nearly each and every hoselay, Chief George Lucia liked to ask me whether I was smarter than a fifth-grader. My friend, Travis, liked to answer for me in the negative.
On Oct. 21, 2007, my assigned pager went off while my students were in music class, and, suddenly, I no longer was a teacher.
On that day, a large fire called “Poomacha” erupted on the southside of Palomar Mountain in northern San Diego County, and there was a chance that it could threaten the entire mountain community if the winds sprang up. Because resources were at a premium in Southern California as a result of what was then unprecedented fire activity, I was being called up to active duty along with about 25 other members of the Palomar Mountain Volunteer Fire Department (PMVFD).
I said goodbye to my class, told them to behave for the substitute and left for the station, which was an hour away.
A tinderbox
On the drive, much of the Interstate 15 freeway looked like a hellscape. The Witch Creek fire had just swept through, leaving ash and flame in its wake. I arrived at the station, and seeing the fixed faces of my fellow volunteers, I knew then that I was going to be involved in my career fire.
I still remember standing in my wildland gear with my friends, Scott Kardell, Justin Wisnewski and Travis Johnson, watching the red glow from below get closer and closer to Highway 76. (Someone that evening took a picture of the moment, and it still hangs in Station 97 to this day.) We knew that if the fire crossed the highway, we were in massive trouble. There was no mutual aid available for days, and the only thing that was between us and Poomacha would be an immense and dry canopy of fir, pine and cedar trees.
We were teachers, astronomers, custodians, marines and office workers, but we were trained to be firefighters, too. (I was Firefighter 14, or, as my friends had written on the back of my helmet, Hollywood.) As we watched the red glow of the fire meet the snaking road below us in the dying light, we knew that it was going to be a while before we could be any of those other things again.
While the chief directed us, the men and women of the PMVFD, that night, we fought what at times was a wall of flame that was more than 100 feet high. Winds blew so hard that night that tightened helmets still flew off of our heads. Embers swirled like fireflies, landing on any exposed skin. It became difficult to tell one person from another, because everyone was covered in gray soot and ash.
Palomar hadn’t had a massive fire like this in generations. The trees had suffered greatly from the bark beetle infestation, and we were deep into a decades-long drought. Our friends, Bruce Graves and Mark “Doc” Sowards, refreshed our water stores from Water Tender 97 as fast as they could, but we knew that there was no keeping up with the fiery storm.
To top it all off, a red flag warning still was in effect. The Santa Anas were going to blow but not in the direction that we needed. Furthermore, there hadn’t been a cloud in the sky for days.
The entire forest below State Park Road went up like a tinderbox that night. I watched it race up like flames in a chimney below Tom Burton’s house. We stood our ground there, while the other three engines planted themselves along the ridge miles apart from one another. There would be no second line of defense: three trucks that carried roughly 750 gallons each, a water tender that held 4,000 gallons (but that needed time to refill and repump to each one), a rescue that carried 200 gallons and the chief’s truck, which held about 100 gallons. Each vehicle had fire extinguishers for something small. All of us carried fire shelters as a last resort. Miles of raging flame raced toward us. We were it, and we knew it.
At around 10:00 pm, the fire jumped State Park Road and ran through the park, destroying the beautiful trees and many buildings there that we loved. I heard Travis call on the radio for an extra truck, and my partner, Justin, went to help with the brush rig while I took Rescue 97, which was a much smaller vehicle, to the aid of our chief.
Driving down the winding road, we came to a lone white truck, the chief’s rig. The chief was holding back all of Palomar Mountain from the blaze singlehandedly, but his Ford, like Rescue 97, only had a minute of water-fighting power.
“We’ve got to hold this line!” he yelled over the wind.
That was all that we needed to hear. While my friends ran hoselays, I turned on the pressure, and, with nozzles open, we fought back the flames like a boy throwing up his hands to a bully’s punches. The heat off of that fire was like a cathedral-size furnace. I had thought my fire-proof wildland gear was tested before then, but as the flames tried to reach over and around me, I knew that it really hadn’t. The only thing that was between us and being roasted alive was the open nozzle and the fanlike spray of our hose, but it wasn’t going to last long.
The winds blew the embers all around us. Flames swept over our heads.
“Fall back!” shouted the chief over the roar of the fire. He pointed through the trees. “It’s jumped South Grade! Fall back, and we’ll help Engine 97 on top! It’s our only chance, or else it’s going over Crestline Road!”
Crestline Road was where nearly half of the cabins that were on the mountain were located, mine and most of the volunteers’ among them.
We dropped our hoses behind us and dashed back to the rescue. I disconnected the couplings from the back, and while flames erupted in the trees on the wrong side of the road now, we spun around and stormed up the mountain. In my rearview mirror, I saw the chief’s red lights flashing through the haze. He had waited for us.
On the way up, the radio crackled. It was Travis. The fire now had broken all containment in the State Park. Travis was the ranger for the park, and he had fought the fire out of his park ranger truck. (Later, we would learn that he used fire extinguishers and a shovel in nothing but his officer’s uniform the whole time. There just wasn’t enough equipment, firefighters or water to stop it.) Worse, our friends, Dan and Laura Zeiber, were trapped there by a fallen tree. Somehow, they cut, fought, chainsawed and sprayed their way out of the state park, bringing every last one of them to the station. Along the way, they knocked on every door that they could, ushering residents to the safety zone, where community emergency response team members waited.
We hoped that the fire would lie low through the night and that we might have help before the winds sprung up again in the morning.
Hell on Earth
None of us spoke as we listened to the radio. We were mountain people. We moved there to be close to nature. We joined the department so we could protect it. I wept inside for every tree that we lost, but I cried for joy knowing that my friends were safe.
When the rescue got to Engine 97, we saw why they called for assistance. It feels near to impossible for me to describe that scene, but when I look back now, I see a normal country road. To the left is a lovely hill of sage scrub and oak topped by A-frame cabins that peeked above the tree line, the moon rising above it. To the right is hell on Earth, opening wide to swallow it whole. (A picture was taken by someone at that moment, and this one wound up in the local papers. A firefighter is shown running from a wave of flame that curls over him like a tsunami. I still don’t know who that person is.)
By the time that the chief and the rescue made it to the engine, the fire was crawling its way up the scrub brush toward the dozens of homes that were above us. We only had one chance left to save Crestline. We prepared the fastest hoselay that we ever prepared, and Justin filled the hose with the last of the water. My friend, Steve Brown, and I crawled up the side of the hill as best that we could.
“Water 1!” I shouted.
“Water 2!” Steve cried.
The flow came, and as I watched the stream storm out of the nozzle up into the smoky air, I knew instantly that it wouldn’t reach the edges of the fire.
“It’s coming over the ridge!” someone below us called out.
“Come on,” screamed Justin as loudly as he could over the roar of the fire. “Just a little higher. We have to stop it here!” Justin was a Marine, and someone had apparently once told that Marines don’t quit.
However, the hill was nearly a vertical climb. There was no perch, no place to hold onto. I watched helplessly as the fire crept up the hill, bush by bush, advancing relentlessly toward the homes—Justin’s, the chief’s, my home, too.
That’s when the chief called for a pull back. “Cut those damn hoses and fall back to the station. Now, Dammit! Now, Hollywood! Now, Brown!”
While the Poomacha fire engulfed the air and the hill around us like some savage rampaging monster, Justin took out his knife and cut the hose free from the engine. I remember just closing the rescue’s door when a tendril of flame reached out and over the hill, lapping the sides like a dog would water.
We pulled back to the station, but the Poomacha had found a partner in its destruction: the wind. Before we knew it, gusts whipped back around, and flames now threatened to engulf the station itself. We had no choice. The chief ordered all personnel to the evacuation and safety zone, which was an abandoned parking lot that was about one-quarter of a mile away.
Minutes later, Justin and I sat in the rig and watched the Poomacha fire race up and over Crestline Road. Tears streamed down our ash-coated faces. We said nothing, and although the radio sometimes crackled as though someone was hitting the transmit button, no one talked. There wasn’t anything to say. I remember the uncontrolled gasp from Justin and me when we saw and then heard the first explosion.
“Propane tank,” Justin said.
That was one of the longest nights of my life. My cellphone had long since died, but around 1:00 a.m. my wife called Justin’s phone.
“Are you okay?! she asked frantically. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day! What’s going on?”
“I’m fine,” I told her.
I remember looking up then at the hungry red line in the darkness. There was just enough moon to make out the tops of trees. I was watching the fire race up the tallest tree on that ridge. I knew then it was the cedar tree where a great horned owl lived. It was on the edge of our property.
“I heard the fire took some structures,” she whispered. “How’s the…”
“It’s gone,” I said. “It’s gone, honey.”
Around 2:00 a.m., the chief came over the radio and told us to get some sleep. In the morning, he said, we would hope to hear from Heartland dispatch. He told us that a few of our volunteer neighbors were working on another portion of the mountain and help was on the way in the morning. We knew it was going to be too late to save any homes on Crestline, but it gave us some small comfort.
A miracle
I awoke to the sound of hysterical laughter.
“Wake up, Hollywood! Wake up, you jerk!” It was Justin. “Put your freaking seatbelt on, damn it,” he was barking at me.
Before I could get my head out from between a mounted fire extinguisher and a bolted first aid kit, Brush 97’s engine roared to life. Then to the right of me, Engine 97, Water Tender 97 and Rescue 97, too. I looked out of the window in the pale light and saw that the chief’s white rig had its red lights flashing. Justin flipped the switch on the dash, and our lights came to life above us.
“What the hell is going on, Justin?” I asked.
Just then, the radio clicked, and then clicked again. People were trying to talk over one another. Then I heard their voices.
“Can you believe it? Over.”
“Copy. Boooo, yeah!”
“It’s a miracle!”
“What is going on, Justin?” I asked again. “Are we evacuating again? Talk to me, man!”
His eyes were lit up inside of their soot-stained sockets. “Chief just scouted Crestline, Tom,” he said, and the pink lines of a smile cracked into life through the ash and raced upward toward both ears. “There isn’t a single house lost on Crestline. Not one!”
He slapped me on the back. Tears of joy ran down our faces.
“You hear that, you freaking volunteer?! We didn’t lose a one of them!”
Within minutes, the chief gave us coordinates for structure protection. When I heard ours, I thought I was imagining things. Coming around the bend on Crestline, there it was, my house, like all of the others, in a sea of ash. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
In less than 30 seconds, we laid out a hoselay in front of my very own home. Engine 97 was working on a flare-up by the home of a local architect, and the rescue had refilled and, backed up by the water tender, tackled a spot that was north of our position.
Somehow, someway, during the night, the fire raced up the hillside through the fuels around the cabins but didn’t catch any of them in the process. Now, with the morning winds picking up, the fire grew hungry again, but there wasn’t as much fuel for it to burn. Miraculously, we finally had a fighting chance.
My house was the first in a canyon that made a natural path for an advancing fire, and I knew instantly why the chief put us here: If my cabin was lost, we’d lose all of those that were behind it. By 8:00 am, we had help in the form of mutual aid from the Rincon Band of Luiseño Indians Reservation and the Pala Band of Mission Indians Reservation. Many of their firefighters were volunteers, too. Their air horns blasted at us as they came over the ridge to let us know the cavalry was coming.
I can’t write the words that Justin and I spoke when we heard those horns, but many of them started with the letter “f”.
The news channel must have caught word that other agencies were coming to Palomar’s aid, because while Justin and I were Water 1 and Water 2 that morning, someone who had a microphone, a yellow jacket and a very professional voice asked from behind us what was happening.
“Oh, nothing,” Justin said. “Just putting out this here fire in front of my friend Hollywood’s house.”
I stood feet apart in front of my own bedroom window, fanning down the flames that were in front of me. Behind me, Justin called for more pressure from Doc. I felt the surge come and tightened my grip.
A voice from behind me asked, “Sir, you are live on Channel 8 Action News. What’s it like being a firefighter and saving your own house?”
“Oh,” I laughed. “I’m not a firefighter. I teach fifth grade.”
“We just do this for fun,” one of my crewmates said.
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This story is written in memoriam to two of the finest men who I have ever had the pleasure to know or to fight alongside. To Mark “Doc” Sowards and to Steve Brown: May you both rest in peace. Your heroism and bravery never will be forgotten.
