"a helluva job”

It is my experience that firemen are really just boys who have grown up enough to play with fire and do it legally. During training sessions we built our own fires, the bigger the better, and practiced putting them out. The day we were given an abandoned house “to burn”, was like winning the lottery. It was what we enjoyed doing.

That being said, there is nothing worse for a fireman, especially a volunteer, than having days or even weeks go by without a fire call. I know that this sounds weird, but it gets depressing. Well this story begins at the end of a 3-week dry spell for fires in Bishop California.

Our pagers went off at about 4:00 in the afternoon. “Attention Bishop Volunteers, Attention Bishop Volunteers, we have a report of a brush fire in Round Valley near Horton Creek Campground, Please respond.” Immediately my heart pounded. Was it excitement, was it joy, or a combination? Who cares!!


I responded to Station 1 and knew that we were to take the large brush trucks. I jumped into Engine 14 and looked to the driver’s seat to see Hugh Henderson. Hugh had joined the fire department a few years after I had, but was very experienced and I had no concerns about responding with him as the Engineer. I preferred to be “just” the firefighter on this rig anyway because the action was better. I would get to stand on the front deck and run the permanently mounted nozzle as Hugh slowly inched the former military AWD vehicle through the fire scene.

As we approached the scene, which was about 10 miles from the firehouse we could see a large column of black smoke. We got so excited that we looked at each other and then shared an enthusiastic high five amidst our whooping and hollering. We knew that there was going to be lots of action and we would tackle a good portion of it.

As we pulled onto the scene we could see that nearly 60 acres were already blackened, smoldering or on fire. The area was completely fenced with a barbed wire and 6x6 post fencing. We came to a stop and Phil Moxley, the fire chief, stepped up onto the side running board. He looked at us and he said, “There is a CDF (California Dept. of Forestry) truck that has gotten themselves in a bit of a pickle. They went too far into the fire scene and the engine on their truck has died. They can’t get it restarted and the crew of 4 is in danger. Go in and get ‘em out.” Knowing there was no time to find a gate to enter, he looked at the fence then back at Hugh and said, "take it out".

Hugh put the 6 wheel drive vehicle in low gear and we proceeded to simply drive over the fence line, knocking down fence post and wire as if it were made of balsam wood.

We went directly to the stranded crew, attached a chain to the front of their vehicle and with little or no effort we were able to pull them about 200 yards into the burn area** and to safety. Here the CDF mechanics would be able to restart the engine without any concerns of safety.

(note: ** When you are on a brush fire and you are in danger of being overrun by a fire that may have turned back, the safest place to be is “in the burn”. It’s hard for a fire to come back through and burn an area that has been burned previously. It might be smoky, but it is safe.)

Once this crew was safe we could put our efforts into fire suppression. By this time Engine 9 had also arrived and between the 2 of us and one small dozer from the US Forest Service, we knocked that fire down in a few hours. Our tactic was to attack each flank with a different rig and try to pinch it at the point. This took careful work as the fire could always flare back up behind you and surprise you. Once we and Engine 9 met at the point we had pretty much surrounded the entire fire with only a few small spot fires within. This allowed the local hand crews, staffed by prisoners, to complete the mop up work.

The engine crew we had saved still had not been able to get their rig running so we really handled the fire all by ourselves, even though it was within the jurisdiction of the CDF. And to top it off we managed to keep it from running up the face of Mt. Tom, which would have been extremely disastrous as the fire entered the Inyo National Forest.

As if the fire fighting that day hadn’t been enough, the crowning moment was when the Chief for the CDF station came on the radio and said for all of humanity to hear, “you Bishop boys did a helluva a job out there today.”