Tag: firefighter

Fire Is Dangerously Unpredictable

Lessons from My Dad

W.J. Astore

Hi Everyone: If you’d like to support this site but don’t want to subscribe and pay a yearly fee, perhaps you’d consider my new book, My Father’s Journal, available through Amazon for $10 (paperback) or $5 (Kindle). Just click on that link and order away. Order five copies for your dad! (Yes, that’s reference to a song lyric, “Gonna buy five copies for my mother.”)

Anyhow, here’s an except from the book, which details my father’s efforts to fight raging forest fires on the West Coast in Oregon and California during the 1930s. His account will likely remind you of the recent fires in LA.

A big “thank you” to those who order the book—I hope you enjoy it.

*****

It is surprising how many forest fires our crew fought and other groups that we assisted in the two summers I was in Oregon.

The main and largest fire we fought was in the fall of 1936. A very dry summer and fall added to the fire danger. We were in Enterprise, Oregon when we got our call to go to Bandon “By the Sea” Oregon. Enterprise is in the northeast corner of the state. The day before, Bandon had been swept by the forest fire. Twelve people lost their lives. It could have been much worse but all inhabitants fled to the ocean beaches. One pregnant lady gave birth to a baby on the beach.

Fifty of the men in our camp, using 2.5-ton trucks, traveled across the state (guessing approximately 300 miles). The areas were involved in hundreds of fires that covered an area greater than the state of Massachusetts.

We were on the fire lines for over five weeks. At times we were put on reserve where we could shower and shave. We had about 5000 men, woodsmen, rangers, and CCC boys fighting this fire.

We were at Gold Beach, Oregon and we could look into California at the Siskiyou Mt. Range. There was a rumor we were going to fight a fire in the redwoods of California. But the call never came. We drove through Bandon; there were rows and rows of dwellings, gas stations and buildings burned to the ground. Quite a few chimneys were still standing. Every once in a while you’d see a dwelling or building spared by the fire. Just a whim of fate.

My father was a great saver of documents, including in this case The Medford District News, a local newspaper in Oregon that devoted two full pages to the five-week campaign to contain the Bandon Fires of 1936.[i] Written by Roy Craft, a first lieutenant, the story is worth quoting at length:

It was on Saturday, Sept. 26, 1936, that all hell broke loose in the Oregon coast country! With the forests dry as a Minute Man’s powder and the humidity at 20%, a 40-mile wind blew up out of the southeast, swept through the wooded hills and laid waste the coastal city of Bandon. It was a Declaration of War between the destructive forces of fire and the protective forces of the Civilian Conservation Corps….

As in all CCC activity, the Army oversaw the feeding and care of the men. It was the Army’s job to set up the fire camps, supply the enrollees with food and personal equipment, care for their health and see that they were in shape for action….

[Later that night] the fire had swept up to the very edge of the city. Then, borne on the shoulders of the 40-mile wind, the flames rode into Bandon. The Bandon fire department and the CCC men made a desperate stand but normal fire equipment was no match for the blaze.

As the fire approached the town, many residents were still unaware of the impending tragedy and had gone to the local theatre to see the feature picture, “Thirty-Six Hours to Live.” The film didn’t last that long, for in the middle of the show the film was stopped and a call was made for volunteer fire fighters.

As the fire poured into Bandon, building after building went up in flames. The residents literally “ran for their lives,” with men of the CCC … assisting in the evacuation.

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Photo available at https://www.oregonhistoryproject.org/articles/historical-records/bandon-fire-1936/

Many people escaped in boats across the Coquille River, but the fire claimed at least eleven lives. As my father mentioned, a baby was indeed born that very night on the beach, which was taken as a “symbol that Bandon would rise from it charred ruins,” according to a somewhat fanciful newspaper account.

More than 100,000 acres burned over a period of five weeks until the November rains came to extinguish the flames for good. (Dad penned a quick postcard, dated 10/26/36, to tell the family he was fine and that he’d “been out fighting forest fires for over a month now.”)

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As LT Craft put it in his newspaper account,

Anybody can play at being a hero for a couple of hours, or face trying and dangerous situations when the stimulus of excitement makes them glamorous and daring. But it takes guts to put out day after day on the fire line! Nothing tests a man’s mettle like a five weeks’ siege with fire, when it’s drudgery to put in a day and a night on the line, sleep a few hours on the hard ground, and then crawl out again and go back to pitch in with shovel, hazel hoe and back pump.

The Bandon Fire was the largest that my father faced, and he spoke of it often.

(If you’d like to order the book, here’s that link again. Thanks!)

The LA Fires Look Like a Nuclear Apocalypse

W.J. Astore

Except a Nuclear Apocalypse Would Be Unimaginably Worse

The wildfires in LA are horrific. People are losing everything. Thousands of structures have been consumed by flames. Ash, soot, smoke, poison the air. It’s devastating. Just look at this photo taken from space.

It looks like a nuclear apocalypse. Yet as devastating as the LA fires have been, a nuclear apocalypse would be unimaginably worse. A thousand times worse. A million times worse.

We see something like the wildfires in LA—as bad as they are, they remain on a scale that is comprehensible. We can fathom them. They will eventually be contained.

One atomic bomb like the one used at Hiroshima would be a thousand times worse (and don’t forget the blast wave and radiation as well as the fires). A thermonuclear weapon, a hydrogen bomb or warhead, would be one hundred thousand times worse. Unimaginable. Unfathomable. Unsurvivable.

There’s much to be learned from these wildfires in LA. Much more action needs to be taken to prepare for similar events in the future. Perhaps they might serve as a reminder as well of how much worse the fires could and would be from a man-made inferno in a nuclear war.

America, it’s high time we stopped building more nuclear weapons and started investing in improvements to our infrastructure, to disaster preparedness, to meet the climate-driven catastrophes that we know are coming.

America needs more fire trucks, more fire crews, even something seemingly as simple as more water. We don’t need more infernal (and inferno-producing) nuclear weapons.

Fighting Forest Fires

A firefighter of Alcoy and Elda tries to

Very sad news coming out of Arizona: the loss of nineteen firefighters as they fought valiantly against wildfires started by lightning.  My Dad fought forest fires in Oregon in the mid-1930s when he was in the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC.  He once worked nearly 24 hours straight on a fire line to contain a blaze.  He confessed he volunteered for the extra shift because he was in part too scared to sleep with the fire so close and so unpredictable.

Fire is protean, capricious, an almost living thing.  Fire is truly “wild.”  Small wonder we have nightmares about fire-breathing monsters or the fires of hell.  It’s takes tough and courageous men and women to face down fire, to confront it, to try to contain it.  Not only do you face the hell of heat and flames, but also the dangers of choking and blinding smoke and collapsing (even exploding) trees.

Here’s an excerpt from my father’s journal about some of the wildfires he fought in the 1930s:

We also fought a 10,000 acre fire in the foothills of Mt. Rainier in the State of Washington.  Mt. Rainier is a pretty impressive mountain and over 14,000 feet high.   A bus took us from Enterprise Oregon via the highway that followed the Columbia River for over 400 miles.  The whole trip to the fire was 600 miles.  Talk about scenery; very breathtaking.  Off the highway you could see plenty of waterfalls and minor streams that flowed into the Columbia River.

 Another big fire we fought burnt to the edge of the Pacific Ocean.  We were discussing the fact, all that ocean water but we couldn’t put it on the fire.

 Oddities: Two CCC boys were killed because a truck ran off a mountain road because visibility was bad with smoke and fog.

 Also, we built a fire trail and we were going to start a backfire to the main fire.  We couldn’t start a fire because of mist that wet the area that we wanted to burn.  Where the fire was approaching you could hear the burning trees and snags falling.  You looked towards the fire but you couldn’t see anything on account of the smog.  We went to another area.  Later when the sun came out and it cleared the fire went out of control again.

Work on the fire line was exhausting, even for men in the prime of life, as my father knew:

We were in the area of the North Fork of the Pistol River.  Our crew was resting.  It was a flat area, heavily wooded, miles from anything.  One end of the stream had narrowed because of a sandbar and formed a pool that was a hundred yards long and about twenty yards wide.  There was about a twenty-foot-high rock ledge on one bank.  What a beautiful natural swimming pool.  The water was cold and clear as crystal.  The ranger said if you wanted to go in for a swim, go ahead.  No one went in; the answer must be because we were too tired. 

Amazing, isn’t it, that young men were so exhausted after fighting fires that they didn’t have the energy to jump in a stream-fed pool of cool water?

We owe a debt to firefighters around the world for the dangers they confront when taking on fire.  True heroes, indeed.

W.J. Astore