Apparently Gavin Newsom and CalFire announced the end of the 2022 fire season in California. As a firefighter in Northern California, it feels as if it had ended back in August.
Surprisingly though, as the 2022 fire season closes, we are still being sent down to Southern California for a cover assignment due to the potentially threatening Santa Ana winds. We expected peak Santa Anas to occur around mid-October, so throwing together a Type 2 IA crew a week before Thanksgiving was a bit disorienting for most of us.
Fortunately I had few plans for Thanksgiving, and I knew that this assignment would help my households finances quite a bit, especially since we had such little fire activity to bank money on. That is the unfortunate reality: I rely on fires to pay my rent and utilities, and hope to have enough of them to save up and survive the winter.
So we are headed down to Los Angeles. The assignment will be as long as 12-13 days, and as short as just a few, if the winds don’t pose much of an issue to the forests around LA.
The crew is mixed between engines, handcrews, and helitack of both the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service. After a season isolated to Hat Creek, it’ll be a hoot to start getting to know firefighters from around the Lassen area, from Alturas to Chester.
I’m on the 395 south of Reno, looking at the mountains to my west. They are snow-covered and forming their own weather systems. We’ll be following the Sierra Nevadas all the way down to the end, where the Death Valley begins and Southern California shows its full colors of heavy urbanization and desolate terrain.
- Dom
Surprisingly though, as the 2022 fire season closes, we are still being sent down to Southern California for a cover assignment due to the potentially threatening Santa Ana winds. We expected peak Santa Anas to occur around mid-October, so throwing together a Type 2 IA crew a week before Thanksgiving was a bit disorienting for most of us.
Fortunately I had few plans for Thanksgiving, and I knew that this assignment would help my households finances quite a bit, especially since we had such little fire activity to bank money on. That is the unfortunate reality: I rely on fires to pay my rent and utilities, and hope to have enough of them to save up and survive the winter.
So we are headed down to Los Angeles. The assignment will be as long as 12-13 days, and as short as just a few, if the winds don’t pose much of an issue to the forests around LA.
The crew is mixed between engines, handcrews, and helitack of both the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service. After a season isolated to Hat Creek, it’ll be a hoot to start getting to know firefighters from around the Lassen area, from Alturas to Chester.
I’m on the 395 south of Reno, looking at the mountains to my west. They are snow-covered and forming their own weather systems. We’ll be following the Sierra Nevadas all the way down to the end, where the Death Valley begins and Southern California shows its full colors of heavy urbanization and desolate terrain.
- Dom