John Austin Fights Fire

(John Austin wrote the following column for Chile's Santiago Times [www.santiagotimes.cl], which published it in the July 22, 2008 edition. An editor's note introduced the article thus, "Chile has earthquakes and volcanoes; California, our sister country in so many ways, has earthquakes and fires. The current fires in California -- more than 1,000 of them, most started by lightning strikes in dry grass and woodlands -- have produced news reports of firefighter heroism and sacrifice and startling photos of aircraft swooping down to drop fire retardant just above the rooftops of threatened houses. One photo reminded John Austin, retired writer and long-time California resident, of the remarkably foolhardy efforts he made to fight an earlier fire that endangered his house." The "Sue" John speaks about is of course our classmate Susan White Austin.)

PIDDLER ON THE ROOF
By John Austin

The picture of the plane dropping fire retardant just feet above a house brought to mind what happened when my wife, Sue, and I moved here to San Rafael. That summer of 1973, an arsonist set four fires in the bone-dry hills within a half-mile of our house.

Sue called me in the city and I rushed home from work, Driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, I could see the smoke, which had climbed several thousand feet in the air, from 20 miles away. When I arrived home, there was an evacuation order in effect. Sue had already packed a few things and quickly gathered up our young daughter, Diana, and our cat and departed in our only car. She tried to persuade me to go with them, but I stupidly decided to stay on and try to save our house. I got up on the roof to soak down the wood shakes and surrounding trees. The garden hose I dragged up with me dribbled a pitifully weak stream of water.

As I watered, I could see firefighters slogging up a steep rise some 200 yards from our house in 100-degree-plus heat. A stand of eucalyptus trees planted close together as a windbreak probably 70 years earlier rose above the crest of the ridge. The trees stood some 80 feet high and stretched about 150 yards along the ridge line. Whiffs of white smoke appeared among the limbs and then BANG, a very loud explosion rocked the house. The whole stand of trees erupted in a 100-foot-high,150-yard-long sheet of flame. The firefighters were knocked over and sent rolling down the hill. I was blown back to the rear edge of the roof, my eyebrows singed off.

The wave of heat surging out from the ignited eucalyptus grove was so intense that I felt nauseated. I once toured a steel plant in Pennsylvania and when they tipped the huge buckets to pour off molten steel the air became sickeningly hot. This was hotter, and I realized fighting this blaze with a garden hose was maybe not such a good idea.

Just before Sue left, we had watched from our deck as three houses across the small valley below us went up. They first leaked little wisps of white smoke—just as the trees had—and then BOOM they were engulfed in flame. From the time the smoke first appeared to the time the houses were a smoldering pile of ash was no more than 90 seconds. As I got back up on my feet on the roof, I thought I might be about to experience the same thing.

Then, flying so low I could see the rivets in the wings, a WW II B-17 zoomed overhead. It came out of nowhere. I neither saw it nor heard it before it appeared right above my head. It dropped red fire retardant, which covered the roof and me in a thick blanket of gummy powder. The main target of the bomber and its load of retardant was the ridge line of burning eucalyptus. It scored a direct hit. Amazingly, the fire in the trees was snuffed out almost immediately, and the struggling firefighters began to regroup, heading back up the hill.

The plane was so low, 40 feet or less, and its trajectory so sharply downward, that I was sure it was about to crash as it passed out of view into the surrounding smoke, which had taken on a reddish hue. But there was no explosion. Instead, more quickly than seemed possible, the B-17 was back over my roof—lower than before, its engines shrieking as it tried to regain altitude. The backwash from the propellers blew the hose out of my hands, and again I tumbled down to the back of the roof. Fortunately, I didn’t fall off. I was stunned, but I would have kissed whoever was flying that plane, risking his or her life to save the valley’s houses. (I later learned the pilot was probably a woman, one of the two at the time flying fire control missions in northern California.)

I had had enough. I got off the roof, went to the front of the house, turned off the water to the hose, and walked away from our neighborhood, out of the immediate fire zone. The fires were brought under control some 12 hours later, and no houses on our side of the valley were lost. Even better, no one was killed or seriously injured, though some of the firefighters suffered minor burns and bruises.

This summer has been the worst for fires since Sue and I have been here. Thankfully, none has been very close to us. But a couple of weeks ago, the air was uncharacteristically hazy, smudged with the smoke of hundreds of fires—some several hundreds of miles away—which winds brought our way. The sun was an eerie red much of the day, and, because of the smoke, the temperatures stayed 10 degrees cooler than they normally would have been.

Though warnings were issued about the hazards to breathing posed by the smoke, I remained unconcerned and proved I had learned very little in the 35 years since that fiery day on the roof. I kept up my everyday pattern of exercising on one of our decks in the cool of the morning at six a.m. despite the warnings.

After about a week, the winds changed and the smoke dissipated.