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Fruitcake Fire 06/06/2002

As related to Fire Information by Paul Duarte, Initial Attack Incident Commander for the Fruitcake Fire

This is a first hand account about actions taken by fire fighters to attack, contain and control the Fruitcake Fire on Wednesday.

Paul’s Account:

We were just released from Coolbroth, and assigned to patrol on the north end of the valley, near Saguache.  But we were still near Coolbroth and we got a dispatch about a reported smoke down south near Piedrosa Canyon area.  So I took our engine and two additional fire fighters and headed down the highway.  At the same time an Allouette helicopter was dispatched by Saguache Ranger District, to the new fire’s location.

Photo of lightning strike
that started this fire.

Initially Bill Joslin sized up the fire.  He is the Conejos Peak District FMO, and he instructed us and assigned me as Initial Attack IC.  We proceeded to his location, which was about three miles from the smoke.

We arrived at Bill’s location just a little bit after the Allouette arrived over the fire, and the pilot gave us his size up of the fire over the radio.  He landed and picked me up and flew me over the fire to locate a landing site and give me a good aerial view of what the fire was doing.  It was cooking; burning hot.

Sky Crane at work.

We noticed a structure near the fire, which was about ¼ acre in size.  I considered the structure in how to attack the fire.

We landed near the fire and I did a ground size up and had Kent Smith and Paul Minow, my two engine crewmen, flown into the fire location.

They identified an anchor point on the SW side.  It was burned out and they tied their line into a rock outcrop, as this was a safe place to start building hand line.  As they built line, three more 3-person squads were flown into the fire and we posted a lookout and started to look for snags and hazards.

We were close to getting a scratch line all around the fire when the Type I Sikorsky Sky Crane showed up overhead, and the Allouette set down to hook up his long line for bucket work.

And then the Type I started its work.  It was Drawing water from Terrace reservoir with the Snorkel.  We alternated the Allouette, which was dipping, with the big Sky Crane.

We used a signal mirror for the first drop.  And then after that we talked on the radio, left flank, right flank or down the middle from the previous drop, that kind of direction.  The two pilots were great; extremely professional and talented in doing their job of placing the drops exactly where we wanted it.   I worked the Sky Crane and Kent worked with the Allouette.  The two pilots coordinated over the radio too, so that they stayed out of each other’s path over the reservoir.

Kent was hitting the stumps and hot spots and I was having the Sky Crane lay down line, building off each prior drop and occasionally cooling whole areas of the thing.

 I lost track with 4-minute turn arounds and with 1000 gallons a shot with the sky crane and about 100 gallons a bucket with the Allouette, we hit it with almost 30,000 gallons of water.  It better not rekindle.  But there still was some smokes when I checked it yesterday!  That surprised us.

So five of us went in and mopped it up.  It’s something, the smokes yesterday and how dry the soil was around the fires edges.  I confirmed it was controlled last night at 1700.