One year later: Looking back at the Valley fire's chaotic first night

Fire officials would later call the Valley fire unstoppable and unprecedented, and from the cab of a pickup driving through the flames that’s how it appeared to three veteran firefighters last year just hours after the blaze started on Boggs Mountain.

The trio was on a rushed scouting mission - a term firefighters refer to as a “hot lap” - when the fire’s rapidly expanding perimeter thrust them onto the front lines of a helter-skelter evacuation process that was turning into a rescue operation.

The man riding shotgun, Cal Fire’s Greg “Bert” Bertelli, had called for the evacuation of Cobb about 35 minutes after the fire broke out at 1:24 p.m. on Sept. 12.

The situation was so dire in that first hour, Bertelli recalled, that he was blunt with a man hurrying to load more belongings into a car. It was past time to leave.

“‘You’re going to kill both of us if you get another armload,’” Bertelli told him, finally convincing him to flee.

“It was so chaotic and crazy,” said Bertelli, now a division chief for Lake County.

A year later, a look back at the fire’s first explosive hours reveals new details from people in charge of directing the initial battle against the blaze, including heroic efforts to save lives with limited firefighting resources.

On that particular day, Lake County had seen its firefighting corps and equipment drawn down to assist the battle against a three-day-old fire in the Gold Country near Jackson. The Butte fire would go on to burn 70,000 acres, kill two people and destroy 550 homes.

When the Valley fire started, there were just two Cal Fire engines in the county and one hand crew of at least a dozen firefighters. Four engines and a second crew had gone to the Butte fire.

Cal Fire had hired other engines to fill in, and six engines immediately responded to Cobb, along with other Cal Fire resources, including one hand crew and two bulldozers. Nearby fire districts also scrambled their personnel and engines and Cal Fire put three air tankers and one helicopter into the sky.

Within minutes fire commanders called for more help, requesting 10 more engines, and about an hour later 40 more engines, and eventually a total of 11 air tankers and six helicopters.

Over the next hours and days, the ground and airborne force would balloon, including more engines and bulldozers and thousands of firefighters drawn from throughout the state. Cal Fire would spend $59 million fighting the fire, including $1.3 million in fire retardant dropped by air tankers and nearly $2.7 million on food for the hungry crews.

Fire officials say that even if the state agency had all of its in-county equipment and staff, and more, that first day it wouldn’t have made a difference.

“There were not enough firefighting resources to fight the fire and not just because of the drawdown,” said Todd Derum, a Cal Fire division chief who co-commanded the operation for the first 18 hours. Derum was the pickup driver that evening as he and Bertelli, the other co-commander, and a visiting British firefighter surveyed the growing blaze.

“If we’d had a full contingent it would not have mattered,” Derum said. “Everything was on fire.”

Forecasters had not predicted that day’s winds, now believed to have been caused by the remnants of Hurricane Linda off the coast of Mexico. One 37-mph gust broke records for September going back 13 years at the nearby Konocti station, according to a post-fire assessment of the firefight.

When the early call for 40 more engines went out over the radio from Cal Fire Division Chief Linda Green, the alarmed tone in her voice struck several veteran Lake County firefighters.

“That’s when I knew things were going south fast,” said Jay Beristianos, a Lucerne native who now runs the Northshore Fire Protection District.

It already had been such a bad run of fires that summer in Lake County. It started on July 22 with the Wragg fire, then on July 29 came the Rocky. On August 9, the Jerusalem fire broke out and on August 24 the Grade fire.

The Valley fire started as a reported two-acre blaze moving at a moderate pace, but grew to 50 acres in about 30 minutes. Within an hour it had swept over and badly burned four members of a helitack firefighting crew based at nearby Boggs Mountain, and two hours later it was burning Harbin Hot Springs 7 miles away. By 5:15 p.m., Middletown - 8 miles away south of Cobb on Highway 175 - was evacuating. Within 12 hours, it was at 40,000 acres and stretched into Napa County, and by dawn it was pushing 50,000 acres and had moved into eastern Sonoma County.

“We threw the book at it. We threw absolutely everything at it,” said Shana Jones, chief of the Sonoma, Lake, Napa Cal Fire region. “It just had a mind of its own.”

Any overarching plan Derum and Bertelli could script from their pickup was outpaced by the fire. As they drove, they ran over power lines they suspected were live, pushed cars out of the roadway and stopped numerous times to help in communities clogged with people still needing to get out.

“Thank God we evacuated when we did,” said Bertelli. As it was, he feared scores would die in the fire.

“I was sick to my stomach for the first day and well into the next several days,” Bertelli said.

Four people are known to have died in the fire. A fifth person remains missing, his body never found.

With help still on the way, the only true firefight in those first 18 hours or so occurred in Hidden Valley Lake and Middletown. There, several groups of engine teams, including 10 engines from Sonoma County, worked through the night saving homes and businesses as the fire jumped from street to street and propane tanks blew one after the other, helping spread the fire.

Elsewhere, crews expanded evacuation zones as the fire spread in all directions.

It was a night filled with valiant deeds by so many, Bertelli and Derum said. Dozens of first responders were working even though their homes had been lost.

“They did the heroic acts,” Bertelli said.

Derum and Bertelli, like other Cal Fire division chiefs, each lead a team of fire managers, which get deployed to run large fires in the state. They’ve taken their experience on the Valley fire with them.

Derum’s team led the first two weeks of the now 106,000-acre Soberanes fire in Monterey County, a fearsome blaze burning in similarly dry, rugged and risky terrain. Some of his decisions harked back to the Valley fire.

He gave earlier evacuation orders and kept them in place longer; called a greater number of public meetings to keep residents up to date; and held onto his firefighting resources. He also closed Highway 1 due to threatening flames and to clear the road for use by firefighters.

Late last month, at a 600-acre arson blaze burning deep in Humboldt County timberland, Bertelli took many of the same careful steps.

“I looked at what the fire’s potential could do in the very, very worst-case scenario,” Bertelli said.

You can reach Staff Writer Randi Rossmann at 707-521-5412 or randi.rossmann@pressdemocrat.com.