Cal Fire takes public health measures to protect firefighters battling LNU Lightning Complex blazes

CALISTOGA — Before entering the Cal Fire base camp at Calistoga Fairgrounds, firefighters and other personnel must pass through a tent containing a mass fever screening system using thermal imaging to measure their skin temperature.

The line for fever screening, a necessary precaution in the age of COVID-19, tends to be longest before 7 a.m., when firefighters begin their 24-hour shifts.

“It’s kind of like Disneyland,” said Cal Fire Public Information Officer Jeremy Rahn. Once in the tent, Rahn immediately began bantering with Morgan Schoon, who was operating the high-tech scanner. “I know I’m tall enough,” he joked. “I wanna go on the ride.”

A division chief from Merced County, Rahn worked the Tubbs fire in the fall of 2017, and the Mendocino Complex fire the following summer. He’s on a first-name basis with many of the people in the camp now battling the LNU Lightning Complex fires, and has to remind himself to social distance.

“You see somebody at the fire you haven’t seen in a year, first thing you wanna do is come up and shake hands,” he said. “Then it’s like, ’Oops! Can’t do that.’ ”

That familiarity is a result of a new reality: climate change is bringing more wildfires, with more intensity, to California.

This year, Cal Fire has been forced to revamp its playbook to grapple with another new reality: “the incident within the incident.” That’s how Sean Kavanaugh, Cal Fire’s LNU incident commander, described doing battle with COVID-19 and a massive wildland inferno at the same time.

While the virus hasn’t changed the agency’s tactics — “We’re still the same, fighting fire aggressively and providing for the safety of the public,” said LNU Unit Chief Shana Jones — almost every other aspect of the job looks different during the pandemic.

Morning briefings at the command center are now limited to strike team leaders and crew chiefs, for whom masks and social distancing are mandatory. Firefighters who want to hear those key updates can tune into a designated radio channel.

Instead of sliding a tray over a rail while choosing items in the chow line, buffet style, firefighters are given an allotted time — to avoid crowding — then handed pre-packaged items. There are no more large gatherings for meals.

While the majority of the 2,600 firefighters and support personnel working the LNU Complex blazes are lodged in hotels, some are sleeping in rented trailers, Kavanaugh said.

To cut down on the risk of coronavirus transmission, members of one strike team are not “commingling” with others, he said. Those lodged in sleeping trailers are “the same folks who’ve been around each other already. So we put them in the same trailers,” which are being regularly, and comprehensively disinfected.

For firefighters experiencing health issues ranging from poison oak to sore throats, the Calistoga base camp includes a kind of pop-up urgent care center, staffed by the California Medical Assistance Team.

Early in the fight against this blaze, a handful of firefighters were told they may have been exposed to the virus and pulled off the fire line as a precaution, Kavanaugh said. As of Friday morning, none of the firefighters working the LNU Complex had tested positive for COVID-19, Cal Fire spokesman Will Powers said.

“You can’t be afraid of it,” said Kavanaugh of the virus. “You have to have good practices in place to deal with it, and support your employees.”

Masking, social distancing and frequent hand-washing at base camp are one thing. Observing those precautions while working the front lines of the fire is another matter entirely.

Speaking Thursday as a featured guest on KQED’s “Forum” program, Cal Fire spokesman Patrick O’Connor was asked by a caller why so many firefighters she’d seen weren’t wearing masks.

“Often times,” replied O’Connor, a fire captain in Redding, “we’re in a position where we’re not able to wear those face coverings.”

“What firefighters do is very physical labor,” he explained. Putting on a mask “restricts normal respiratory activity, making those exertions more difficult,” which in turn “decreases the effectiveness of what we can do.”

On Wednesday at Armstrong Woods State Natural Reserve, just north of Guerneville, fire crews patrolled the valley floor, tending to spot fires and keeping a sharp eye out for coast redwoods that were unstable and leaning in the wake of the Walbridge fire, which had passed through a day earlier.

Asked if he and his crew members were inclined to wear masks when working the fire line, Captain Rick Rees of the North County Fire Protection District in San Diego County replied, “Not really, out in the field.” Those measures were observed, he said, “more within camp.”

“Out on the firefight, we’re not going to be wearing masks so easily,” unless the smoke, ash and heat made it necessary to don their department-issued masks.

Long before the coronavirus, Rees pointed out, firefighters were taught to social distance.

“We have a saying: ‘Keep your dime.’ It’s a reminder to stay 10 feet apart from one another, because we’re often swinging tools, that kind of stuff,” the fire captain said.

Moments later, a 250-foot, 1,000-year-old coastal redwood he’d been keeping an eye on had come crashing down within a few yards of Armstrong Woods Road. That drama drew a small crowd, including a firefighter and paramedic, also from the San Diego area. While grateful for such public health measures such as the fever screener at base camp, he lamented some of those measures had eroded “the camaraderie of the fire service.”

“This is a kind of brotherhood and sisterhood,” said this first responder, who requested anonymity. Firefighters have been instructed to refer all questions to Cal Fire public information officers. “Eating in shifts, having to stay separated” has “changed that dramatically,” he said.

A few minutes before that giant redwood fell, a strike team captain from Southern California had driven his pickup up Armstrong Woods Road. Now he circled back, expressing gratitude for his good timing. In the battle between redwoods and motor vehicles, he noted, “the tree always wins.”

The captain, who also declined to give his name, also was thankful to Cal Fire for the work they’d done to keep the virus at bay.

“We appreciate all that, ‘cause we’re also doing it at home,” including deep-cleaning the fire station and daily temperature checks.

The fire service “got on this very early,” he said, “especially in Southern California. We’ve been wearing masks on every call. We’ve put masks on our patients.”

The fire captain’s workforce is healthy and COVID-aware. That said, he went on, “I have a group of 22 guys, and we’re traveling up and down the state together.”

“At some point, you just have to accept that there’s going to be some risk,” he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at Austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com, or 707-521-5214. On Twitter @Ausmurph88