Henry 1 braved Kincade fire's intense winds to give real-time information

It was the night of Oct. 23, and Chris Haas could see orange flames from the seat of his car as he neared the Airport Boulevard exit on Highway 101, bringing a flood memories from the 2017 Tubbs fire, which destroyed his home.

A text from coworker Gabe Stirnus, a part-time paramedic on the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office helicopter, warned him less than an hour before of a quick-moving fire that had just sparked at The Geysers in the Mayacamas Mountains.

Haas, a tactical flight officer on the helicopter, named Henry 1, switched on a portable scanner at his east Santa Rosa house, where he, his wife and two dogs had relocated after the 2017 fire razed their Fountaingrove residence. Radio traffic confirmed fierce winds and dry conditions forecast that night were pushing the blaze across the mountain range rapidly.

Not wanting to waste time, Haas reached out to Henry 1 pilot Nigel Cooper and Stirnus, and the three determined they would ready the helicopter to go help the growing number of firefighters and deputies on the ground. Haas, who learned his home had burned in the Tubbs fire while working on Henry 1, gathered a few belongings and headed out the door.

“I take every call very seriously, but fire stuff, it affected me obviously very immediately,” Haas, 35, said. “It was kind of like, ‘Oh no, this is it.’?”

So began the night for the three-person team aboard Henry 1 hours after the Kincade fire sparked. It was one of several flights the unit took throughout the two-week blaze, in which the crews relayed near-instantaneous information to people on the ground. That included information such as the locations of new spot fires or activity on the opposite side of tall ridges. The team’s ability to fly after dark, a rarity during wildfires, and their familiarity with the local terrain also gave firefighters a greater advantage against the blaze, Cal Fire Battalion Chief Marshall Turbeville said.

“The best thing about Henry 1 is that they are a local resource with local knowledge,” said Turbeville. “It allowed us to make good decisions.”

That was the case the night the Kincade fire started, Turbeville said, when Henry 1 arrived about 90 minutes after the blaze was first reported near Kincade and Burned Mountain roads. While a Cal Fire airplane was dispatched out of Sacramento County’s McClellan Air Force Base to catch a glimpse of the blaze soon after it sparked, it had left the area of the fire around the time Henry 1 was arriving, Haas said.

Haas, who was a deputy for the Sheriff’s Office before he began working on Henry 1, immediately started reaching out to deputies as they carried out evacuation orders for hundreds of homes east of Geyserville near the fire’s path, advising them on which roads to take or avoid. Stirnus, who also works as a fire captain for the Sonoma Valley Fire & Rescue Authority, radioed in information about the fire’s speed, size and spread to the fire crews in the area. The early view of the fire helped officials determine how many resources were needed and the best place to put them, Turbeville said.

The airborne team raced to meet other needs that came up throughout the night, including helping ensure the residents of an address too far for firefighters to reach quickly had heeded evacuation orders, Turbeville said. They also confirmed a radio repeater in the area, which local first responders use to communicate via radio across far distances, was not in harm’s way.

Cooper, an experienced pilot who began his career more than 20 years ago in the New Zealand military, focused on keeping the copter in the air through the grueling, three-hour flight.

“We were experiencing up drafts and down drafts in excess of 2,000 feet per minute,” Cooper said. “We call it riding the wave. We were just along for the ride at that point and there’s nothing you can do.”

With fuel nearing empty, the helicopter returned at around 2:30 a.m.

“It was a lot different than in 2017 in the sense of ‘OK, I think everybody that needs to be out of the way of this right now is out of the way, so there was comfort in that,’” Haas said.

When the helicopter wasn’t in the air, the team was on standby, ready to carry out any emergency rescues if firefighters couldn’t reach them by ground. Luckily, no such rescues were needed by the crew during this fire, Haas said.

The team also shared videos recorded from the helicopter’s camera throughout the incident, which were widely watched and re-shared from the Sheriff’s Office Facebook page as evacuated residents commented on the status of their neighborhoods and showed appreciation for the efforts of first responders.

“What people not only want but what they need to be able to go to sleep at night is situational awareness, facts,” said Sonoma County Supervisor James Gore, who rode on the aircraft with Sheriff Mark Essick seven days after the fire’s start to asses the damage in his district. “It gives you a real look of what’s happened and what’s ahead of you.”

Shiloh Estates resident Summer Peterson said one Henry 1 video in particular helped her and her family start processing the impact that the fire had on their community. While the group, which evacuated to Sacramento a few days after the fire started, was receiving daily updates about the fire from a neighbor who stayed behind, the aerial footage gave them a glimpse of how other properties and land nearby had fared.

Thankfully, her home was unharmed.

“To help see that your home is there, to just help start processing the devastation before you drive through it, it’s a unique experience and very helpful,” she said. “To see, ‘Wow these firefighters, they were rock stars.’?”