Stratmoor Hills Fire District’s crews have been helping the L.A. fire for ten days now.
John Ortiz normally works on the south side of Colorado Springs, but now he's in Los Angeles fighting alongside California crews and others called out to help.
So far, the fight has been unlike anything he's seen before.
“Even though we're trained as wild land firefighters and we are trained to deal with urban interface. When it's at this scale or when you have multiple homes and you're interacting with other agencies and you're trying to put out the different hot spots. There's had to be a lot more stopping, looking to see what's actually on fire, to see if we can actually handle it,” he tells News5.
Ortiz tells us the work they have been doing—from putting out hot spots, to helping animals, and filling helicopters with water to drop on the flames.
Today they are at a helicopter dip site, helping aircraft pick up water and bring it to the fire.
“In that time that they're leaving, we're going to be operating valves to make sure that tank stays full. So we may have anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes of turnaround time for aircraft to come in to make sure that tank stays full,” he said.
They’ve also discovered how new tools can help them when fighting wildfires.
“We’ve actually added some structure firefighting tools and left it on the engine coming out here, which have come in really handy. Normally we have a pry bar that's called the halogen that we normally don't use on wildfires. It has been vastly, vastly imperative that we have that in this incident just to—whether it's open a door, whether it's to turn off a water valve, to remove a lock,” says Ortiz.
Ortiz's chief, Shawn Bittle, says the lessons his crew learn in California won't stay in California.
They'll be bringing what they learned back to Colorado to improve their firefights at home.
Chief Bittle tells News5 that with lessons the crew has learned, the district hopes to better their station to handle wildfires here in our state.
“We do have plans to make an entire training session out of the deployment to California… kind of a mini documentary, if you will, on lessons learned, situations encountered, and, you know, we will have counselors on standby if any of our firefighters feel like they need to talk to someone about things they've seen out there,” said Bittle.
The crews are expected to return home from California this coming Friday. In Colorado
Watch the full story above.
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