SCOTTS VALLEY, Santa Cruz County — By Thursday afternoon, the command post in Scotts Valley remained eerily quiet. Socially distanced folding chairs sat empty in the yellow grass. The grounds, normally bustling with firefighters resting between shifts, were quiet. Everyone was already on the front lines of an uncontrollable wildfire.
And that’s not expected to change.
When dry lightning storms sparked scores of fires in Northern California earlier this week, major blazes were already burning in Central and Southern California — exacerbating a wildfire crisis that has left the state depleted and overwhelmed.
Commanders had hoped to call in enough firepower to battle the blazes, with hundreds of crews snuffing spot fires and defending homes, bulldozers plowing dirt containment lines and aircraft sprinkling water and pink retardant on the flames. It’s worked well enough in previous years — but with a historic number of conflagrations burning across the state, this approach was challenged.
“Everyone is trying to go to the proverbial coffer to get assistance and help, but with the magnitude of fires we’re stretched extremely thin right now,” said Cal Fire spokesman Dan Olson, stationed at the empty command post in Santa Cruz County. “It’s challenging all aspects of the emergency response system.”
When major fires overwhelm local resources, first responders typically turn to a statewide mutual aid system designed to rally support from nearby counties. The program has been praised as a national model.
But in recent years, as climate change has intensified the power and frequency of California’s wildfires, that support system has been less effective. And the conditions that created the problem are only getting worse.
In the early — and most destructive — hours of the Wine Country wildfires of 2017, most calls for help went unanswered. The competition for fire engines and water tenders across California was too fierce. The same thing happened in 2018 as devastating blazes simultaneously blitzed through Southern and Northern California — the Camp Fire in Butte County and the Woolsey Fire in Los Angeles County.
Now, in the first few days after 12,000 lightning strikes helped ignite about 560 wildfires in California, outside assistance in Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties was again short, according to officials. Here, the “CZU Lightning Complex” has consumed 57,000 acres and forced the evacuation of 77,000 residents. The blaze was burning up to 1,000 acres an hour Thursday — about 13 football fields a minute.
Olson, the Cal Fire spokesman in Santa Cruz County, said the number of firefighters assigned to beat back the CZU Lightning Complex held at 591 for the first 72 hours. That’s because other massive complexes also needed resources.
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The LNU Complex in the North Bay topped 302,000 acres Friday night. And the SCU Complex in the South Bay approached 230,000 acres.
Additional crews from departments in Southern California and other agencies arrived on Thursday evening and early Friday to help Olson’s colleagues, an incident spokesperson said, but they were still “drastically short” for a fire this size — and there was little hope of receiving additional help until out-of-state crews arrived to relieve them.
As of Friday morning, Cal Fire spokesman Scott McLean said, 375 engines had been requested from outside California. So far, 45 of them have arrived. Many other Western states are also facing an active fire season.
“Right now, we are looking at 12,000 individuals assigned to these incidents,” said McLean, based at a command post near Calistoga. In 2018, with two major fires burning, “we saw over 15,000 firefighters assigned. That gives you an idea of what we’re missing.”
The shortage of resources early on made it more challenging to build a perimeter around the fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains and San Mateo County coast, Olson said. The blaze was 2% contained by Friday night and still threatening several towns. As a result, some firefighters have worked double or triple shifts — up to 72 hours in a row.
“We’ve tried to put firefighters up in hotels when they’re off — but then we have to wake them up to assist with evacuations and protection efforts,” Olson said. “I would refer to this as a ‘historic event,’ but me and my team are tired of using that term,” he said, referring to past record-breaking wildfires.
Politicians and firefighters in other parts of Northern California also spoke about the lack of sufficient fire personnel when the fires ignited.
In Sonoma County, air support was limited early on because the few available planes were sent to protect homes in Vacaville and Fairfield, said Supervisor Lynda Hopkins, who represents parts of Sonoma County threatened by the LNU Lightning Complex.
When the fires broke out, some local engines helping with incidents in the other parts of the state had to be rerouted home, she said. The shortage of personnel echoes the 2017 firestorm in Wine Country, which burned down sections of Santa Rosa and other rural communities.
“Even though this fire is moving more slowly, we’re not able to do the things that we would be able to do if we had more resources to contain it,” Hopkins said, noting that some additional engines were being sent from Southern California Friday morning. “It’s repetitive community trauma. ... There’s a tremendous level of anxiety in the community.”
While in Santa Clara County on Thursday surveying the SCU complex, Gov. Gavin Newsom said he ran into a group of San Jose firefighters who “looked completely wiped” and said they needed more support.
“They were simply overwhelmed by what they saw,” he said. “They were getting some gas and getting some drinks and they said, ‘We’re just going to a hotel down the block, we’re taking a shower, and we’re told we have to get right back on the line.’”
Newsom said all of the local mutual aid resources were either deployed or prepared to quickly respond to new incidents. When asked at a Friday news conference about local leaders in Santa Cruz County “begging” for more resources, he said the state was providing everything it could.
“I can assure you, if we have one extra person, we will prioritize sending those personnel out to the most vulnerable communities in the state,” Newsom said.
Brian K. Rice, president of the California Professional Firefighters association, said California’s mutual aid system is the best in the country, but days of lightning-sparked wildfires across much of the state during a prolonged heat wave would stretch any system to its limits.
The siege was compounded by the fact that many prison firefighting crews have been sidelined due to the pandemic. Major outbreaks of the coronavirus in several prisons, along with early releases, caused the ranks of inmate firefighters to shrink. Newsom has authorized an additional 858 seasonal firefighters, and most of those positions have been filled.
“Even if we had double the number of fire engines available in the state right now, we’d still be taxed,” Rice said. “I’m a firefighter, I’ll always want more funds going towards fire services, but we also have public schools, libraries, parks. It’s a balancing act.”
The shortage has left those on the ground in Santa Cruz County, San Mateo County and elsewhere exhausted and overwhelmed.
On Thursday afternoon, Cody Dales, 33, tried to sleep for a few hours. He was scrunched in the front seat of his red Toyota truck, his feet resting on the driver’s seat, his head on an ash-flecked pillow in the passenger’s seat. Dust filmed his dashboard. A water tender, Dales had left his home in Georgetown in El Dorado County to help fight the wildfire in Santa Cruz County.
“There’s a million fires going on, and we have a skeleton crew,” Dales said. “Until we get more resources, it’s going to be difficult. But this is what we have to work with. There’s nothing else to do but keep working.”
San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Alexei Koseff contributed to this report.
Joaquin Palomino and Lizzie Johnson are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: jpalomino@sfchronicle.com, ljohnson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joaquinpalomino, @lizziejohnsonnn
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