Firefighters Work Sleepless Nights Battling Northern California Wildfires

East of Santa Rosa in a small valley surrounded by blackened hills, about a dozen firetrucks and engines were pulled over at the Bennett Valley Fire Station in Sonoma County.

Volunteer firefighter Steve Balich, of Occidental, was brushing his teeth.

"Three days we’ve been sleeping in the front of the truck -- no showers yet," he said.

Balich's face was smeared with dirt. He and the three other members of his team had been out all night using hand tools to cut away brush along the front lines of the Adobe Fire, just one of the wildfires burning in his home county. Once they cut down to bare earth, they start smaller fires that burn back toward the larger wildfire to keep it from getting nearer to houses.

"And that's the best we can do with a fire this big, is to hold it, because you can't cover everything," he said. "But we're burning it down so there's nothing left to burn."

Thousands of firefighters -- from local volunteer crews like Balich's to US Forest Service firefighters to inmate firefighters -- have been working nonstop to battle the blazes consuming Northern California.

Balich and his other crew members -- Rachel Lunardi, Rhylind McAuliffe and Kyle Calvi -- are between the Nuns Fire and the Adobe Fire.

"We've just been working our way around," McAuliffe said. "It's all about fighting these little fingers of fire that kind of poke out here and there" -- before they spread.

They're used to being one of the "resources" called in to help fight fires in another county.

"We're the ones waiting for the resources this time," Balich said. "We have never really seen this in our lifetime here."

Balich said he volunteered for a simple reason: "It's always been very gratifying to help people."

Lunardi, who works as an electrician, said she became a volunteer firefighter to help people -- but also because of family: She's been around fire stations her whole life; her father is the Occidental Fire Department's chief.

But this was a new experience for her, too.

"This is my first strike team, so I've never seen anything like this before," she said.

From here, the four volunteers were headed to the Napa County Fairgrounds next to get their first break after three days and a much-needed shower. Calvi said he'd gotten only about eight hours sleep during the three days of battling the fire.

Further down the road, at the Glen Ellen Fire Station, Battalion Chief  Kirk Van Wormer and a clutch of other firefighters surveyed maps of the active fires in the area. 

 "We’re sitting in the middle of the Nuns Fire," he said, pointing to the charred landscape around him. "This is where our fire station is, and the Nuns Fire burned all the way around the firehouse."

Van Wormer said part of how they are fighting this current fire is by looking to the past. This same area burned in the 1964 Nuns Canyon Fire.

"Exact same name of the fire we're standing in right now," he said. "And we study those, and we learn from those past fires."

One example of learning from the '64 fire: "We used a lot of the same control lines, or the location of those control lines from what we learned from past fires, and it proved very beneficial to help stop this fire."

Van Wormer said that despite little containment for days, they are making progress.

A big turning point came three days ago. He said a fire in Annadel State Park near Santa Rosa was threatening to come down into another populated area. Working with multiple agencies, firefighters came up with a plan: They cut a bulldozer line through the park and stopped the fire's progress.

"That was the first big victory that we had in this whole craziness of fires," he said. "So that was kind of the turning point of seeing our plan actually work the way we wanted. And that gave people a lot of hope and reinforcement, and motivation to continue on."

Van Wormer said so far his home has survived the fire, but he said his heart goes out to nearly a dozen firefighters in Santa Rosa who lost their homes in the terrible fires that began on Sunday night.