Wildfires pose a significant threat to San Antonio. Here’s how firefighters are preparing. - San Antonio Express-News

By the time the two San Antonio firefighters arrived, each wearing bright yellow jackets and red fire helmets, the man hacked loudly, seemingly unable to breathe.

The firefighters grabbed the man by his arms and helped lead him to safety, away from a picturesque home in this residential retirement community on the North Side that was becoming engulfed by an imaginary fire.

“Obviously we can't have the realism of a fire,” Fire Chief Charles Hood said of the training exercise. “But the scenarios that they're going to pull up to — they don't know what it will be."

The exercise Thursday was part of a new wildfire suppression training that, once completed early next year, will be available to firefighters nationwide. San Antonio firefighters are among the first in the nation to go through the beta training, which is being championed by the International Association of Fire Fighters.

The training comes less than a month after a series of large wildfires erupted across California, mostly in the northern part of the state, killing 97 civilians and 6 firefighters.

Hood said the Camp Fire, which leveled the town of Paradise in Northern California, leading to 85 of the deaths, “has been the biggest fire that any of us has ever seen.”

“So the timing of this is perfect,” he said. “Educating the public and getting our firefighters trained I think is critical at this time.”

Wildfire risk isn’t just a West Coast program anymore. A November report by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which is mandated by law to publish a study on the environment every four years, found that the impacts of climate change, including an increased risk for wildfires, are beginning to be felt in communities across the U.S.

Rick Swan, director of Wildland Fire Fighting Safety and Response at IAFF, said San Antonio is not immune to the dangers. A brush fire at Camp Bullis in 2016 consumed about 30 acres of land and compelled the fire department to put together a evacuation plan for The Dominion, though thankfully it was not ultimately needed.

“A matter of time, weather and a moment,” said Swan, a retired deputy chief from California with 33 years of firefighting experience. “That's all it is."

Capt. Brian Stanush, who has been with the San Antonio Fire Department for 25 years, said juniper and cedar on the North Side and mesquite on the South Side could easily ignite, resulting in a devastating wildfire.

Recognizing the risks, the San Antonio Fire Department has made it a priority in recent years to educate neighborhoods in areas where homes are built near or among land prone to fires.

In Roseheart, the retirement community where Thursday’s training exercises were conducted, the fire department has worked alongside residents to clear nearby vegetation and build a 50-foot firebreak, a man-made gap in the brush to slow or stop the progress of a brushfire.

Tom Jones, who has lived in Roseheart for four and a half years, said the risk of wildfires is a concern among residents. He said the fires in California “encourages us to pick up the gauntlet and do something about it.”

Jones, chairman of the Roseheart Firewise Committee, part of a national network that helps residents prepare for the threat of a wildfire, knows full well the importance. While living in Southern California years ago, he witnessed firsthand a fire that left ash all over the Los Angeles Valley.

“There’s always going to be a fuel load,” said Jones, referring to the amount of flammable material that surrounds a fire. “It makes a lot of sense to be prepared.”

The training

For over two years, the International Association of Firefighters, a fire union that, among other goals, aims to improve safety for its members, has worked to produce a training course that compiles best practices for fighting wildfires.

Their efforts, which are funded by a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, focus on smaller departments that might not have the resources to handle a raging wildfire.

That’s important because those firefighters are often on the front lines before other agencies arrive as backup.

“Those are the ones that are going to be mostly impacted in the difficulty of getting resources in quickly,” Swan said. “ If you don't train for this, when the time comes, you don't have the tools in your pocket.”

The International Association of Firefighters has conducted the beta testing for their training in Lewiston, Maine and Colorado Springs, Colo., prior to their stop in San Antonio this week.

They chose to come to San Antonio after Chief Hood learned of the training and expressed an interest. Hood said the department has “a robust amount of resources,” including brush trucks and water tankers, to fight wildfires but that it’s important to continually train for such incidents because the dynamics of fighting a wildfire are much different than those used on a structure fire.

“An urban interface fire is probably a lot more challenging in the big picture than most structure fires we fight on a day-to-day basis,” Hood said.

Eleven instructors — including the incident commander for the Camp Fire in California — conducted the training, which included 32 hours of online and classroom instruction followed by the hands-on drills and role playing scenarios on Thursday. Sixty San Antonio firefighters took part.

Residents in the Roseheart community allowed firefighters to block off streets Thursday to put their skills to the test.

The simulations were designed to be as realistic as possible. Instructors were cast as residents, and yellow cue cards were placed throughout residents’ yards to represent obstacles or emergencies, including kids taking selfies, an elderly man unable to evacuate and power lines in the path of the fire.

“We try to put a little bit of real life into it,” Swan said. “There's a lot of emotion. We want to push some buttons on these guys so they think 'Oh this could be real life.’”

Some of the obstacles are built to test the crews. Swan said many firefighters, when arriving to a scene where four houses are engulfed, would instinctively try to douse the fire, rather than pulling back to put up a fire wall designed to prevent the spread.

“We want to break that muscle memory,” Swan said. “We want to show them, ‘You don't necessarily have to do it this way. You can do it this way and be much more efficient and save more homes.”

The program, Swan said, is designed so firefighters, once complete with the training, can return to their departments and teach their colleagues lessons learned.

“The beauty of this is, the 60 that are going through this program, they're going to be able to go out and train the rest of the departments,” Hood said, adding that the benefits of Thursday’s training are threefold .

“It's about saving lives of the citizens but it's also about saving the lives of my firefighters, to make sure that they're in the perfect position so that they're going to be successful and they're going to home at the end of the shift,” Hood said. “It is also about saving the valuable properties that could be lost in this situation.”

“The citizens, the firefighters and then the property."

Emilie Eaton is a criminal justice reporter in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read her on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | eeaton@express-news.net | Twitter: @emilieeaton

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