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 at the house, each wearing bright yellow jackets and red fire helmets, the man was hacking loudly, seemingly unable to breathe.

The firefighters grabbed the man by his arms and helped lead him outside to safety. His picturesque home in a retirement community on the North Side was on fire, albeit an imaginary one.

They were taking part in a simulated training exercise to prepare for real wildfire that could happen one day.

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

The simulation was part of new wildfire suppression training that, once refined early next year, will be available to fire departments nationwide. San Antonio firefighters are among the first in the nation test the training, which is being developed by the International Association of Fire Fighters.

The training comes less than a month after a wildfires destroyed huge swaths of California, killing 97 civilians and six 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 problem 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 effects of climate change, including a higher risk of wildfires, are starting to be felt across the U.S.

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

“A matter of time, weather and a moment,” Swan said about the prospect of a wildfire.

Capt. Brian Stanush, a 25-year veteran of the San Antonio Fire Department, said juniper and cedar on the North Side and mesquite on the South Side could easily ignite.

The department has made it a priority in recent years to educate neighborhoods in areas where homes are built on or near fire-prone land.

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-wide firebreak, a gap in the brush to slow or stop the spread of a fire.

Tom Jones, who has lived in Roseheart for more than four years, said wildfire risk is a concern among residents, one that was heightened by the recent California fires.

Jones, chairman of the Roseheart Firewise Committee, part of a national network that helps residents prepare for a wildfire, still remembers a fire he witnessed years ago while living in California that left ash all over Los Angeles Valley.

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

Battling the blaze

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 toward a training course that compiles best practices for fighting wildfires.

Their efforts, funded by a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, 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.

The association has tested their training in Lewiston, Maine, and Colorado Springs, Colo., prior to their stop in San Antonio.

They chose San Antonio after Hood 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 because the dynamics of fighting a wildfire differ significantly from 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 hands-on drills and role-playing scenarios. Sixty San Antonio firefighters took part.

Residents of Roseheart 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 were built to test the crews. Swan said many firefighters, when arriving at a place where four houses are burning, would try instinctively to douse the fire, rather than pulling back to make a fire wall to stop it from spreading.

As one instructor says: If you save one house, you’ll lose 10.

“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.”

Hood said the benefits of the training were 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

Let's block ads! (Why?)