Fire Capt. Joe Diko of Station 15 in Ocean Beach spent last week protecting homes at the bottom of the San Pasqual Valley from the infernos that raged across San Diego County.
By most accounts, the spate of wildfires were the worst in California history.
Diko said what he and his firefighters from Station 15 experienced was unlike anything he’s ever seen in his 26 years with San Diego Fire and Rescue.
“It was at least 50- to 60-mile-an-hour winds up there, and we had a lot of smoke. We could barely see in the distance the glow from the fire,” he said.
Diko’s was the first engine in the strike team assigned to the intersection of Bandy Canyon and Highland Valley roads near Lake Hodges.
The crew was tasked with protecting a house that lay at the bottom of Bandy Canyon Road.
At about 1 a.m. Monday morning, the fire roared through area, he said. With water lines deployed and a protective area cleared from around the house, the crews braced for the coming firestorm.
“We didn’t get a lot of heat from it, but we got a tremendous amount of smoke and what was like a spark snowstorm about two to three feet off the ground blowing across [the owner’s] property,” he said.
Ultimately, Diko and the crew were successful in keeping the home from burning.
The fire raged around them, however, and the wind howled as it passed, he said. Located furthest to the east, the fire hit Diko’s postion first. He alerted the rest of his engine company atop the hill. They would soon find themselves overrun by the flames.
In a relatively safe place but with nowhere to go, they hunkered down. Diko said he could hear the firefighters rescuing trapped residents as he listened to radio transmissions.
He heard calls of firefighters rescuing people from cars as the flames licked closer.
Residents in burning homes were being rescued. People waited for help in swimming pools while flames engulfed their homes, held powerless by the fire that partly surrounded them, he said.
As the fire began to die down enough for them to move, Diko and his crew headed further east, nearly driving off a bridge that had burned out. Firefighters set up some traffic cones to warn others, then headed back down Highland Valley Road.
“There were trees blown over from the wind that had burned in the road, [and there were] logs, boulders in the road. There were downed power lines and power poles everywhere. Houses were burning on both sides of the road,” he said.
After a couple of hours of battling flames and traveling from house to house evacuating residents, they met the rest of the strike team in Rancho Bernardo at about 4 a.m.
The team tried to douse a three-story apartment complex with multiple buildings ablaze but simply didn’t have enough resources to put out the inferno, he said.
“Our resources were stretched so slim that we had one fire engine for each building,” he said, adding that each of the burning buildings required about 8 to 12 engines and three fire trucks per fire under the best of circumstances.
Diko fell sick that day and was able to spend the night at home before coming back to Rancho Bernardo the next morning for another two-day stint.
On, Oct. 25, Diko was sent to the Harris fire, which was already burning through the southern region. Diko and another strike team fought that blaze under horrid conditions, sometimes catching about one to two hours of sleep between shifts until Saturday, when he was able to return home.
Over the course of six to seven days, Diko said he worked about 99 hours.
And as the strike teams were stretched to the limits of human capability, Diko said they could have saved more homes if they had adequate resources.
After the 2003 Cedar fire, city fire officials reported that the San Diego Fire and Rescue Department fell short of the national standard by about 22 engines, he said. He added that some of the engines currently in use are about 25 years old.
“It’s going to happen again if the city does not get behind us and get us resources that we need and get the amount of firefighters that we need in this city to prevent this type of disaster from happening again,” Diko said.
A transient occupancy tax ” or hotel/motel tax ” increase, proposed after the fire in 2003 could have helped had it gone into effect, he said.
As the worst of the fires come to an end, he said this season’s blazes should come as a wake-up call to residents that the city needs to secure the resources to fight future blazes.
People need to understand the type of effort that really went in to stopping the 2007 wildfires, he said.