KERNVILLE, Calif. (KERO) — The incident command post in Kernville is the current home of hundreds of personnel who are involved in suppressing two wildfires that, as of July 23, have collectively burned over 25,000 acres
- With two large fires burning in the Sequoia National Forest, fire personnel have gathered at Camp Nine in Kernville to set up an Incident Command Post.
- The Trout fire started on July 13 and the Long fire started on July 15. Both were started by lightning strikes.
- As of July 23, roughly 1,000 personnel were working to suppress the fire, split between two incident command posts — one in Kernville and one in Troy Meadow.
BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT:
For hundreds of fire personnel, this incident command post set up at Camp 9 in Kernville is currently home –
“These facilities here have everything a firefighter would need while assigned to an incident for up to fourteen days.”
Joe Rosa is the Public Information Officer for California Interagency Incident Management Team 14 - which is working on containing the Trout and Long fires.
“We have a kitchen, camp also includes shower units, laundry units.”
Firefighters have access to mobile sleep trailers, which are air conditioned and have outlets.
There are forty bunks per trailer.
Fire crews are also given the option to camp on the grounds.
As of Tuesday the two fires have burned roughly 28,000 acres total.
There is a total of around 1,000 personnel working on the fire, mostly split between this incident command post and one set up at Troy Meadow.
The firefighters started their day with a briefing.
“This map gets changed every morning,” said Rosa, motioning to a large map that shows the perimeter of each fire.
“Where you see that it’s black, they are confident, 100 percent confident that this is not going anywhere.”
Rosa says that progress can be made on suppressing a fire without that containment percentage increasing.
“They are constantly working and making progress, it just doesn’t show up as containment all the time.”
The Trout and Long fires have presented crews with challenges.
“The helicopter support is not only for water dropping missions, they’re bringing in crews here to drop them off because there’s no road access.”
Rosa says some of the crews camp in those hard-to-reach-areas for two to three days.
“We take lunches and breakfast and drop them at a certain point so they still get fed while they are doing this arduous task of trying to contain that fire.”
A thunderstorm on Monday caused more complications.
“Yesterday we had wetting rains here, had a road washed out, and we had crews on both sides of the road so they’re working today to extract them and get them all back together.”
On Tuesday, another thunderstorm is forecast.
“Frequent cloud-to-ground lightning that may start new fires, and then mobilized heavy rain similar to what we saw yesterday,” said Brooke Taber, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service who is helping with suppression efforts.
Taber says rain can help suppress the fire, but can cause other issues.
“You have a lot of areas that have been burned, so you have burn scar, and that’s very susceptible to flooding, so you can have debris flows or flash flooding.”
The Heliport in Kernville is functioning as a base for helicopters fighting the fire - which transport crews and drop water and fire retardant.
Attention isn’t solely paid to the perimeter, crews are also working to protect nearby structures.
“There’s historic cabins in there, and those cabins have been wrapped. They take a material, it’s almost like tin foil and they wrap the structure and tape it, and it looks like a big silver house,” Rosa said.
The interagency response is a massive logistical operation, but Rosa says California is a leader in the nation for these types of large wildfire operations.
“The crews are working hard, obviously the number one priority is keeping it as small as we can but we gotta take into consideration the public safety in Kennedy Meadows, the folks that travel our road systems, and the firefighter safety.”
Rosa tells me they are expecting fire crews from the National Guard to join the camp soon.
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