Old Sparky & The Epic Fires: Part 2

This episode concludes our conversation with Tim Cash about his adventures operating a fire tower for the US Forest Service this past year. We shift gears from talking about the lookout itself to the elements- fire, smoke, and lightning. One of the fires he experienced burned close to a million acres, which is bigger than the state of Rhode Island.

One book Tim mentioned he read was by Phillip Connors titled Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout. A good read! Tim also mentioned that the government rents out certain lookout towers. Here is a link to them. Most of them are out west but there are a couple on the east coast.

Thanks again for listening to The Outfall. As always, we love to hear your comments.

Transcript

Tim Cash:
And that fire took off that day. Over the course of a couple of weeks, it burned over 100,000 acres. It was the largest fire from a single start in California history. It wasn’t more than one fire. It was just one large fire.

Robert Osborne:
Wow.

Tim Cash:
There were days when it was burning 35,000 to 40,000 acres a day. She had suffered permanent hearing damage from close lightning.

Robert Osborne:
This is Robert and welcome to The Outfall, where we share the backstories of our water world. In this episode, we conclude our conversation with Tim Cash. We shift gears from talking about the lookout itself to the elements. We’re talking fire, we’re talking smoke, we’re talking lightning. One of the fires he experienced burned close to a million acres, which is bigger than the state of Rhode Island. Enjoy.

Tim Cash:
This year thunderstorms came early, in June. Normally thunderstorms don’t roll in until around August, but this year early fire season, June, end of June, we started having a lot of lightning activity. Those roll in usually late in the afternoon. They’ll keep you on duty sometimes until 10 o’clock at night because you’re up looking for down strikes. If you see a strike come down, you do your best to find a location of that and then call it in and then they’ll send a crew out the next day to look for a fire start. So some days could be pretty long. Those days are days that you can’t get out, really leave the lookout.

David Ladner:
What about getting struck by lightning yourself? Like the tower? Does it get struck very often?

Tim Cash:
They do. They’re well-grounded. You have a lightning rod that pokes up out of the top of the roof on top. And then you have copper cables that are about half an inch in diameter, large copper wire that runs down each corner of the roof. It’s a hip roof. So if you can imagine a house with a hip roof, actually the roofs are called dunce caps. Like the dunce in a dunce cap, because they’re pointed at the very top. And so these wires run down and then run down the walls, each corner of the lookout, and then they are grounded out about 10 feet down in the ground. About 30 to 40 feet away from the lookout. Lookouts have been killed. They’ve been severely injured. One woman I used to do relief work for on the Tahoe National Forest, had suffered permanent hearing damage from a close lightning strike. It’s a scary place to be during a lightning storm. We have a chair, I call it Old Sparky. It’s a wooden chair and it has the old-fashioned telegraph glass insulators screwed onto the bottom of each leg. And then you have a rubber mat that you put down on the floor to put your feet on. And if you’re starting to have real severe close lightning activity, you sit on that chair and put your feet on the rubber mat and then just pray that you don’t take a direct hit. But the flashes can be pretty scary. And we’ve had lookouts been struck and burned.

David Ladner:
So even with the lightning rod, sometimes it’ll go around it or something.

Tim Cash:
Yeah. You just don’t touch anything metal, just hope you don’t get hit. This was an extreme fire year. In my first year in 2016, the largest fire we had on the Tahoe National Forest was 7,000 acres, which seemed like a lot to burn. Most of the fires during that fire season were strikes or arson and we would catch it really quickly and get it put out. This year was a totally different story. The conditions out there were just extreme fire conditions. We had two fires, two starts on the Plumas National Forest that burned over a million acres. The first start was June 29th. We had a lightning thunderstorm come through and it touched off two fires. One was 500 acres and the other was about 600 acres and they were able to get those put out pretty quick. And I was home on leave for July 4th that weekend. When I came back, I was sitting on the lookout.
I saw a smoke start within the fire, the burn scar of one of the fires that had just burned, they had just put out. And that fire took off that day. Over the course of a couple of weeks, it burned over 100,000 acres, basically just burned itself out into the desert and there was nothing left to burn. And then July 13th in the north fork of the Feather River Canyon on the Plumas National Forest, a tree fell on a power line owned by Pacific Gas and Electric. And it started a fire that burned until October, burned 963,000 acres, burned much of our forest, burned onto the Lassen National Forest. And then it burned about 80% of Lassen National Park where Mount Lassen is. It was the second-largest fire in California history. The largest fire was last year, the Mendocino Complex Fire. It burned just a little over a million acres.
It was a complex fire, which means it was a fire that there were multiple fire starts. They were managing it as one fire, just administratively. That’s what a complex fire is. If you look at The Dixie Fire, which started on July 13th, even though they’re calling it the second-largest fire in California history, it was the largest fire from a single start in California history. It wasn’t more than one fire. It was just one large fire. There were days when it was burning 35,000 to 40,000 acres a day. Winds were blowing 35, 40, 50 miles an hour.
It’s very depressing and very upsetting to watch so much forest and so many businesses and houses and people’s livelihoods go up in smoke this year. It was terrible. At one time we had, I think there were 6,300 firefighters working this one fire, The Dixie Fire. It is the first fire in California history that’s traveled all the way across the Sierra Mountains, the west to the east. I got sent home on August 23rd because the smoke was so bad, it was unhealthy, hazardous. And then a week later, they called me and told me that they were going to close the lookout because they were afraid it was going to burn, The Dixie Fire burn, within about four miles of it. So they closed the lookout and I stayed home another two weeks.

All of our lookouts, we have five lookouts on the forest. All of them are closed this season, except for one. They had to be closed and wrapped. And some of the fires burned right up to two of the lookouts. So they were just barely saved. So yeah, it was not pretty, but fortunately, the area that I’m looking out over is still pretty green, but in other areas of the forest, the trees look like match sticks that have been toothpicks that have been burned standing there. I think one of the low points was, there was a little town called Greenville, California. I was listening to our fire service radio, our forest net frequency, and listening to the firefighters trying to keep the fire from entering the town. And they finally just said, look, we’re pulling out, here it comes right down the main street. We got to get out of here. And it was like, just thinking about all these businesses and just people’s lives being destroyed by all this. And so that was the low point right there that day. And then the smoke was pretty bad.
I got snowed out on October 8th. That’s when the snow started falling. And that was when it was time to get out before you get stuck up there at the lookout. They got some snow but since then, nothing really it’s just back to what it’s been.

Robert Osborne:
All this technology, satellites, everything, is there a future for fire towers in the next 20 years?

Tim Cash:
Well, I don’t see how the job could be done accurately and in real-time without a pair of eyes. The area that I’m in, there are cameras all over these mountains. They have camera towers on mountains around in the area. I don’t know that any one of those cameras ever actually spotted a fire. I would call in a smoke and then they would turn the camera over there to see where it was. But the camera didn’t know that there was a smoke there, it had to be told what to do.
When you’re up there you can tell a firefighter, you should tell a ground crew, is it on the right side or the left side of the road or what’s the best road to get in thereon. Once you call in a smoke, there’s a lot of interaction with the crews on the ground. They will call you for more information. I think there’s a lot more interest in keeping these things open than there was recently, but it is a dying profession. It hard to get people to commit their lives to sit in one of these things for what they pay. And then the expense of operating them is getting to be pretty high. A lot of them are in bad shape and need a lot of work and renovation on them.

Robert Osborne:
Would you do it again?

Tim Cash:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it’s something that gets in your blood.

Robert Osborne:
We want to thank Tim for joining us and sharing the world of a fire lookout with us. Please take a look at the pictures in the show notes. Would you do it? Come on, think about it. Would you? If you’re not ready to spend your summer on a lookout, but if this episode sparked a little bit additional curiosity, one great book Tim mentioned that he read was Philip Connors’s book, titled Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout. I picked up a couple of copies of it, and it’s great. There’s a link to it in the show notes. If you want my extra copy, I’ll be glad to send it to you. Just send me a note from the website and we’ll mail it to you. Finally, Tim mentioned that the government rents out certain lookout towers. I had no idea. There’s a link to them in our show notes. Most of them are out west, but there are a couple on the east coast. I’m putting that on my growing bucket list. Thanks again for listening to The Outfall. As always, we love to hear your comments. So if you enjoy our podcast, please help us, subscribe to your favorite podcast player, and share the podcast with a friend. We’ll see you next time.