It’s overcast and drizzly in Palo Colorado Canyon on the morning of Aug. 5, and the dampness is a welcome relief from the hot dry weather of the preceding two weeks that helped fuel the Soberanes Fire.
The line of fire engines that was here just a few days earlier is gone. The most excitement now happens at the foot of Palo Colorado at Highway 1, where a CHP officer patrols the road block. A resident tries to get in to water her orchids and vineyard, and storms off after the CHP officer won’t let her. Meanwhile, bomb squad members and tree crews are waved through; they’re on their way to blow up a redwood tree 13 feet in diameter that’s burning on the inside, a situation that could eventually lead to it crashing down.
At the Mid-Coast Fire Station about three miles up the road, the focus has shifted from active firefighting to the practical matters of rebuilding and repopulating the canyon. On a table outside the station, the day’s firefighting guide – a 73-page printout of weather information and maps – has grown soggy in the wet fog.
Chief Cheryl Goetz is most concerned today about getting dumpsters in place so that residents can safely toss their spoiled food as they return to refrigerators and freezers that have been without power for two-plus weeks.
“There’s science experiments in some refrigerators that I don’t even want to know about,” she says. “There’s no firefighting today, but I’m running around putting out fires, like the garbage thing.”
She’s also been negotiating with Pacific Gas & Electric workers to go beyond their required job to remove damaged trees, but to also remove brush that could easily ignite under power lines. “I told them that to leave brush was unconscionable,” she says.
As Goetz talks about the fire, volunteer firefighter Erin Carey walks up to say a Cal Fire official wants to borrow a Knox key – a master key public safety officials use to open gates to private roads.
The Cal Fire official intends to escort a county building inspector – also accompanied by a sheriff’s deputy – to a burned-out home to assess the damage.
“They cannot borrow a Knox key, ever,” Goetz says. “Even though they’re trying to do the right thing, that would violate the trust the community has put in me. End of conversation.”
They’re on their way to blow up a redwood tree.
Instead, Goetz and Carey climb into Goetz’s truck to go retrieve her Knox key from her house – which nearly burned down – to hand to another Mid-Coast volunteer who will escort the building inspector, deputy and Cal Fire official. On the way, they pass a water tender they’ve seen many times in the past two weeks. “We call that thing tittie pink,” Goetz says. “It’s the wrongest color you could ever see.”
Goetz and her husband Jake, both Cal Fire retirees and Mid-Coast volunteers, were en route to the Sierras when she got paged around 8:30am July 22 about a fire in Garrapata State Park.
Hours later, when they heard the fire jumped a key containment line, they turned around and came home and began a sustained two-week firefight. The trees near their own house, on property Jake’s family has owned since 1913, now have char marks 30 feet high.
Their challenge now will be removing the layer of hardened fire retardant crews sprayed onto the house, which will start with re-wetting it to make it gooey again. Carey was part of the three-person group that called itself the “slime crew,” spraying retardant onto homes.
Another member of that crew, Norm Cotton – who they dubbed “Captain Slime” – is the only founding member of the 38-year-old Mid-Coast Fire Brigade who’s still an active volunteer. (He’s now 71 years old.)
Cotton first got involved partly out of curiosity: “I like to do about everything.”
The station itself has come a long way, he says, from the early days when members would keep trucks parked at home until they needed them, and they’d commonly find rats had chewed through wires and engines wouldn’t start. “I kept a truck in my barn for 18 years,” Cotton says. “The rest sat outside.”
Today’s fire station is two stories and has big windows. Goetz’s daughter is in the kitchen cooking a chili verde dinner for the crew, and another volunteer is sleeping in a room off to the side.
As a contractor, Cotton runs the mutual water company that supplies his home and 18 others in the neighborhood, and he also maintains dirt roads in the Palo Colorado area. That makes Cotton an expert on navigating the area, and he says the maps Cal Fire originally got were incomplete: “I thought, ‘Oh gosh, I don’t know how they’ll know where anything is.’” He showed them some old logging roads to use for fire breaks.
Cotton built his home 40 years ago, and has watched a few disasters come through – mostly flooding and mudslides during El Niño winters. “I’m prepared to lose my place if I have to,” he says. “That’s part of living in the country.”