On Thursday, they were deep in the Los Padres National Forest, covered in wood grit, soot and sweat, as the Thomas fire continued to grow — becoming the fourth-largest in modern California history. In the morning, commanders stressed the dangers of the work and urged them to be careful even while mopping up hot spots, cutting burned trees or striding though charred rubble. Hours later, a San Diego fire engineer, Cory Iverson, died on the fire lines. The loss rippled through the army of 8,000 fire personnel — both professionals and inmates — on the scene. Some lined the road as Iverson’s body was loaded into a hearse and taken from the fire zone. For 11 days, they’ve been fighting a sharply uneven battle against a devilish fusion of dry wind, fault-crumpled terrain and desiccated vegetation. Playing some of the hardest roles are the inmate hand crews, which make up about 20 percent of the firefighters here.
On a ridge above Montecito on Thursday, they worked in crews of 15, leaders shouting orders, scarifying a ribbon of mountain too steep and craggy for any bulldozer. The winds had abated, as they had many times before, but the inmates were racing the clock, chopping away at ceanothus trunks and gnarled manzanita roots with specialized saws, picks, shovels, rakes and axes. Forecasters predicted Santa Barbara’s notorious sundowner winds, which howl down the mountain canyons to the coast, driving flames and embers with them, would return Friday night. Because the wildfire has sprawled so widely, the task of finding the critical points to cut it off had become profoundly difficult. “This thing is 60 miles long and 40 miles wide,” said Tim Chavez, a fire behavior analyst with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “There’s a lot of fire out there.”
Inmates working on a fire crew rest at camp between shifts on the fire line as they work with California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) on the Thomas fire in Ventura, Calif.
No day has been the same on the front lines. On Saturday, the winds had calmed. The heat rose in a column, carrying smoke and soot, mushrooming into a pyrocumulus cloud 30,000 feet high. On the ground, it was quiet and still. Gerardo Moran, 41, and his fellow convicts thought the worst was over. They were loading the truck about 2 a.m. Sunday to head back to camp and rest, as the temperature dropped. Then the weight of all that material in the atmosphere collapsed. A violent downdraft hit the ground and blew in every direction, fanning waves of flame. “Come on, tools out!” a Cal Fire captain shouted. “I never knew we were gonna be in the eye of the storm right there,” Moran recalled this week. “It’s pretty intense — the biggest adrenaline rushes I’ve ever had, right there on the fire line.”
The fire scorched another 50,000 acres during that bout. But Moran and the inmates were able to save a horse ranch off Highway 150, which he was happy about. Established in 1943, the inmate fire program employs roughly 3,800 prisoners across California, paying them $2 a day in the off-season — when they clear flood control channels and hiking trails — and $1 an hour when they’re fighting fires. “I’ve always been a fan of the program,” said Mark Brown, a deputy fire chief in Marin County and operations commander on the Thomas fire. “They work their butts off.” For the inmates, the danger is obvious — four have died since the program began, including two in the last two years. And some have manipulated the program — in October, an inmate escaped when he walked off the fire line while fighting a blaze in Orange County, only to be recaptured on Halloween in Los Angeles.
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