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I pull into the firehouse parking lot. The workers already have half of the fair equipment pulled down.
“I have to go. I’m back at the station,” I tell him.
“Later,” he says before the line goes dead.
I enter the station to find Jay, Mike, Nick, and Chris in the middle of a poker game.
I take a seat at the table.
“Deal me in,” I demand.
Their eyes go wide. I never play with them.
“You sure, boss?” Mike asks.
I toss a wad of bills from my pocket onto the table. “Yep. It’s been a shitty night. It can’t get any worse, so I might as well let you assholes take my money.”
Words I will soon regret.
Corbin
The fellas do indeed take all my cash. I’m not the worst poker player, but Jay and Mike are sharks, who need to take their winning act to Vegas.
Just as the last hand is claimed by Jay and we stand to clean up and put away the deck and chips, an alarm sounds.
The guys head straight to their lockers as I radio dispatch and find out a wildfire has broken out and is spreading at a high rate of speed.
Shit, we have to get this contained as soon as possible.
I tell dispatch to send a call out to all the local stations to quickly pull in as much help as we can.
My guys are geared up and headed for the firehouse’s apparatuses in record time.
“It’s a fast-spreading brush fire off Cloverleaf Road,” I tell them. “We’ll need all the vehicles in action for this one to get boots on the ground and stop the spread as soon as possible. Storms are headed in, and dispatch is calling in reinforcements,” I continue.
They nod their understanding and start loading into the engines.
“I’ll see you guys out there.”
I jump into the command vehicle and ride out ahead of the engines to assess the situation. As I approach the side of Plott Mountain, I can already see the bright glow of the flames climbing up the side.
I get on my radio and call down to Balsam Ridge Emergency Services and tell them to have the county send out an alert for a mandatory evacuation of all residents on Plott Mountain above Cloverleaf Road. The guys are about ten minutes behind me, so I start going door to door, alerting people to the fire and asking them to leave immediately.
Mr. Sheffield is already loading his dogs into the bed of his truck when I come up his drive. He tells me that he watched the construction crew down at the Sutton homestead light some landscaping debris on fire in a controlled burn earlier, but it somehow spread to the field behind the barn, and they couldn’t get it stopped.
Dammit.
Earlier in the week, the county warned of a strong storm system moving into the area, bringing damaging winds with it. Due to low humidity and high wind surges, I issued a red flag warning.
Embers from the construction burn probably got caught up in the gusts and hit the dry meadow, which was nothing but waiting kindling.
I set up a base camp off at the end of Cloverleaf and tell the crew to drive up as far as they can. They park the engines and proceed on foot. I join them, and we start cutting a line as quickly as possible. Jay and Mike circle up on foot to start cutting from the other side.
“Right now, it looks to be about twenty acres. We have to get those trees down and out of the way to stop the path. I have haulers on the way, so we can cut a dozer line. I’ll send them up to you as soon as they get here. If this fire makes it over the peak, then the ski lodge is in danger, and so are all the homes on Misty Mountain. If you see it crest, call down as soon as it does, so I can get an evac order for the other side of the mountain,” I tell them.
“You got it, Chief,” Jay says before they grab their backpacks and start the hike.
Chris, Nick, and our new recruits spread out and start digging in. When trucks begin arriving from surrounding counties, I guide them to each home on the ridge to have them hose everything down. If we can get the property wet enough, we can hopefully hold the flames back from the houses.
