Overwhelmed by spot fires in bone-dry pine needles and leaf litter at their feet, a Cal Fire captain and three firefighters retreated to a patch of bare earth on a Cobb Mountain ridgetop during the first hour of the voracious Valley fire on Sept. 12.
But they were not safe for long in the fenced goat pen where they took refuge. The wind picked up, the spot fires multiplied and one man saw the flames “sheeting and swirling” across a nearby driveway.
Then, a brush-covered slope “torched into a wall of flame,” according to Cal Fire’s first published report on the blaze that killed four people and charred 76,067 acres in Lake, Napa and Sonoma counties.
The flames “sent a significant wave of radiant heat” over the four members of the Boggs Mountain helitack crew at about 2 p.m., less than a half-hour after they had landed and set out to protect structures from a growing inferno. “They could feel their faces burning from the radiant heat,” said the report, which was posted Saturday on the blog wildfiretoday.com.
The four men ran to a fence, climbed over it and raced toward a steel garage on the property in the 15100 block of Bottle Rock Road near Cobb, deploying their portable fire shelters near the metal walls. The captain put out a mayday call over the radio. In vivid detail, the report — called a green sheet — describes how one firefighter had to remove his gloves to tear the melted plastic covering away from the aluminum shell of his shelter.