Dressed in yellow fire-retardant pants and jackets — lighter and easier to move in than their usual turnout work for urban structure fires — firefighters from two Lodi Fire Department engines and one Liberty Fire District engine conducted their annual wildland fire training behind the Lodi Wine and Business Center on Tuesday afternoon.
“Sometimes in a wildland fire, we use fire to fight fire. We create a back burn, eliminating fuel ahead of the main body of the fire,” said Lodi Fire Battalion Chief Michael Alegre.
While two firefighters used drip torches to drop a burning mixture of gasoline and diesel fuel along a patch of dried grass near a fence, two more firefighters used wildland hoses — smaller and more maneuverable than hoses used in structure fires — to prevent the fire from spreading too far from the fence or engulfing trees or power lines.