"Camp Fire: Day One – 'Rescue People And Don't Get Killed'" ($25 in paperback, published independently through Citygate Associates, available at Barnes & Noble) draws on more than fifty interviews.
In a letter to me, Sager notes that he wrote his book after talking with Incident Commander John Messina on the second day of the fire. Getting the interviews was an emotional process. Firefighters rescued others even as their own homes were burning. "Yet they persevered." Four years later, he says, "many are retired, some on physical disability, some on psychological disability."
Several of the fifty-plus chapters provide overviews of the fire and the Butte College staging area, but most focus on first-hand accounts beginning with Beth Bowersox, dispatcher and "call taker" at the Emergency Command Center, whose responsibility was to name the fire.
As the severity of the fire became apparent, engines, strike teams, dozers, and air support were all activated. Battalion Chief Tony Brownell was there that first day. As Sager writes, Clark Road "was packed with people trying to escape the fire … he proceeded north to Wagstaff to check on the Kmart parking lot situation. Between two and three hundred cars were jammed in there. … It was a TRA" (temporary refuge area).
Chapters, many containing maps and photographs, detail dramatic rescues as well as tragic losses and the extraordinary interconnection of the stories. What emerges is how often those on the scene had to make split-second decisions to save lives, part of their CAL FIRE training.
Some who evacuated that day can read, perhaps for the first time, what was going on in their own neighborhood immediately after leaving.
Sager's work here is simply indispensable.
