The Esperanza Fire by John N. Maclean

Author:John N. Maclean
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2016-03-30T10:52:20.896022+00:00

THE SEARCH FOR the still-missing crewmen at the site had resumed immediately after Loutzenhiser and Cerda were found. Espinoza walked on up the driveway looking for a place where someone might have survived. “I started up toward the engine, but Gearhart said not to go there; there was stuff still exploding. The house was still burning. That’s when I started looking where somebody could run to and survive. That’s when I found Danny.”

“Hey, Josh, hook up a hose so I can put out that stob,” Espinoza called to Spoon, not wanting to draw everyone’s attention.

As Spoon dragged the hose over toward Espinoza, he saw on a slope below the driveway what looked like a smoldering log with sputtering flames wedged against a burning stob, or tree stump, which had stopped it from rolling over the bank and onto the road directly below. Spoon had never seen a burned dead body before. It looked unreal to him, like a charcoaled mannequin.

“Let me do this,” he told Espinoza. “You go be with the guys.”

“Are you sure?” Espinoza said.

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll do this.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

A three-man crew from Cal Fire Engine 3176, the first state unit to arrive, walked toward Spoon, down the slope from the driveway where they had helped attend to Cerda. The captain, Jeff Veik, saw what was going on and told a crewman, Frank Ebner, to go back to the engine and get the banjos—canteens shaped like the round head of a banjo—and a tarpaulin. As Ebner came down the slope with the equipment, he noticed what he thought was a burning log.

“I’m so sorry about your friends,” Ebner said to Spoon. Then Ebner took a closer look at what Spoon was doing with the hose.

“Oh, my God,” Ebner said. “Do you want something to cover him?”

“Yes,” Spoon said.

Quickly, helping hands appeared from every direction.

“We all did it,” Spoon said, “six or seven of us.”

They poured the water from the banjos on Daniel Najera as gently as human hands could manage. Ebner, with tears welling in his eyes, asked if it was okay to say something. It was. The group recited the Lord’s Prayer, and then they covered Najera’s body with the tarp.

The crew of Engine 3176, suppressing shock and bewilderment, returned to firefighting duties. The men—Veik, Ebner, and Craig Roberts—had just endured an experience similar in everything but outcome and degree of intensity to what had happened at the Octagon House: they had been swept by the same wave of superheated air that had engulfed the men of Engine 57. When the area ignition occurred, Engine 3176 was stationed at a home just off Twin Pines Road. The home was on a direct line above the unnamed creek drainage; by later measurement, it was 835 feet higher in elevation and two-thirds of a mile as the crow flies from the Octagon House. “We experienced exactly what they experienced at Engine 57, except we were at the top of the ridge and they were mid-slope,” Ebner said five years later.

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