On Friday Wildfire Today covered the two burnovers on the Highway 31 fire near North Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. The Post and Courier interviewed the tractor plow operators that became entrapped and has a very interesting article told from their points of view. Here is how the article begins, but you should read the whole piece at the Post and Courier (link no longer works).
Eight hours into the state’s worst wildfire in 30 years, with visibility next to nothing and flames shooting up pine trees, Wayne Springs and Terry Cook manned bulldozers on the fire’s left flank.
The smoke was bad enough, but now it was getting dark. They were working in a muddy area around a power pole when Springs’ bulldozer got stuck. Cook came around to help pull him out, but she got stuck too.
The wind shifted. Suddenly, instead of being behind the fire, they were in its path.
[…]
Springs radioed for help, but the fire was running too fast now, faster than he or Cook ever could run. The fire was like a giant tumbleweed, throwing off embers into the distance as the mass of flames rolled toward them.
Neither Springs or Cook had seen anything like this before. Springs, 43, had been running plows for the Forest Commission for five years, and Cook, 44, had been doing it for four.
But their training kicked in, and they quickly pulled out bags containing special reflective aluminum blankets. “We’re deploying our shelters,” Springs said over the radio, the equivalent of sending a mayday.
They crouched in the bog, water up to their knees, and put the shelters over their heads as the fire roared closer. In western wildfires, some firefighters have panicked and run as the fire passed over, dying in the process.
Springs and Cook fought the urge to bolt as the 10-story-high flames neared. They heard bay bushes pop all around them, the waxy leaves fueling the fire with a substance as flammable as petroleum.
When Cook got under her shelter, she noticed the light from the fires turned the blanket orange.
Two minutes later, it was over.
Springs and Cook pulled off the blankets and watched the fire race ahead of them and out of sight. The forest smoldered around them. Cook got out her cell phone and snapped a photo of Springs with his shelter slung over his shoulder and thought she would remember that image for the rest of her life.
Justin Gibbins, battalion chief with the Horry County Fire and Rescue, heard the drama over the radio and waited. “We were holding our breaths,” he said. “When they came out, they looked very startled.”
[…]
At one point, Gibbins found himself in smoke so dense that he couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead. Less than 100 feet away, a Forestry Commission truck drove up with a bulldozer on a trailer bed. But the fire shot toward the worker as he tried to pull off the bulldozer’s chains.
“The fire came so quick, he had to run,” Gibbins said. The driver managed to save the truck, but the fire claimed the dozer.
We are very glad the firefighters are ok.
