LOCAL

West Coast firefighters arrive in Knoxville

Travis Dorman
travis.dorman@knoxnews.com

One hundred firefighters from the West Coast arrived on Tuesday afternoon in Knoxville, where they will receive their assignments and mobilize to several Southern states to battle active wildfires caused by an ongoing drought.

A charter jet carrying the five, 20-person handcrews, most from Washington and Oregon, touched down at TAC Air of McGhee Tyson Airport around 4 p.m. The crews are not the first, nor will they be the last, recruited to alleviate the drought and wildfire emergency plaguing the Southeast. Thirty-five crews have already landed, and five to seven crews are slated to arrive each day this week in Knoxville — a prime hub because of its central location, said Eastern Area Incident Management Team spokeswoman Catherine Coele.

When the jet hits the tarmac, the firefighters on board have no idea where they will be heading or what fire they will be fighting, whether it's in Tennessee, Georgia or North Carolina, Coele said. They are given that information later at the "mobilization center" — a conference room at the nearby Hilton Hotel.

"When they hit the ground, our guys let the Coordination Center know, and they get their resource orders, which have the incidents they'll be assigned to," Coele said as firefighters formed a makeshift assembly line and threw large red luggage bags from person to person.

The crews received their assignments Tuesday night and are tentatively scheduled to depart Knoxville in rental trucks early Wednesday morning, though "it's a very fluid process" and some crews could leave tonight, Coele said.

Coele, who works as a fire prevention specialist on most days, said that in her 10-year career, she's never seen a wildfire emergency of this magnitude in the South.

Randall Blakley, a 10-year veteran firefighter from Washington, said he has fought blazes in the South a handful of times.

"It seems like to me, every year the drought gets worse," Blakley said. "It's something we have to prepare for every year."

Two more charged with setting TN wildfires

Fighting fires in the South is different from fighting fires in the North or out west because of the different materials that fuel the flames, Blakley said.

"Up north we're looking at a lot of big trees, a lot of fires and digging a lot of lines (strips of land cleared of flammable materials and dug down to mineral soil) with a lot of tools. Over here we're looking at a lot of leaf litter and a lot of raking, maybe even using leaf blowers over here, which we don't use at all in region six."

"When the fire's coming towards us, we'll get a good ridge top where we're going to put the line in, and we'll put two leaf blowers up in front. The leaf blowers will blow the leaves out of the way, and we'll get the saw teams in and cut the limbs out of the way. Then we'll dig in behind to get the minimal fuel underneath the leaves. But the leaves are what's carrying a lot of the fire."

Wednesday forecast: Areas of smoke, sunny

The danger firefighters face begins when they get in their vehicles to head to their assignments, said Kim Lemke, a Wisconsin resident who has worked as a safety officer for the Great Lakes Agency for 38 years. Lemke, who briefed the firefighters on safety, told crew leaders that Knoxville natives call Alcoa Highway "I'll Kill Ya Highway" due to the crazy traffic.

"The biggest exposure they're going to have from this point on to whatever fire they're assigned to is their driving," Lemke said. "A lot of the firefighters come from rural areas. They're not used to the city traffic, so we want to brief them and make sure they're driving defensively, that everybody's communicating back and forth with their vehicles on radio, that they have a navigator and that the driver's not distracted."

Related: