This morning, the California team that has overseen the suppression of Spokane’s wildfires will head home. Local officials such as Fire Chief Tom Williams have praised the manner in which they’ve coordinated the effort. California team members have raved about the treatment they’ve received here.
Incident commander Tom Clemo told a community meeting at Shadle Park High School this week that it was a happy accident that his team was assigned to Spokane.
Tom Clemo: We were headed to Baker City, Oregon. We arrived there on the 31st or 30th, somewhere in there, and our mission was to take over the Fox Fire and Powder River fire from Southwest Incident Management Team Two. There are 38 complex incident management teams in the country. We're one of them.
Southwest Two is another, and as I was sitting in the room with the other incident commander from Southwest Two, his phone rang, and it was a coordination center that said, hey, can you guys extend a couple of days? And he said, well, let me call you back. Then my phone rang, and the same individual said, Tom, I think we're going to send you guys to Spokane.
So, within 15 minutes, 127 of us had checked out of hotels, and we were northbound, and I was on the phone with a multitude of people, including Chief Williams, other agency administrators, the operations section chief from the incident, and all of the members from my team were making context to counterparts in the area, and while driving northbound, had quite a bit of intelligence about what was going on here in Spokane.
I was looking at a map on my iPad that showed a straight beeline of the Old Trails fire, pull the ops map back up of the Old Trails fire that indicated high winds, and we were into neighborhoods, and that's what was clearly painted for us.
So we actually have a guideline on how to assume command in what we call a hot handoff, and this really couldn't have been a hotter handoff. Our operations folks immediately went to the line, engaged with division supervision. Branch directors, our safety officers, got in the field.
Through the amazing coordination and generosity, we had the opportunity to get to Mt. Spokane High School. That was our command post for five days, and we operated out of there, and as you've heard from a few other people, and I kind of want to emphasize this part, that high school turned into an amazing demonstration of hope and generosity to the team. We had food trucks that showed up, we had individuals dropping off stuff all day long.
We built what amounted to a general store in the lobby, and so firefighters that were out all day or out all night, because we've been running double shifts for everybody, they were able to come back, get something to eat, homemade food. I mean, don't tell my wife, but I've been eating better here than I was kind of eating at home. She's probably watching this right now throwing something at the iPad as we speak, but amazing.
They'd come back, they'd go through what amounts to a Walgreens or a Walmart, they'd get everything they would need, because they don't have time to do that when they're going from fire line to chow line to bed. That is something we have not seen before, not at that level.
So when we moved to the fairgrounds, and if you look at the ops map, way down in the corner, there's a little triangle, a little blue triangle, when we moved to the fairgrounds, it was all set up for us.
At our peak we were at almost 2,000 people, the general store came with us, and it was tended to by a multitude of volunteers, and every night crews would come in, and every morning they'd come in after night shift, they'd pick up what they needed, they'd have a chance to call home, see how things were going, and they would tell all of us of what an amazing experience it's been in this community.
It has been an honor to serve you. It has been an incident that will go down in our team's history books as probably one of the most amazing events of coordination, collaboration, and community that we've seen.
If you see any of us in a black shirt with a Team 7 logo on it over the next couple of days, and you have any questions you don't feel comfortable asking in a group, or you forgot about tonight, ask us, we'll do everything we can to get you the answer, and when we start heading southbound on Sunday morning early back to California, and back to where our folks are from, we will forever remember the generosity and the gratitude of Spokane.