LINE OF FIRE

The fight to contain an inferno in Los Angeles.

- M. R. O'CONNOR

The Eaton Fire, which burned thousands of homes in Altadena (above), was one of the deadliest blazes in California history.

On the seventh day of the Eaton Fire, the most lethal of several wildfires burning in Southern California, I woke up in a tent at the Rose Bowl, which had become a staging area for first responders, called “fire camp.” At 7 A.M., an emergency-management team known as incident command gave a briefing at the stadium entrance. We were told that the blaze now encompassed fourteen thousand acres and was only fifteen per cent contained. It had risen into the San Gabriel Mountains to the north and spread into the suburbs to the south. “It does not get much worse than it’s going to be the next few days,” an expert on fire behavior warned us. “We could have rapid fire spread in basically any direction.”

At eight o’clock, I climbed into one of several white pickup trucks as part of a twenty-person handcrew, a team of wildland firefighters who dig lines around fires to contain and control them. (If fire engines are the artillery of firefighting and airtankers and helicopters are the air force, handcrews are the infantry.) Our caravan drove east to Sierra Madre, a community of about eleven thousand in the foothills of the mountains. Police officers, parked on the streets to enforce mandatory evacuation orders, waved us through, and we unloaded at the eerily vacant Eaton Canyon Golf Course. Behind us, the houses were untouched, but we knew that in front of us hundreds of homes had been reduced to rubble. Nearly everyone in the crew carried hand tools, and two people, designated sawyers, carried chainsaws. We shrugged on our backpacks—which included silver, cocoonlike fire shelters that we could deploy if we were overtaken by flames—and lined up. “Assume you’re not coming back to the trucks till tonight,” our captain instructed. “Stay vigilant! Stay alert!”