Campus firefighters are among thousands who have been enlisted in the battle against raging wildfires in northeast California.

Four UC Davis firefighters are working the Ponderosa Fire southeast of Redding, while another UC Davis firefighter is a strike team leader on the Rush Fire on the Nevada border.

Capt. Nate Hartinger, engineer John Hodge, and Kyle Dubs and Paul Rush left the campus late Saturday night aboard a state fire engine that is housed at UC Davis. They have been doing mop-up work, in areas where the flames have been controlled, checking for hot spots that could spark a new outbreak of fire, said John Heilmann, division chief for training and safety in the UC Davis Fire Department.

“They’re hauling hose up and down the steep terrain in 100-degree temperatures,” Heilmann said. “It’s grueling work.”

The Ponderosa Fire started Aug. 18, the result of lightning, and, as of 6:30 a.m. today (Aug. 22) had burned 24,323 acres of grass, brush and timber, and destroyed 50 structures. Evacuations had been ordered in Manton, Shingletown and Viola, as the fire threatened more than 3,000 homes. Officials reported 50 percent containment.

The UC Davis crew is doing its work with Cal EMA fire engine 364, belonging to the California Emergency Management Agency. The campus has free use of the engine for departmental operations; in return, the Fire Department provides a crew when the engine is called up by Cal EMA.

The state reimburses UC Davis the cost of covering the shifts of firefighters who are assigned to the Cal EMA rig.

Heilmann said engineer Scott Hatcher would swap places with Hodge at midweek, so Hodge could get back to the station for a promotional exam.

Capt. Dave Stiles is assigned to a Yolo County strike team on the lightning-sparked Rush Fire, which has been burning since Aug. 12 on federal land along the California-Nevada border, east and northeast of Susanville. As of this morning, the fire had burned nearly 314,000 acres of brush and was about 60 percent contained.

UC Davis does not have an engine on the Yolo County strike team. Stiles began his tour as assistant leader and was expected to take over as leader come Thursday.

Fire cooks return to campus

Firefighters have to eat, and UC Davis helped on that end, too, with four Dining Commons chefs assigned to a fire camp in southwest Oregon for a week.

The cooks — Mike Baldocchi and Darwin Gross of the Segundo Dining Commons, and Emily Cornejo and Mark Rivera of the Tercero Dining Commons — left for Oregon on three hours’ notice Aug. 13. All four were due back by today.

The chefs are employees of Sodexo, the international company that runs Dining Services, and Sodexo has federal contracts for all kinds of food service — including fire camps.

The UC Davis chefs fed hundreds of firefighters on the Fort Complex, referring to three fires in close proximity to one another on the Klamath and Rogue River-Siskiyou national forests. Both forests straddle the Oregon-California border.

Lightning sparked the fires on Aug. 12, and, as of today, the fires — all on the California side of the border — had burned 6,444 acres of brush and timber. Officials reported 37 percent containment.

Reach Dateline UC Davis Editor Dave Jones at (530) 752-6556 or dljones@ucdavis.edu.

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