Hundreds of feet above the hills of Tehachapi a pattern emerges. Roads and fire breaks carved into the hillside combined with pink lines of phos-check to save homes. "It slows the spread of the fire itself and slows the burning of the fuel," says Engineer Michael Nicholas, Kern County Fire Department.
Nicholas viewed nearly 40 minutes of video shot by 17 news from a helicopter. "A lot of the fire behavior is going to be weather driven and predominantly wind-driven." The vanatage point gives us a glimpse of the fire and burn area we haven't seen before.
"What you don't see is a lot of the vegetation on the ground. Some of the pine needles on the green and the foliage underneath," Nicholas added.
In some cases fire burned right up to a home in all directions. In those cases, Nicholas says it comes down to the owner having made defensible space. "It's a request by us to have vegetation down to mineral soil 100 feet around the home. It give us a place for us to stage and hopefully fight the fire."
The fire service calls the aerial attack ambitious. Eight air tankers flew a total of 97 hours as of Wednesday and dropped 231,000 gallons of retardant. They were joined by 16 helicopters who flew more than 192 hours and dropped 350,000 gallons of water.
But the fight isn't over yet. "If it burned the crowns up top and left the stuff down below, you could have fire in the future," says Nicholas. On the ground, hand crews are still putting out hot spots and working to dig fire lines that rob the fire of its fuel. "That's one of the most physically ardous taks is the hand crews carrying hundreds of pounds worth of tools on their backs and digging for hours."
But they promise to be here until the West fire is contained.
