Firefighters from the U.S. Forest Service — including from the Houston and Ava offices — are battling fires in California.
“They just feel a sense of relief knowing that pretty much everything in the nation is here,” said Thomas Porter, an employee of the National Forest Service.
He has been a firefighter for the past decade and has seen his fair share of devastation caused by large wildfires.
“Dixie took out an entire town in northern California. The Caldor fire burned up a lot of structures and threatened south Lake Tahoe,” he said.
He is in southern California as part of a relief team from the U.S. Forest Service, stationed at the Mark Twain National Forest, and deployed to help crews fight California’s historic wildfires.
“We’re here with 13 people from Mark Twain, from Doniphan, Poplar Bluff, Potosi, Houston and Ava,” he said. ” We’ll be here for 14 days. Then we’ll travel home. Right now we’re just here as a resource in case they get more starts than the locals can handle. We’ll be able to go out and help them.”
He said what makes these fires so extraordinary are the weather and terrain.
“The Santa Ana event and their fuels being really, really dry. They’re about as dry as they should be in August. We see just as many fires, it’s just our fuels are different so the fires burn differently in Missouri than it does out here,” he said.
Thomas said it’s gratifying to help those in need across the country. “All of the community that’s been affected by this or have been close to it, they see all the resources that are here that are around town, during the day and night, they even say that they’re glad that everyone’s here,” he said.
