The staging area lay outside La Porte, population twenty-six. “We’ll try to come up with a plan, pick up the pieces wherever we can.” He left to assess the area-to see what was on fire and what wasn’t, and to start figuring out how to stop it. “I don’t know how else to say it: Get your minds right to prepare for fucked-up shit,” he said. A steel-headed man with a considered disposition, Burghardt understood as well as anyone when to advance and when to fall back from a fire. We were huddled behind our two buggies, the tricked-out, green ten-seater buses that transported the crew. Our twenty-person crew-Burghardt, captains, squad bosses, senior firefighters, and an assemblage of apprentices and seasonals, myself included-had moved south to a staging area just outside the fire’s twenty-five-mile run. “There’s not a real plan,” Superintendent Scott Burghardt, the head of the Truckee Hotshots, told us the next morning. One air-attack firefighter flying overhead, who from his vantage could see for dozens of miles in all directions, radioed that what he was observing looked like “multiple intergalactic plumes across California.” Instantly, intergalactic, a word possibly never before spoken over the apoetic lanes of air-traffic radio, became the catchphrase all over the fire. On September 8, the day the North Complex intensified, a finite number of crews, including the Truckee Hotshots, were there to take it on, with no backup on the way. If it weren’t for the other simultaneous 2020 record holders, the North Complex would be the second-largest fire on record in California instead, it’s the sixth. Unable to evacuate, fifteen people died in the flames, mostly in Berry Creek. The communities of Berry Creek, Brush Creek, and Feather Falls were overrun. In less than a day, the North Complex crossed twenty-five miles of the Plumas National Forest to the outskirts of Oroville, a town of nineteen thousand, baffling experts with its rate of spread. Two hundred miles northeast of San Francisco, the North Complex started tearing through the Sierra Nevada at devastating speeds, launching flaming bits of pine cones and needles like scouts, igniting spot fires up to four miles ahead of the fire’s advance. The entire West seemed to be going up in flames at once, from the August Complex in the Mendocino National Forest, where thirty-seven fires were coalescing into the largest fire in state history, to the catastrophic fires in Oregon and Washington. ![]() ![]() That day, dry winds blew across California and beyond, wrenching fires loose and sending them ripping across the forest. A smoke column rises from the Big Summit Fire, on the border of Nevada and Utah, which the Truckee Hotshots fought earlier this summer.
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