Gifford Fire operations winding down as crews close in on full containment
Dave Alley
SANTA MARGARITA, Calif. – With crews closing in on full containment of the Gifford Fire, firefighting operations that have been ongoing around the clock for more than two weeks are winding down.
“Things are looking great on the Gifford Fire,” Rich Eagan, Gifford Fire Information Officer said on Monday morning. “Currently, we’re at 91% containment. It’s definitely not out and we do have some weather coming at the end of this week I’m told, but we’re we’re a lot closer to wrapping this thing up.”
After an aggressive backfiring operation last week helped crews gain the upper hand and essentially wiped out all of the active flames by Friday, the bulk of the ongoing work is now mop up duties.
“It’s mundane work,” said Eagan. “Scratching line, picking up hose equipment. Any damage that’s been done to properties such as gates, stuff like that, they’ll repair those. It’s just basically mopping up the fire at this point. Pretty tedious, mundane work. It’s still necessary and that will continue on. That’ll continue on until we have 100% containment on this fire.”
On Monday, crews were once again working in the hillsides east of Santa Margarita in the area in and around the Garcia Wilderness, the location that was the site of last week’s successful burning operation.
“The past couple days we’ve been working near the Pozo Saloon, doing rehab and restoration projects,” said Dalton Thomas, Sierra National Forest Engineering Forestry Assistant. “When the fire comes through, obviously the dozers push in initial attack fire lines to try to stop for a progression of the fire, so our job once the fire kind of settles down is to do rehab and rehab takes a lot. It takes a lot of moving parts and a lot of different pieces of equipment. The main part with rehab is just trying to make things look how it used to be and try to get it to look as natural as possible.”
Even as they continue to work to finish full containment, crews are also taking time to reflect on the overall operation that saw nearly 5,000 firefighters and personnel from across California and beyond work together against the biggest wildfire in the state this year.
“It’s a relief knowing that we’re kind of on the tail end,” said Thomas. “Waking up first couple days in camp, seeing the giant plume, you’re like, oh man, there’s going to be some hard work, but now, to see clear skies and that smell of smoke starting to go away, it’s a relief because you know that you did solid work and you know that you helped out a lot of communities.”
At the same time full containment draws closer, the demobilization process for the Incident Command Post (ICP) at the Santa Margarita Ranch is also in full swing.
“Demobilization is happening right now,” said Eagan. “It’s been happening since Friday, basically. They’re demobilizing about 800 people a day, so I suspect come midweek, it’ll be just the people that need to be here. All the other agencies, big agencies will go home to their home units.”
Eagan also mentioned the ICP will shift south to Santa Maria to the Elks Event Center where operations were based out for a few days following the start of the fire on Aug. 1.
“The transition happens tomorrow at 7 a.m.,” said Eagan. “The U.S. Forest Service has taken over this incident. We will be moving our operations back to the Santa Maria camp. This camp is just buttoning up and then they’ll move the stuff that they need to down to the other camp.”
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