Lightning Injures Firefighters as Frazier Mountain Burns

  • The Frazier Mountain fire, captured from a camera at 6,000 foot Eagle's Perch on Tejon Ranch.

    The Frazier Mountain fire, captured from a camera at 6,000 foot Eagle's Perch on Tejon Ranch.

Three Injured in Freak Incident

By Patric Hedlund, Gary Meyer and Community Reporters

A fast-moving lightning storm created a ring of 11 fires around the Mountain Communities last weekend, setting more than 40 fires in Kern County’s mountains. Locally, fires blazed at the base of the Grapevine on Tejon Ranch to the east of Interstate 5, with others springing up in Lockwood Valley, on Tecuya Ridge and then, suddenly, at about 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, a small fire on Frazier Mountain exploded into a larger wildfire moving across ridges too rough and remote for firefighters to access. Smokejumpers were called in to parachute into the rugged area.

Helicopters and fixed-wing craft roared back and forth across the sky to dump fire suppresent and water sucked from Frazier Mountain Park pond onto the blaze.

To the northeast, residents of Stallion Springs near Tehachapi were asked to evacuate on Saturday when 7,500 homes were threatened.

Then, on Tuesday, Sept. 13 U.S. Forest Service firefighter Ryan Bridgen, 30 was at a staging area in Lockwood Valley, near Ozena, when a lightning bolt struck the ground within 50 feet of where he was standing with two others. The explosion knocked them to the ground. Bridgen, who grew up on the mountain and who served as Fire Sciences Instructor at Frazier Mountain High School, was airlifted to a hospital in Bakersfield.

“It put him to the ground, he still had a pretty bad headache when we brought him home from the hospital. We just got him out this morning,” said Bridgen’s mother-in-law Dixie Bacon on Wednesday, Sept. 14.

“I’m doing good,” Bridgen said in a short phone interview Wednesday, as he tried to rest after returning home from the hospital. He said it is hard to explain what the explosion and force of the lightning bolt was like. There were no burns, but his ears were ringing and he blacked out. He said he hoped to recover enough to return to work this week.

As Bridgen was recovering, USFS fire crews gained the upper hand on the Frazier I fire on Frazier Mountain. “With weather forecasts indicating a warming trend, our intention is to fully contain remaining trouble spots as quickly as possible,” USFS spokesman Andy Madsen said.

By Wednesday, Mt. Pinos District fire crews had full control of 80 percent of the fires that broke out following the lightning strikes Saturday morning.

Mt. Pinos Fire Management Officer John Abell said, “Eleven fires from the lightning events of the past week are in various stages of control and mop-up within the Mt. Pinos Ranger District. All eleven fires are contained. Crews are still engaged on the Salt fire on the north face of Tecuya Ridge, near Salt Creek. “We dropped three smokejumpers on Antimony Peak and just extracted them today,” Abell said. The smokejumpers who fight fires in our area come from various locations and agencies, including United States Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management; some from Redding and some from San Bernardino, according to Abell.

This is part of the September 16, 2011 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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