By Judy Osburn, resident of Ozena Valley

The fire isn’t over, but the worst danger has passed our ranch in Ozena Valley, three and a half miles east of the Zaca fire’s eastern containment line.

The evening of Wednesday, Aug. 22 , we watched flame-throwing helitorches, flaming Ping-Pong ball shooters and helicopters towing buckets that hurled liquid fire, all attacking our western mountain range from Ozena Forestry Station to Brubaker canyon (from the corner of Lockwood Valley Road and Highway 33 for about seven miles)—quite a firework show. It looked like a war scene from a sci-fi movie.

It’s no wonder that a firefighters’ blog recently titled its daily update map "Zaca Fire and Recreation Map." In addition to flame throwing "helitorches," they also play with Ping-Pong poppers: machines mounted in helicopters that inject chemical filled Ping-Pong balls with an ignition catalyst just before shooting each ball into the forest. We’ve also seen them spilling liquid flames from buckets hanging beneath helicopters. The fire loves this game. It appears to rest each night, then slowly stretches its limbs upon arising late in the mornings, in anticipation of more fun and games. By early afternoon it stands up monstrously tall, spreading dark smoke as far as possible.

Late evening the smoke cloud mostly clears into thin white strands as the fire settles into sparkling communities of small flames that take turns billowing as they rise up into raging parties of bright lights, sometimes coming together to feed upon each other’s energies and make a grand run until the flames tire and relax into more separate little sparkling communities. The contented little sparkles gradually fade under a low blanket of light gray smoke and rest for the night, ready to rise again for another day of recreation. Weeks ago officials ceased distinguishing the wildfire from the domestic "back fire"—it’s been one big hybrid on the maps since then.

The fire crews and commanders have done an incredible job of keeping this fire within their planned primary containment lines. The massive burnout was the only thing they could do under the circumstances.

The circumstances of our apparently impoverished infrastructure include a lack of air strike resources-aside from the somewhat controversial DC-10, only eight air tankers have been available to fight this gigantic fire-a decade ago they used to send that many air tankers to put out a small fire that only spread 20 or 40 acres a few miles from here. Of course there are many wildfires now burning in the Montana/Idaho area, but many of California’s old C-150 tankers were retired last year and never replaced-and who knows how many air tankers are unavailable because they’re supporting troops and troop movement in Iraq.

This is part of the August 31, 2007 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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