We were called out to a fire in the mountains, about 60 miles out in the back-country. We got out there and it was cold and there wasn’t too much smoke. But about then, a fire took off in the wildland area in San Diego, so they called us back. So we had to travel all of that distance back into the city to fight this other fire, which was a really fast moving fire because it was quite windy. 

They gave us an assignment for five rigs to go out and hit this one area that was moving quite fast. So we were driving through the brush. These were brush rigs so they were lifted and had four-wheel drive. Imagine tanks going through the brush. We were cruising pretty fast across the ground, when all of the sudden a bunch of illegal immigrants started running out of the bushes in front of us. Their camps were all set up in the brush, and we were about to run over them. It looked like ants leaving the brush. We accidentally ran through some of their camps and almost killed some of them, but we had no idea they were there. The border patrol had a lot of run trying to round them up. 

That fire moved so fast that it started at about 10 o’clock in the morning, and by about midnight it had almost reached highway 5 which was quite a ways away. The commanders said we were going to have to make a stand, so they had us stop all of our rigs about 50 feet apart in a row with our pumps running, our hose lines off and all of our gear on. We waited for that thing to come, and it really came. When it hit us we used our hose lines on it but it still eddied. An eddy is like in a river, where the water will hit the side of the banks and redirect upstream into a circular motion. This fire actually went over our heads, over our rigs, and was ready to start the brush and weeds on the other side of the rigs on fire. We had to point of some of the hose lines behind us to stop it, and stayed there all night just waiting to see if flare-ups happened. We did stop that fire, but it traveled about 30 miles before we finally did.