At 7:22 pm Tuesday, Contra Costa County firefighters responded to a three-alarm vegetation fire which threatened 40 Antioch homes and sent flames more than 40-ft high into the air.
The fire was located on a trail behind homes on Pawnee Drive which between Prewett Ranch Drive and Indian Hill Drive was contained to four-acres. No homes were lost; however, several fences were damaged.
The fire which was reported shortly before 7:30 pm was under control by 8:45 pm and fully controlled by 10:15 pm said Robert Marshall, Contra Costa County Fire Marshal.
One resident located on Hereford Ct. was transported to a local hospital with smoke inhalation.
Upon arrival, Engine 88 had a 2-acre grass fire moving up the steep slope towards homes and immediately requested a full wild land fire response and moved to structure protection.
Due to the amount of structures threatened, the incident required 20 engines and 65 firefighters from both Contra Costa County Fire Protection District and East Contra Costa Fire Protection District–all five engines were requested leaving the District with no coverage for a short period of time.
The location of the fire near homes caused a challenge for firefighters who were trying to put out the flames while trying to save homes, however, Marshall explained the weather was on their side with low temperatures and winds making the fire manageable.
“Had we had higher temps, and a strong wind, we might have had a different outcome,” said Marshall.
The cause of the fire is still under investigation.
Note:
With District resources tied up in Antioch, CONFIRE was assisted by Alameda County Fire to help cover the District while ECCFPD was assisted by Tracy Fire and CALFIRE.
12 comments
Hard to believe 4 acres can threaten so many homes. Thank you firefighters for being there when needed despite the public’s unwillingness to support you on keeping stations open.
And ECT FANTASTIC PHOTOS!!!!!!!!!
Chuck you say hard working are not stupid. Your right they are not, but you don’t seem to bright. The local firefighters pay the highest legally allowed contribution into their pensions. Apx twenty percent right off the top into pension. For me that’s 1100.00 per month. I hope I live to the ripe old age of 85 so I can see some of my money. I’m sure the county will be making a lot of money off my contributions for a long time. We can’t change what decisions were made yesterday,but I assure you the current and future employees are most certainly paying their fare share. Try to become educated chuck rather than just popping off without a clue.
Saved 40 homes? Maybe 4 or 5 were in serious trouble but 40 is a stretch based on the authors personal agenda to support fire services. Not to take anything away from the work firefighters do but they would get more benefit without biased reporting.
If we had had a different wind, which could have easily happened, it would have wiped out 40 homes. Fortunately that didn’t happen. We knew it was a big problem with all those fire trucks going by. Thanks firefighters and ECT.
Julio,
What if the sky was to fall too ?. Your stretching it a lot Julio.I got my nice glossy expensive mailer today setting up to pay more and keep the same service of which is less than we had five years ago. At least the 1.4 million for pension shortfalls will get covered.
Good thing they brought in Cal Fire and Tracy early. It could have been another Mt Diablo. By the way, who owns that property and were the weeds abated?
In the end they did their job. A good job too.
Chuck, what I said and what you said are not relative. You are pissed off because they want to raise your taxes and that has nothing to do with what i said. Have a good day Chuck and chill.
Chuck, I think it is FANTASTIC that we can not one, but two fire science experts in you and Bobby Lott right here on this board.
You guys are so freakin’ good that you can sit behind your keyboards and expertly analyze a scene that you were never near and apparently do a better job of it than the dozens of PROFESSIONAL fire fighters who were actually on that fire.
Have you two always been this good or did you just stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night?
I don’t think I’ve read anything so stupid since the one from Arne who implied we don’t need to worry about the reduction in fire services and station closures, we just need to stock up on fire extinguishers and garden hose to protect ourselves from a fire outbreak. Just curious, do you also know how much garden hose is required to defend homes from an approaching 2 acre vegetation fire? Because Arne never would answer……..kinda like you.
I’m losing faith in the common sense of people who are actually allowed to vote.
The reason so many homes can be threatend by a 4 acre fire is because we live in an wildland urban interface community not a forest. Google earth the area and count the homes, this was a very serious fire that had the potential to burn many homes. Pay more, pay less I don’t care but don’t act like your a firefighter when your not! Confire and east confire handled this incident, not CalFire and Tracy fire by the way. The other agency(s) requested were for coverage in east confire jurisdiction that is already severely under protected. Good luck this summer and make sure your garden hose and extinguisher is ready, you may want to buy some used firefighting gear as well I hear fires can get pretty hot!
The clue to a real thing is our fire services are failing to fix the real problem of pension reform and risking service levels to pay for unrealistic pensions.There will be a lot of joining fire resources with other districts until that idea bleeds out too. Just fix the problem and cut the drama to grandstand for more taxes. hard working people are not stupid.
Chuckie, pension reform has already taken place. The problem with people like you who can only parrot talking points and not read for themselves is, you didn’t bother to read the news when it happened.
Just as pension changes to 3@50 did not create a problem overnight, neither does a pension reform solution.
Pretty simple concept, really.
Now can you verbalize in dollars and cents or are YOU just going to grandstand with a phrase somebody fed to you? You whined yesterday about a $1.4M figure. Can you put that in any form of context? Any at all? Or are you just one of the CoCoTax drones who thinks and feels that any pension at all is unacceptable, but you don’t have the stones to admit it?
Chuck now you make sense. This is the problem country wide not just east county. In fact Antioch has a unfunded pension liability of 106 million and growing by hundreds of thousands all the time. It was 82 mil just a year ago.
Chuck
Once again you post uneducated and outdated rhetoric. The real problem is lack of funding, not pensions. You have been told on numerous occasions that the funding that goes from collected taxes is substandard and has been for years. You cannot operate emergency services, like police and fire with 1970’s dollars. You have never paid the full amount for the service that is required. You have been getting services rendered that you have not fully paid for. That it the issue.
Pension “reform” is nothing more than a red herring thrown up by a few people who suffer from pension envy. The measure of success is based on low information and people like you that perpetuate it. They have used the top .001 percent of the workforce to try to make their faulty point, which none of pertains to east county fire. Once again, none of it pertains to east county fire.
Got it?
The reality remains that the majority of emergency personnel work for a very justifiable pension to which they contribute accordingly. The flip side of all of this for those who comprehend economics and real world operational models, is that if you remove, reduce or “reform” the pensions you then will have employees working into their golden years where they have a high probably of sustaining workers comp. injuries.
In case you cannot figure it out, retiring on a workers comp injury comes at a much higher cost to the tax payer as the retirement payout is tax free. The retirement boards, public officials and managements understand this. The question is, why don’t you?
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