In the middle of the night June 25, Newport Beach Fire Capt. Ty Lunde packed up his things, left his wife and three kids and headed north to the Butte County Complex fires.
He wasn’t part of any strike team, a contingent of more than 20 firefighters and a handful of trucks, nor did he have a clear idea of what he’d be doing up there.
He was alone, and after 500 or so miles and eight straight hours behind the wheel, Lunde was thrust into the flames.
“For me, I was just trying to figure out how I was going to fit into the overall picture,” Lunde remembered thinking. “You’d go for the classroom training, but until you actually went there and did it for the first time, you didn’t know how it was going to be.”
Lunde isn’t a renegade firefighter per se, but his assignment resembled one when state fire officials summoned him, and just him, from Newport Beach to Butte County. He is the first Newport Beach firefighter to receive an overhead assignment, where they answer to state fire officials, are paid through state agencies and are given individual assignments for larger groups.
“My assignment changed from day to day,” he said. Firefighters given overhead assignments go through additional training and are used as tools, placed wherever their fellow firefighters need them.
“It’s definitely a different experience by yourself,” he said.
Lunde was usually one of two paramedics assigned to a crew of about 40 state convicts and firefighter supervisors clearing out brush in the dozens of blazes’ potential paths.
“I think they’re making the best out of a bad situation and they really take a lot of pride in what they do. I have a new respect for them,” Lunde said of the prisoners. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has established the Conservation Camp Program, a program for non-violent prisoners to work off time behind bars in exchange for helping the state battle fires. In some instances, when no one else is around, the groups have to knock down flames themselves, as Lunde’s group did in his first week there, he said.
“They did a great job. They worked really hard,” he said.
