Inside the Firecracker on the 4th : Holiday’s Just Day 5 on the Line for Volunteer Firefighter

OJAI —  Dale Cundiff spent July 4 inside the firecracker. His was an eerie view. Smoke eclipsed sun and made midafternoon seem like twilight. Yellow, quiet, hot, restless, waiting. An empty public park. A rabbit scooting in confused circles. It was the only traffic on the highway.

“This is what I mean,” Cundiff said. His perch is a Ventura County Fire Department truck. “We’re in the middle of what is happening.” No face shows beneath his helmet or from behind goggles and blue bandanna. “We help while the emergency is actually in progress, not pick up after it’s all over.”

There’s a hiss and a crackle from the center of Dennison Park southeast of here. Smoking ash falls onto concrete picnic tables and the horseshoe pits. Fresh heat slops against Cundiff’s fire-retardant suit. Then a searing, blundering, indiscriminate freight train of flame crashes over a pine ridge and Cundiff goes to war again.

As he has been doing since Sunday. As he will until it’s over . . . and as a unique firefighter within a special handful of men among those tackling a huge fire near Ojai.

Paid $4.50 an Hour

For Cundiff, 31, is a volunteer reservist.

Last month he was teaching at Matilija Junior High in Ojai and schooling students with learning disabilities. This month, he’s up against danger and exhaustion as a $4.50-an-hour reservist with the Ventura County Fire Department stationed at nearby Meiners Oaks. Thursday, he could have been taking his wife, twin sons and daughter to see Ojai’s Independence Day parade with a backyard family barbecue to follow. Instead, he was putting in his fifth straight day on irritable, unpredictable fire lines while his father-in-law played substitute hamburger chef and the city canceled its parade.

“I enjoy the satisfaction of helping people,” Cundiff explained. “That’s why I went into teaching and special education. But the manifestation isn’t in teaching--the rewards are there, but they’re long term and abstract.

“Here (in firefighting) you can grab it, feel it, see the results . . . and I enjoy the diversity, I enjoy the unpredictability. . . . “

There are 375 regular officers with the Ventura County Fire Department. In support are 180 reservists--plumbers, farmers, store owners, students and a junior high school teacher. Some, a department spokesman said, are motivated by raw adventure. Others are looking for an apprenticeship into full-time firefighting. Cundiff said he was escaping a life block.

“You see, I reached my goals pretty early. At 25 I had a master’s degree, a teaching job, a wife and two boys. I came up to a dead end. I asked myself: ‘Is this all there is?’ So I started looking around.”

He looked to his mechanical aptitude, a desire for manual effort and high sense of public service. He remembered his wife’s relatives. They included several officers with the Los Angeles Fire Department. Five years ago Cundiff went for it, hook, line and ladder.

There are few rigid duty requirements for a Ventura County fire reservist beyond general availability. Cundiff likes to average 10 hours a week. Nobody insists that a volunteer reservist’s training go beyond the established six weekends at the academy. Cundiff has taken courses in fire science and fire chemistry at Oxnard College.

It’s all part of a philosophy. The more you know, Cundiff believes, the better a firefighter’s chances. What you don’t know can lead to deadly surprise and panic. And that’s what kills you.

It wasn’t difficult for the communities and their fire experts to know that blazes were coming. Through June and into July, hills were baked brown, brush as dry as popcorn. Temperatures rose unmercifully, beyond 100 degrees. Even leaves on holly bushes began curling with thirst.

Sunday, among the first of 21 major blazes, the outskirts of Ojai exploded.

At 2 p.m. a fire radio in Cundiff’s bedroom sounded his alert. Save for one quick visit to pick up fresh socks and a change of underwear, he hasn’t been home since. Sleep has been catnaps on the fire truck. But no more than a total of four hours for the first four days.

“Yeah, I’m tired,” he admitted. Wrong. Cundiff was gray.

One Home Saved

That first night was spent on Santa Ana Road in Casitas Pass baby-sitting a ranch and backfiring the immediate area to rob incoming fire of fuel. The home was saved.

There have been trips into Matilija Canyon. One road. Box canyons. Flames on both walls and skipping the road. Not a happy place to be. Then came the firestorm on North Foothill Road.

“We pulled in to protect the (home) structure and the fire was much too close,” he said. “Suddenly the fire was on us. Cool air, hot air, the whirlwind and it blew up in our face.”

It’s called a fire devil. Or a firestorm. It is a huge, suspended parcel of exploding gas and debris, moving any place it’s pushed or sucked. “We hit the dirt,” Cundiff continued. “It was only a momentary thing but in that moment I said to myself: ‘I hope this works out.’ Afraid? You don’t feel threatened at the time. That emotion comes afterward when you realize what could have happened--and that’s good, because if you’re afraid at the time, your efficiency and effectiveness go down.”

Arsonist Suspected

Officials can make only vague guesses about the duration of the Ojai fires. Part of the problem, sheriff’s deputies said, is that an arsonist is believed in the area. Then, commented Norm Scott, a U.S. Forest Service spokesman, “it’s so dry and hot, it’s running as it wants to.”

Cundiff says he will stick with it. Like about 2,000 other firefighters in the area from seven agencies, municipal, county and federal, they will stop when they’re told to leave.

Then, Cundiff says, he will crash. But before that there will be feelings. “I’ll feel peaceful. Content. Because of a job well done and satisfaction from knowing that we lost three houses when it could have been 300. That nobody died, maybe because we were there. . . . You know, that’s the best of it, getting to people when they’re pretty nervous, informing them, saying here’s how we think this is going down, telling them there’s equipment coming in. Calming them and being a tranquilizer.

“I really enjoy reaching people.”