Battling in the backcountry

ARROWBEAR -- Hundreds of Lake Arrowhead-area homes could never have been protected by Road Queens, a nickname for the big, iconic, ladder-hauling fire engines that are designed to save structures.

Up in the mountains, in neighborhoods built along streets as narrow and bendy as creek beds, keeping fire out of yards and living rooms is a job for the boxy but nimble trucks -- the brush engines -- of the U.S. Forest Service’s strike teams.

“You don’t see much of the Forest Service guys on TV -- we’re back here in the middle of nowhere,” said strike team leader Keith Hughes, whose crew helped hold the line for two days against a wildfire that threatened homes in the canyons east of Lake Arrowhead.

Strike teams and their brush engines do something that other firefighters typically cannot do, no matter how flashy their wheels: They bring water and hoses into the backcountry, a task crucial to efforts to limit this week’s toll of property destruction in the San Bernardino Mountains.

The mighty ladder engines sport deck hoses that can soak acres of roofs. They have been a common and welcome sight on the wider routes of the San Bernardinos, but are rarely seen in the tighter quarters of the hillside neighborhoods.

“It’s because they can’t turn around very well,” said Daniel Dresselhaus, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, which also deploys the smaller and more mobile brush trucks.

“We squirt water up here, and string out the hose -- the Road Queens can’t get off the pavement,” said Sam Marouk, a Forest Service division supervisor, who was overseeing a strike team that was spread across a smoldering mountain.

The Forest Service’s dull green brush trucks carry five firefighters, 500 gallons of water and as much as 5,000 feet of hose. They have sufficient brawn to muscle through snags of toppled trees, but are trim enough to negotiate cabin driveways.

Their crews are skilled in the use of “burn-outs,” controlled fires that chew up leaves, twigs and fallen branches, robbing fuel from an advancing blaze.

“This is working real well,” said Roy Leckbee, a strike team engineer who was monitoring a burn-out on a pine-steepled hill near Arrowbear and Running Springs.

The wildfire had reached the crest of the ridge, and the team members were determined to stop it there.

They were using drip torches -- nozzled canisters filled with a mixture of gasoline and diesel -- to set the burn-out. The controlled fires can be patterned in strips, circles or chevrons, depending on the topography and wind. Leckbee’s crew was lighting strips.

“This will make it safe for us to put a hose lay in here,” he said.

He was standing at the bottom of the hill, in flurries of ash, where the team’s five brush trucks -- also known as wildfire or wild-land engines -- were parked.

Beyond the ridge, in the teeth of the fire, a hand crew was shoveling out firebreaks around a house, but needed water to push the blaze back.

The strike team began unfurling hoses from the engines to the ridgetop and over. The lines would stretch more than 1,000 feet.

“We once put in a hose lay that was two miles long,” said Leckbee, who is stationed at Los Padres National Forest.

As of late Wednesday, the fire along the ridge raged on, riding modest but shifting winds. The homes in Arrowbear and Running Springs remained in danger.

By Thursday, the crews had managed to clear a path for the brush trucks and a water tanker to reach the ridge. They set up a portable, 1,500-gallon rubberized water tank on the blackened earth, and the hoses now ran from the engines to the front line of the fire, far down in the smoky canyon.

The flames were in retreat, the homes spared.

paul.pringle@latimes.com