CALDWELL, Idaho — Caldwell firefighters are happy to be home after weeks of working in California. Caldwell Engine 14 along with other Idaho crews deployed to Los Angeles to help communities devastated by wildfires.
"The devastation is just something you can't explain, never seen that before in my life so it's pretty wild," says Dan Kinney, the engineer who drove Caldwell's Engine 14 and its crew to Los Angeles.
"I think the biggest thing is that California just needed the help. There's so much going on, so task forces from all over the place were sent down there," says Kinney.
The crew was deployed for 18 days — 14 working days with four travel days to cover the more than 800 mile drive.
So how long was the drive?
"I don't even know, a long time. Way too long to sit in an engine; these things aren't comfortable and aren't made for traveling like that," explained Kinney.
They filled the engine to the brim with anything they could have needed on their trip from tents and sleeping bags to food and specialized equipment.
"It was kind of crazy because Chief Daniels said we don't know what role we're going to play when we get there. We could be staffing a fire station, an L.A. County fire station, or we could be on an actual fire line. So we were packed heavy for any situation that we could; all the apparatus had all the equipment we would have to run for medical calls, car wrecks, structure fires," says Captain KC Zachary.
He says his team is used to uncertainty, but an incident of this size comes with a lot of variables.
"Day to day, you still don't know what you're gonna get. When we were going there, we knew what we were going into; we just didn't know the scale and how large of an incident this was actually going to be until we were on the ground," says Zachary.
The Caldwell team spent their time going through neighborhoods in Altadena — mopping up and making sure fires in those areas stayed out.
"Just be thankful that we have our families and our homes that we can go home to because what we saw was roughly 10,000 buildings destroyed and we saw people coming in that didn't have a home, and we would talk with them and just, just be thankful," says Zachary.