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The call for help came to Berkeley fire stations on Sunday afternoon three weeks ago, and by nighttime a strike team was heading due south.  

They arrived in San Diego before dawn, where they received their orders—protect houses in the Ramona Valley from the raging inferno that was devouring the landscape in a swathe across a front as wide the distance between Berkeley and Petaluma. 

Within two hours they had arrived in the orange-tinged valley and were hunkering down to battle the blaze.  

“Brother let me tell you, it was unbelievable,” Berkeley firefighter John Louzao said. “The flames were 50-60 feet high, just racing over you. 

“It sounded like a freight train coming down the mountain. Fences just burst into flames from the heat. I couldn’t even look at it; it was so hot.” 

Louzao was one of ten Berkeley firefighters sent to fight the Cedar fire—the largest and most destructive of the Southern California wildfires, claiming 14 lives and 2,232 homes.  

Only the 1991 Oakland-Berkeley Hills Fire—which killed 25 people and burned over 3,000 homes—was more destructive. 

But for the firefighters, most of whom had battled the local blaze, there was no comparison. 

“This reminded me of the Oakland fire, but ten times as worse,” said Lt. Kurt Chun. 

Chun led the four-man engine crew—Berkeley’s contribution to a five-engine county strike team. All four men, along with two Berkeley fire safety specialists, had volunteered for a county list for such assignments. Because they were working that Sunday, they got the call. 

Despite coming from different crews the firefighters worked seamlessly. 

In the valley, the strike team chief barked out orders about which houses to protect. The Berkeley engine crew would back into the driveway, rip out any brush that could fuel the blaze, lay down their hoses, soak the house and property, knock down the towering flames, extinguish any burning embers then race to the next house. 

“Houses were burning down right and left,” said Lt. John Anderson, one of the safety officers charged with establishing escape routes in case the fire threatened to overrun the firefighters. If the passageway closed, their packs contained fire-retardant tents as a last-ditch safety option. 

Complicating efforts, Chun said, was that they had to use their hoses sparingly because the engine only carries 500 gallons and they didn’t have an additional water source. 

Still, they saved countless homes that first day—in one instance using a garden hose and an ax to chop down beams of a burning patio and extinguish the fire before it engulfed the house. 

The rush of the first day paled in comparison to the joy of that first morning. With their section of the fire now under control, they spent the night camped in a neighbor’s back yard and awoke to find the neighbors had returned and prepared them breakfast. 

They received royal treatment wherever they went, drawing standing ovations in restaurants, honks of support from drivers and thumbs-up signs from passersby. 

“People were so generous,” Louzao said. “It’s hard to deal with someone saying thanks because it’s awkward to be thanked for just doing our job.” 

They took care of each other as well. 

Anderson recalled a comrade taking a cold pizza delivered by local police and heating it on tiles from a burnt-out house so the firefighters working 24-hour shifts could eat a warm meal. 

The 50-mile-an-hour wind gust that made their first day so challenging soon shifted, making the rest of the week easy by comparison. 

They were sent to protect a trailer park and a Bible camp, spending most of their time clearing brush to prepare for a fire that never arrived.  

“The roofs and gutters got a good cleaning and the trees were trimmed, but that morning the fog came in,” Chun said. 

Their last assignment was their saddest. They were sent to perform mop-up duty in Julian, one of the hardest hit towns—and the place where Novato firefighter Steve Rucker died fighting the blaze the same day that Berkeley firefighters were battling in the valley. 

Rucker’s death weighed heavily on all the firefighters and their families. The media first erroneously reported the victim as an Alameda County firefighter, prompting Berkeley fire officials to call the firefighters’ families to assure them that everyone was OK. 

“It was really somber,” Chun said. “I think it was a reality check to everyone in our strike team that here is someone just as well trained as we were, and that it could have happened to anyone.” 

Julian looked apocalyptic. Lone chimneys rose from the blackened earth beneath a dirty orange sun. “The plants were toast,” Louzao said. 

But by morning, the winds shifted again, bringing cold, humid ocean breezes and even, perhaps miraculously, a little rain. 

The changes reigned in the fire, and when a second Berkeley engine dispatched to relieve the crew arrived, they quickly headed back north. A week had passed and the job was done. 

“I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to help another community,” said Chun, a 17-year veteran of the Berkeley Fire Department. “Isn’t that just like Berkeley, being as humanitarian as we are? It fits us to send help to a community in need.”