Like many elected officials in San Benito County, Hollister
Mayor Brad Pike has a day job. But Pike’s position as a captain
with the Saratoga fire Department is a little more exciting than
most and it recently took him to Southern California, where he
joined in battling the wildfires consuming the region.
Like many elected officials in San Benito County, Hollister Mayor Brad Pike has a day job. But Pike’s position as a captain with the Saratoga fire Department is a little more exciting than most and it recently took him to Southern California, where he joined in battling the wildfires consuming the region.
“Personally, I felt mixed emotions because this is the job,” Pike said. “But at the same time, I was thinking, ‘This is amazing.'”
On Oct. 22, Pike was dispatched with a 22-person strike team from Santa Clara County to take part in the statewide firefighting efforts. His team was stationed in the Running Springs area of Lake Arrowhead, and even though fire had already swept through, there was still plenty of work, Pike said.
Municipal strike teams were assigned to protect residential areas, he said, while the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection took the lead in containing and putting out the fires themselves. During the day, Pike cleared debris, hosed down the decks of homes and did everything possible to make sure the evacuated neighborhoods were “defensible.”
“Basically, we did a lot of landscaping,” he said.
The work was important, but Pike also acknowledged it was frustrating to serve in a “secondary mode” rather than on the frontlines.
“Everybody wants to be directly putting water on the flames,” he said.
They faced other challenges at night – using overused, “disgusting” portable toilets, and trying to sleep in the parking lot of an empty ski resort where temperatures sometimes dropped into the mid-20s.
Of course, Pike wasn’t the only resident from the area fighting fires in Southern California. CalFire spokeswoman Jan Bray said that as of yesterday, the department’s San Benito-Monterey unit had sent 155 firefighters south, a “huge percentage” of its 270-person team. Hollister Chief Fred Cheshire, on the other hand, opted not to send anyone, because he said his department has already been stretched thin by reduced manpower and having responded to a recent fire in Big Bear.
“It takes a toll on us because we’re at bare-bones staffing,” Cheshire said.
Pike called it “an honor” to have participated. In addition to the smoke, the cold and the toilets, he said he’ll always remember watching 30 police cars driving past his engine, their lights and sirens blazing.
“Watching 30 police cars going code three … to get ahead (of us) and evacuate the people, I realized that we’re just a cog in the bigger system,” Pike said.
