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Wildland Firefighting
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Email Us | Home | Home Winemakers Classic
| The history of our department goes
back to the great fire of 1945 when the hills of Napa and Sonoma Counties
burned with a fierceness which we hope never to see again. Residents of
the Dry Creek watershed then voted to pay an annual membership fee to
finance the purchase and upkeep of a fire engine and to maintain a network
of trails providing access to all reaches of the watershed. In 1978, Napa
County assumed the cost of rolling stock and safety equipment, and more
recently still, air support and vegetation management programs have replaced
the costly and environmentally intrusive fire trails. Our immediate response
area covers approximately 200 square miles and encompasses the western
hills of Napa Valley throughout the Dry Creek Watershed to the Sonoma
County Line.
Our response area is so vast and accessible by so few roads, we locate our apparatus in strategic places within our district to optimize our response time to any given location. We keep a Type III engine, constructed specifically for wildland firefighting, near the top of Mt. Veeder, and another Type III midway up Dry Creek. A Type I engine and a water tender are housed at the intersection of Dry Creek Road and the Oakville Grade. All of our apparatus is equipped to respond also to structure fires and medical emergencies. Within the past five years, increasing traffic and population density on lower Dry Creek Road have placed a higher demand on our services in the southern portion of our district. Under our Memorandum of Understanding with Napa County, we are eligible for an additional fire apparatus to serve this need, provided we acquire a parcel of land, and construct at our expense, a fire station to house the equipment. Quite a burden for an all-volunteer fire department! We will finance this new growth through a distinctly Napa Valley - style fundraiser, the Home Winemakers Classic. Information on some of our most recent wildfires are listed below: |
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