Back from the Brink: A Fire Captain’s Journey from Terror to Trauma to Recovery — and More Terror

‍Part 3 of 4

On the day that still haunts Noelle Bahnmiller, she was scheduled to be off work. But as a favor, she agreed to take another firefighter’s shift. It was early August, in the middle of a brutal fire season that already seemed endless. Lightning sparked the tinder-dry, remote wilderness in Mendocino County, and Bahnmiller, then a captain at Cal Fire, and her engine crew were dispatched to lay firehose across a ridgeline.

There was no hint that it would be anything other than a routine assignment. It was a beautiful day, she was in a forest, noisy with birds, she could see forever and she was hiking. All the best aspects of her firefighting job. “Heaven,” Bahnmiller said.

But a few hours later, her radio crackled with urgent voices: The fire blew up, a benign blaze suddenly exploded into a menacing giant. It burned its way to the tops of the trees, creating a crown fire, the most feared and volatile wildfire.

With flames shooting 250-feet high or more – akin to a blazing, 23-story building – crown fires start on the ground and use small trees and lower limbs as ladders to catapult into the treetops. From that commanding height, embers are carried aloft on fire-created convection winds, sparking new blazes miles from the firefront.

Such monster fires move at an astounding pace. Firefighters can only watch helplessly as the fire in front of them flies overhead and sparks new fires behind them. Whack-a-mole doesn’t even begin to describe the problem.

In practice, it would be rare for firefighters to directly attack flames shooting that high; instead, they are supposed to get out of their way. So when she heard that the fire was in the crown, she knew, “You can’t fight that. You don’t want to be there.”

Feeling the wind shift, and hearing the radio reports, Bahnmiller got an eerie feeling on the back of her neck. She knew what was coming, so she raced back to her two crewmen.

The trio hunkered down in their fire engine in a designated safe zone and prepared to defend themselves against advancing flames, a few miles away but roaring out in all directions. More than 12,000 acres were ablaze.

Fire bosses were barking orders on the radio. The air-attack supervisor shouted, “Get those people out of there!” Nearby a crew of eight men was overrun by flames. Bahnmiller heard their screams ringing in the mountains, but didn’t know their fate.

Bahnmiller’s counterpart on another engine was a longtime friend, and he and his crew were trapped on a ridge, surrounded by fire. She kept in contact with him all night on her phone, texting jokes. As trees exploded into flames, Bahnmiller thought about what she would say to her friend’s wife should he not make it. It was a long vigil.

“I laid in the back of the engine, kept seeing the pictures of the crown fire in my head,” she recalls. “I could hear the fire. They always say it sounds like a freight train and it really does, it’s so loud.

“I could not sleep. I kept thinking of my friends who were trapped. I believed at that time that I was watching the fire kill my friends.”

At 4 a.m., she finally climbed out of the engine and began what would become her months-long daily ritual with post-traumatic stress: After a sleepless night, she greeted the day and threw up.

'Things Started Coming Off the Hook'

Bahnmiller, who was 47 at the time, had been fighting fires for eight years at Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting agency, when she first felt the horrors burrow deep into her, beyond her grasp.

The year was 2014. Ignited by lightning, the Lodge Complex Fire that had burned wilderness and rural towns northeast of Mendocino injured 15 people. Bahnmiller, stationed in Monterey County then, was one of more than 2,000 workers who battled the fire, which burned for 41 days.

It was the summer in the midst of a record-breaking dry spell, when “drought fire” got a grip on California and squeezed and squeezed and never let up. Forests transformed from trees to tinder. The Lodge fire was just one of multiple fires that had ignited simultaneously in the state, straining Cal Fire’s crews.

That summer, “things started coming off the hook,” Bahnmiller said. “The game changed. And it keeps changing.”

Bahnmiller worked the Lodge fire for another week after that long night trapped in her engine with her crew. Later she would learn that all of the burned firefighters survived, as did her friend’s crew, who took refuge in their besieged engine, its paint bubbled and blistered in the heat.

Continuation of story on the CalMatters website.

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Trial by Fire, a four-part series from CalMatters, was reported and written by Julie Cart and edited by Marla Cone. Photography and videos were by Ariana Drehsler, Martin do Nascimento, Miguel Gutierrez Jr. and Julie Hotz. Data visualizations and analysis were by Jeremia Kimelman, Erica Yee and John D’Agostino. Illustrations were by Victor Lowe and Julie Hotz. Production by Liliana Michelena.

‍Trial by Fire is shared by NEP Media with permission from CalMatters.‍‍

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