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SANTA CRUZ – With summer just weeks away, Santa Cruz County fire departments are wasting no time when it comes to preparing crews for the fire season ahead.

Crewmembers from all four county fire departments gathered in the hills of Soquel on Friday to participate in an annual refresher training course. The course aims to ensure that crews are familiar with common procedures, practices and collaborative efforts so that if and when a fire incident occurs, they are ready to move and engage seamlessly.

“Fire season is definitely starting to ramp up,” said Matt Stoddard, a fire engineer with the Watsonville Fire Department and one of the primary training facilitators. “The training helps us become familiar with each other’s equipment and we get to know each other personally so that every time we go out, it’s not the first time we’ve seen one another. We train almost as one department.”

Stoddard said nearly 200 participants will cycle through the program including members of the Watsonville, Central, Santa Cruz and Scotts Valley fire departments. Each session lasts two to three hours and they have been ongoing for the past two weeks.

Each county fire department has several stations within it, but Stoddard said interdepartmental collaboration is common these days in an era where fire conditions have intensified, in part, because of extreme drought. He said he used to think Santa Cruz was immune to large wildland fires because of the thick wall of redwoods surrounding it, but that has all changed.

“The CZU Complex Fire demonstrated that’s just not accurate anymore,” he said. “We’re not immune to those big fires.”

The trainings simulate the tasks and procedures required of firefighters in general, but especially “strike teams,” which are collaborative by nature. A strike team consists of five engines from departments across the county – one from Watsonville, two from Central, one from Santa Cruz and one from Scotts Valley. Friday’s training was geared toward type three strike team engines, which deal primarily in vegetation fires, according to Stoddard.

Through a series of carefully designed fire events and activities, crews practiced refilling their fire engines from creek water, off-road driving, progressive hose laying and radio communication during a simulated firefighter injury.

Stoddard said the remote creek refilling practice proved particularly useful during the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Fire, when one operation pumped water from a creek in North County for approximately 10 hours while battling the blaze. He said pumps can refill a tank at a rate anywhere from 50 to 200 gallons per minute. Type three tanks have a 500-gallon capacity.

“This is very real world for what we encounter,” Stoddard said. “We prepare for the worst and hope for the best, but there’s not really a best these days.”

Progressive hose line laying was another key training component. It is frequently used to attack wildfires in heavy vegetation zones and other areas not directly accessible by fire engines. Stoddard said that one of the qualifiers for complete containment of a fire is for the perimeter to be surrounded with water hose line. For some of the larger fires, crews can lay as much as 10,000 feet of water hosing in a day, according to Stoddard.

But for Stoddard, the training wasn’t just an opportunity for crews to refill their tanks; it was also a signal to the public that their efforts are desperately needed in reducing fire risk.

“Homeowners should take that responsibility to make sure they have their defensible perimeter of 30 to 100 feet around their house,” he said. “It at least gives us a chance to stand our ground, if the homeowner has done the work.”

He recommends community members review Cal Fire’s “Read, Set, Go” fire preparedness guide, as a resource for how to prepare and react if and when a fire incident occurs.For information, visit readyforwildfire.org.

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