Comment on How Valley Fire ‘wall of flame’ trapped, injured four firefighters

In the early hours of the Valley Fire, four firefighters found themselves surrounded by spot fires on top of Cobb Mountain and were forced to deploy fire shelters as crews in the air and on the ground struggled to get aid to the trapped men, all of whom were badly burned. In the first official account of how the four firefighters were injured in the early hours of the 76,000-acre blaze, which killed four people and destroyed nearly 2,000 structures, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, laid bare the details of how a four-man helicopter crew came to be cornered by a “wall of fire,” and ultimately how they came to be rescued. The internal report, called a green sheet and first published on the blog wildfiretoday.com, describes how the crew was flown in and dropped off in a clearing near where the fire started off High Valley Road in Kelseyville around 1:30 on Sept.