Former Novato Fire Captain Fred Pfeifer asked the
question, "How hot is hot?"
Immediately answering his own question, Pfeifer said:
"When the asphalt melts."
The fire captain was talking about fighting the Inverness
Ridge fire early Wednesday, Oct. 4, 1995 when his crew was assigned
to protect an isolated house just east of Limantour Beach.
Firefighters battling the blaze told tales of searing
heat, towering walls of flames, and seemingly impenetrable smoke. Many
called it the most chaotic and frightening experience of their lives.
Few accounts were as indelible as the one told by
then Inverness volunteer firefighter Scot Patterson. "It was intense,"
Patterson told The Light in 1995. "I've never really experienced
anything of that magnitude."
Midnight inferno
Patterson guided a convoy of fire engines on a slow
and perilous journey west on Limantour Road just after midnight, Oct.
3.
Patterson and three others, Tom Nunes, Bill Hart,
and Tony Giacomini, were assigned to protect the Clem Miller Environmental
Education Center. Driving through a tunnel of fire, they headed west
in Engine 1584, leading a strike team that included two engines from
Corte Madera, one from Novato, one from San Rafael, a county engine,
and a truck driven by then Kentfield Fire Chief John Lando.
A tunnel of fire
As the engines crept down steep and curvy Limantour
Road, never more than 50 yards apart, Patterson noted, flames 40 feet
high on one side and more than 100 feet high on the other arched over
them, generating convection winds estimated at 40 mph.
"It was cooking," Patterson recalled. "Flames
were blowing across the road. Some of the pipes on the side [of the
engine] were charred from the flames going up over the truck. It was
just boiling. The big trees (bishop pines and Douglas firs) were lighting
off. It was just like gasoline on a stick."
'Hurry up'
Engines in the convoy were in constant radio contact,
and Patterson heard an anxious firefighter in a truck behind him urge,
"Hey, it’s getting a little hot. You guys might want to hurry
up a little bit."
Patterson, who grew up in Inverness, was in the back
of the fire engine calling out cues to driver Nunes. "I’d
been down that road hundreds of times, and I knew it well," he
recalled this week.
His familiarity with the route proved critical. "The
road literally disappeared – the smoke and flames were so thick,"
he said. "The road was the only thing that wasn’t burning."
A San Rafael firefighter later said that if it had
been up to him to lead the convoy, he wouldn’t have gone in, Patterson
noted.
As it happened, the wind shifted and the blaze didn’t
reach the environmental educational center until the next afternoon.
By that time, helicopters dropping water, line crews clearing brush,
and bulldozers building fire breaks helped protect the center’s
buildings. All that was lost was a cabin behind the facility.
The wind shift made all the difference, Patterson
said.
"We expected a ‘flash-over,’ flames
going right over us," he recalled. "But the westerlies didn’t
pick back up."
Nonetheless, "it was very intense," Patterson
said. "Something I don’t want to have to go through again
for a long time."
‘Things grow back’
Patterson left the force in 1998 after 12 years of
service when a knee injury prevented him from pursuing a career as a
firefighter.
Now a builder living in San Rafael with his wife,
11-year-old son, and 9-year-old daughter, Patterson is philosophical
when considering the risks firefighters take. "You take your chances
every time you walk out the front door," he said.
The memory of the Oct. 4 drive is hard to shake off,
though, especially when he’s back on Point Reyes. "It’s
always on my mind when I drive down Limantour road," he said. "I’ll
go out with my kids and hike on the beach, and they don’t really
buy it. ‘There was no fire here,’ they say. ‘What are
you talking about. It’s all green.’ Yeah, well, things grow
back."