Fire scenario: From barbeque to blackened village

Editor's note: The following is a fictionalized account of what a major fire in the Incline Village might look like, the damage it could cause, and the fire suppression measures that would be used to fight it.

It was a warm, breezy Saturday afternoon the day before July 4 and the Nielsons had just returned home from a morning of boating off the East Shore.

George Nielson was teaching his 7-year-old granddaughter, Katy, how to waterski but at around 1 o'clock, the water started to get rough and the trio headed home for lunch.

Katy was visiting Incline Village for Fourth of July weekend from the Bay Area with her parents and baby brother, who were all enjoying the afternoon sun and the smell of the pine trees when she and her grandparents returned home to the large, two-story house on lower Tyner Way.

The family fired up the barbecue on the back-yard porch, and despite the afternoon breeze which caused the pages in their books to flap wildly, the adults relaxed by a picnic table and read while Katy chased her little brother Jake through the tall, prickly grasses and around the Huckleberry Oak in the yard.

Giggling and running for safety from his sister's tickling hands, Jake ducked under a small table on the porch. As the toddler climbed out from his hiding spot and stood up to take off again, he lost his balance and knocked into the flaming grill. Flailing his arms, he fell backwards onto the grass, and within inches from his tiny body, the barbecue fell too.

Before he knew it, Jake's mother scooped him up, away from danger, but the dry grasses and dead branches had already begun to catch fire from the white-hot charcoal strewn about the yard.

Mr. Nielson ran to grab a hose from the front yard.

"It's too late," his wife yelled as she watched the dry pine needles and brush that surrounded their home and blanketed their yard go up in flames. Dead pine needles on the roof exploded like miniature fire crackers and started to ignite the wooden shingles.

"Call 911!" Mrs. Nielson screamed.

The fire had started to climb into the trees, using the dead branches like a ladder to climb higher and higher. Sparks jumped to neighboring roofs. Eight minutes had passed and Katy's mother gathered her children into a huddle on the street out front. They watched in disbelief as the house they'd spent many a happy summer vacation went up in flames.

Katy's father called 911 from the kitchen while he watched the fire spread over the backyard like a wave washing up on shore.

"Incline, 911. Where is your emergency?"

"Yes, uh, I'm calling from 686 Tyner Way, and, uh, my son knocked over a barbecue and we started a pretty big fire. It's spreading really fast. You better come quick."

Twelve minutes. It was a race against time.

Main station 11, Mount Rose station 13 and Crystal Bay station 12 were all alerted.

"We have a wildland fire at 686 Tyner Way," said the battalion chief as he sent two brush engines, two structure engines and a hand crew of 20 to the site. "It's now a half-acre in size, and it's spreading fast."

It had been 20 minutes and the fire had seeped into the backyards of Toni Court. With winds from the south at 8 mph and the subdivision at about a 30 percent slope, the fire was spreading at 6 acres an hour.

The battalion chief knew that in a few hours the fire could wipe out the whole subdivision all the way through upper Tyner.

He notified Placer dispatch to send every available Type 1 and Type 3 engine available under the Lake Tahoe Basin Mutual Aid Agreement.

The chief notified all off-duty chiefs, fire personnel and the Camino and Minden dispatch centers. Camino dispatches for the Forest Service in the basin, and Minden dispatches for the Nevada Division of Forestry and its airtanker base.

"We need to get the ball rolling on air," the chief said.

He worked to set up a unified command between agencies to share responsibilities and coordinate with the forest service and state on the operation.

Fire crews from stations 11 and 13, first on the scene, rushed to fight the fire.

As the Nielsons' house slowly became engulfed in flames, embers bounced off the Randals' metal roof next door. Flames fell into their yard but with all the brush clearing and pine-needle raking the Randals had done, the fire skipped their house and headed up the hill.

Coughing and choking, the Nielsons piled into their mini-van and raced down Tyner Way before the smoke became too thick to navigate to safety.

Twelve homes were threatened in the first 20 minutes, and while fire crews worked diligently, the Nielsons' home and a vacant house on Toni Court were destroyed. Ten homes were saved.

Air support was in the vicinity. Air tankers and helicopters coordinated with the lead air tanker supervisor to protect structures and pinch the fire off before it grew any larger.

The mid-afternoon sun beat down and the wind carried flames up the subdivision slope. In just 40 minutes from the barbecue toppling over, the fire had crossed the bend of Tyner and progressed even with Valerie Court. Homes with wood-shake roofs cluttered with dead pine needles were catching fire fast.

Twenty-seven homes were threatened now.

Mrs. Allison on Tracy Court cursed her neighbor while she watered down her property with a garden hose.

After spending $5,000 of her savings last year on a class-A metal roof, her neighbors, the Bracketts, hadn't practiced defensible space methods. Their yard was littered with dead brush, and trees with decaying branches dropped dead pine needles on their wood-shingled roof.

The Bracketts rushed to stuff belongings in their Buick while Mrs. Allison threatened them with a lawsuit if her home burned down because of their carelessness.

Forty minutes later, 27 homes were threatened - 23 were saved, and four were lost.

Residents sped down Tyner way through the thick, black smoke. Drivers could see only 10 feet ahead as they dodged fire trucks and ambulances racing up the street. There was only one way in and out of the subdivision. A car and an SUV collided and rolled into a ditch. They disappeared in the cloud of gray smoke.

At the one-hour mark, the fire was well within Douglas and Cynthia courts and eating its way through the lower portion of Dorcey Drive. Forty-six homes were threatened.

The sheriff was working to evacuate people quickly. He activated an Emergency Evacuation Operation Center, a local disaster coordination team involving a local support team, the Sheriff's department, fire department, Incline Village General Improvement District, Sierra Pacific Power, Nevada Department of Roads and Washoe County Roads.

In the last hour, five homes were lost, but 41 were saved.

The fire was moving through the whole upper Tyner subdivision. In the second hour, it was spreading four times as fast as it was the hour before. It was racing at 24 acres per hour.

Sirens were blaring throughout Incline as trucks raced from neighboring basin fire departments to help out. Black soot fell from the sky.

Two hours, 125 homes affected. The fire had run through the entire upper Tyner and Dorcey subdivisions.

Three hours and 40 minutes after the fire's inception, fire crews had the blaze contained - but not before it wiped out $7 million worth of homes. The fire was kept in the Tyner and Dorcey subdivisions and didn't run rampant in the wilderness, but it did have a tremendous impact on the community.

Incline Village not only lost millions of dollars in homes, it had to spend several million more dollars to re-seed the charred ground and perform erosion control measures.

With the cost of homes skyrocketing, the Nielsons could not afford to build again in Incline Village. Their children and grandchildren would not spend their summers at the lake anymore, but they did have fond memories of years past and what Incline used to look like before the July 2004 fire.

North Lake Tahoe Fire Protection District Battalion Chief Greg McKay identified this as only one of the worst-case fire scenarios possible in Incline Village.