Giomi on Waterfall Fire: Carson is resilient

Many technical challenges faced firefighters battling the Waterfall Fire in Carson City two decades ago, but what Carson City Supervisor and former Fire Chief Stacey Giomi remembered in a recent interview were the personal challenges of consoling friends and neighbors in the fire’s aftermath.

The Waterfall Fire burned more than 8,000 acres and destroyed 18 homes on the west side of the capital city. It took 2,000 firefighters and nearly a week to contain. Giomi, then acting fire chief of the city, remembered helping friends comb through the rubble of their homes, searching for “pieces they could save.”

“Even broken pieces of china they’d save to turn into something. Handed-down china. Kids’ toys,” he said. “There’s a lot more of a humanistic standpoint to it than people realize. Above and beyond the technical job, you have a responsibility to the community, and you can’t take it lightly.”

Regarding those homes lost to the blaze, Giomi, who lives on the west side, described the awful feeling of “when you have given everything you have, and it’s not enough.”

The possibilities of any event are hard to discern in retrospect. What would have happened had firefighters not responded as aggressively? The Waterfall Fire claimed structures and vehicles, but no lives were lost, and firefighters suffered only minor injuries during a burnover in Kings Canyon.

“It is a miracle that more people were not injured or even killed,” Giomi said.

Giomi was assistant chief and became acting chief at the time of the fire because the official chief was on vacation. Giomi would later serve as chief for a decade before becoming a supervisor, but he’d gotten his start as a volunteer firefighter in 1979 and was hired as a dispatcher in 1983. As someone who had worked his way up the ranks, he understood the summer of 2004 created the perfect conditions for a conflagration. Drought, winds, fuels. The call came in just before three in the morning on July 14. A wayward campfire had become a noticeable glow in a steep area near the waterfall in Kings Canyon.

“My most vivid memory is the whole incident that led to the burnover, that flare up that happened on the first day about eight to nine hours into the fire,” Giomi said. “I can distinctly remember calling a relative as I was coming out of the canyon, and I said, ‘You need to get to the house and get stuff out right now.’”

Giomi said that first day, injuries were reported among a hand crew working near an outcrop where rocks had come loose. Resources, including air resources, were redirected to protect the crew and rescue efforts, he said. Unfortunately, it was around the same time winds increased and the fire started spotting on the other side of Kings Canyon Road.

“My first thought was things may not go the way we want them to go,” he said. “It’s a pretty hopeless feeling when a fire blows up like that. There’s really nothing you can do but get out of its way… There was a lot of heroic firefighting that happened up in that canyon that afternoon and the subsequent afternoon when we lost houses again.”

Evacuations were ordered as the fire spread south over C-Hill and north toward Ash Canyon. Each neighborhood posed its own challenges for emergency crews, Giomi recalled. He said it was like a nightmare.

“It’s impossible for someone who hasn’t gone through it to understand the devastation those homeowners went through,” he said. “A lot of them were my friends – years-long friends of the family… Yeah, to this day, I think about that fire. I live up there. I still look at the hills and can still remember those days and the regret that we couldn’t stop the fire and protect all those homes so they wouldn’t burn down.”

Giomi credited Steve Mihelic, his predecessor, for saving homes in the Ash Canyon area by implementing a defensible space program the season before the Waterfall Fire. The defensible space and fuels reduction programs have since grown into cornerstones of preventative work in CCFD, encompassing the whole wildland urban interface. And when Giomi took the reins of the department, he also made it his mission to work better with other agencies.

“One of the things I made a priority as fire chief was for us to do things on a regional basis as much as possible,” he said.

That meant regional training academies, so firefighters from different organizations could trust each other during a major incident. It also meant departments within the city being unified, from the Carson City Sheriff’s Office to the Public Works Department. Additionally, Giomi spent five years as president of the Nevada Fire Chiefs Association because he believed in sharing resources and “collaboration across jurisdictional boundaries.”

Although events like the Waterfall Fire are overwhelming, a community can be resilient in the face of them, Giomi emphasized. It’s something that Carson City has proved, he said.

“At the end of the day, that’s the bright spot for me,” he said. “We have great community members, folks that really care about their friends and neighbors and literally have done and will do anything for them.”