2003 Cedar Fire
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And let us not forget the unfortunate
Steven Liss Rucker
Department: Novato
Deceased: October 29, 2003
On October 29, 2003, Engineer Steven Rucker was serving as a Novato Fire District crewmember called to the Cedar Fire in San Diego County, when his crew was overrun by fire. Engineer Rucker, an 11-year veteran of the Novato Fire Protection District was 38 years old. His was the only firefighter line-of-duty death in the tragic fires that ravaged Southern California in fall 2003
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Who knew that afternoon at first report? We all.learned alot
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I was on that fire in a last resort LG B/A type strike team. Officially a B. We were not on the ST list but called as kind of a last resort group of resources.
We were dispatched to the fire from NEU in the afternoon but then diverted to something up north by Paradise that was contained about the time we got there. We hurry up and waited for a couple hours by Oroville ECC and then headed down to the fire. Got down the Grapevine in a traffic jam around 6am in time to see a whole brush mountainside off in the distance go up in a sheet of flame north of LA there, but nobody cared, it was unpopulated rock land.
We continued to a very empty fire camp (airport) and were told the IA resources were still on the fire and we were the next shift. We were out there in a smoking wasteland for a long time with just our little ST, not much of anybody else around for what seemed a very long time.
We got the news about Mr. Rucker when in base camp off shift. One of my mentors from years before, “Lucky” Borenstein who was quite a character, had described the somber, quiet mood that fell over the camp of the South Canyon fire when that event happened.
Well nothing like that happened on the Cedar fire, it was mostly a sea of newly come engine guys in our part of the camp by the time this happened, and they were still just walking around laughing and joking as if nothing had happened.
Just my recollections of that time.
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Along those lines, I thought I should add that the Mission Center Solutions Southern California Firestorm report is probably the best lessons learned report I ever came across.
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I was assigned as the L-2881 rep. to the formal Incident Review Team. 10 months getting the final report together. Complicated incident. RIP Steven Rucker.
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