Justin Harrison, a 23-year-old Engineer with the Vacaville Fire Protection District showed up for work on January 8, 2024 looking forward to a normal day of work. Hours later, he was driving south to help put out one of the largest wildfire clusters in California history.
When Harrison was asked to go south, he said, the answer was easy.
“I jumped on it because I was on work that day and they were like ‘Hey, who wants to go?’” he said. “And I was like ‘Absolutely, I’ll go down there as long as you guys need me.”
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Harrison spent 16 days fighting the Eaton Fire in an Office of Emergency Services Water Tender alongside Stephen Mesnickow, a Suisun Fire Protection District employee. Leaving just one day after the Eaton and Palisades Fires broke out, Harrison said that the long journey had an abrupt beginning, but was a rewarding experience.
Why so gung-ho to drive more than halfway across the state to help people he didn’t know? Harrison said that’s simply part of the job.
“It’s our job to help you on the worst day of your life,” he said.
The Vacaville Fire Protection District serves unincorporated Solano County in the area surrounding the city. The Vacaville Fire Department was requested to send resources to the fires, but could not due to a staffing shortage of 21 people with 15 open positions.
After a quick stop home to pack some of his personal supplies, Harrison said he and Mesnickow drove straight to the Base Camp at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. The Solano pair spent most of the time canvassing communities to look for hot spots and turning off water and gas connections around houses that had been saved.
Harrison said they worked 24 hours on and 24 hours off with a strike team of departments from Northern California. A full-time VFPD employee, he said, his wages were covered by the district and will be reimbursed by the state in the future.
“It was really enlightening,” he said of working with other departments from across the state and the nation. “Everyone in the fire service is like a brotherhood or sisterhood and it’s nice having people from all over the area.”
The community’s response to the tragedy was overwhelmingly impressive, Harrison said, and he appreciated their support of the fire crews and their neighbors.
“The community of Altadena was so welcoming and so becoming and they were helping each other out,” Harrison said.
Harrison said the firefighters were put up in hotels for the first couple of nights, then were shifted into sleeping structures. Running into residents of the area was impactful, he said.
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“They just always were so thankful for what we were doing but it was hard knowing what they had gone through,” he said.
Knowing that the LNU fire was so impactful on his hometown, Harrison said, he knows it can be a long road to rebuild.
“All these 7,000 houses that burned in Altadena,” he said. “That’s going to be a community that is going to need a lot of rebuilding.”
The fire response was enormous, Harrison said, and it was educational to see how much work goes into organizing, feeding and commanding a firefighting force of that size. He also said he learned problem-solving skills with their equipment from the other departments on the task force.
“When you love what you do, it’s not really work for you, it’s just something you enjoy doing,” he said. “Yeah, it might be a little tiring, but at the end of the day I’m the one who chose to do this, I’m the guy who wanted to do it.”
Getting to help other people keeps Harrison going, he said, even through long shifts or a trip like this.
“I don’t want to be the type of person who runs away when there is someone in danger, I want to be the one who helps you,” he said.
Still, after the adrenaline wore off and the trip was done, Harrison said he was pretty beat.
“I definitely slept for a couple of days when I got back,” he joked.
Harrison said he started as a volunteer with the district at 19 and has never looked back. Volunteer staffing made it possible for Harrison to go help in Southern California, he said, and he is thankful for the volunteers’ support of the department.
“This district has been volunteer-run pretty much since its beginning,” he said.
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David Kuntz, Acting Fire Chief, said the district had an hour to decide whether or not to send Harrison when the call for help came in. Kuntz said that the department has responded to nine OES requests in the last year.
Jason Keune, Battalion Chief, said the OES tanker that Harrison was on is a vehicle owned by the state, which the department can use on its incidents if they commit to staffing it when it is needed by the state. Both the city and the district have OES units, Keune said, which have a trademark lime green color.
Volunteer staffing has changed through the years, Kuntz said, but now they have paid staff from 7 a.m. until 5 p.m. and use volunteers to cover the other hours. The volunteers receive a stipend to compensate them for the use of their resources.
“Due to budget concerns, there is no way we can afford to have three people at night, all night,” Keune said, “so we rely heavily on those volunteers to pick up those shifts.”
Volunteers are often young people interested in a career in the industry, Kuntz explained, and many of them go on to work full-time with the department or other area departments. The volunteer hours help the district but also allow the young people too.
Financially, Kuntz said, the special district is limited in funds by the number of people living in the district, as they are funded by taxpayer dollars. However, the organization is in strong financial shape and has either paid or volunteer staff coverage all 24 hours of the day.
“Every year except one out of the last seven we have actually put money into our savings,” he said.