Lakeside Units Provide Mutual Aid to San Diego County Fire

Deerhorn Valley:

On Monday January 27, 2013 Lakeside units were called to assist with a fire off of Honey Springs Road in the Deerhorn Valley area.  The fire, which was in San Diego County Fire's area, involved a double wide mobile home that was fully involved when the first units arrived on scene.  No interior attack was made, all efforts were focused around an exterior defensive attack.

This area of the county has no plumbed water supply system like we have in Lakeside, the closest fire hydrant was close to 5 miles away.  The lack of plumbed water system makes it very difficult to suppress a structure fire without a great deal of resources.  The amount of water needed to extinguish fully involved structure fire is on the order of thousands of gallons, which is far more than is carried in a first alarm structure fire response.

San Diego County Fire crews work on an exterior fire attack

The water supply issue was resolved by setting up a water point system.  This system involves setting up a portable water tank, which can hold over 2,000 gallons of water, and having fire engines draft water out of that tank while they pump water onto the fire.

WT7251 Offloading it's 2,000 gallons of water into a portable tank

Lakeside Units were called to help with this operation.  Lakeside Water Tender 7251 (a county resource) along with Engine 2 from the River Park Fire Station went to assist with the water point operation and Lakeside Rescue 3 was dispatched to provide incident support.  Once at the scene WT7251 and E2 provided water support for a short time before being released back to the incident.  This incident again shows the high level of mutual aid that exists in the county of San Diego.  Being able to share resources allows fire departments to have less of a need to buy low use highly specialized fire equipment.  This "sharing of resources" proves to be a benefit not just to the citizens of the county but the citizens of Lakeside as well.

Photos and Story by Captain Bernie Molloy.