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flew into parched grass. The fire
quickly spread.
Incident Commander Tom Lubas,
a 23-year veteran of Cal Fire, and
his colleagues set up a command
centre, called in more firefighters
and carved containment lines. But
then the fire exploded from 1,820
hectares to 11,600.
Just after noon, Lubas handed off
his incident commander role and
left base camp at the Shasta County
fairgrounds in Redding. Though he
had worked in the morning, it was
supposed to be his day off, and now
he planned to shower and rest. From
his truck window, Lubas watched
as a 9,000-metre-tall convection
column—a plume filled with ash,
debris and hydrocarbons—bal-
looned into the sky, sucking up the
hot air as oxygen fed the fire.
As he drove, his truck registered
the temperature outside: 45 C. On
the coast, 241 kilometres to the west, it
was 15 C. As the cool coastal air blew
over Bully Choop Mountain and into
the Sacramento Valley, the temperature
difference caused warm air to shoot up
in a vortex. As day turned to dusk, the
convection column would rotate faster
and faster, contorting into a cyclone.
Sometime after 5:30 p.m., as Lubas
finished grocery shopping, the sky grew
dark. The fire’s behaviour alarmed
him, so he went back to work, driving
to the hills northwest of Redding to
assist in evacuating residents. But anhour later, he stopped. He was blocked.
Ahead of him, the tornado twisted.
It was sinister and snakelike, a swirl of
orange that seemed to fill the entire sky.
Flames soared 120 metres in the air. It
wouldn’t touch down for another hour,
but it was rapidly gaining strength. The
tornado would grow to 300 metres wide,
the size of three football fields, and
produce temperatures almost double
those of a typical wildfire. Its howling
obliterated every other sound.
Tom Lubas was in shock. Nobody is
going to believe this, he thought.Incident
Commander
Tom Lubas led
the battle
against the
wildfire.rd.ca 41