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| Inmate firefighters lauded for battling south state fires |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 04/19/2004 |
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More than 2,750 inmate firefighters helped save homes and lives during last fall's record Southern California wildfires, working more than 1.7 million hours and saving the state several million dollars, according to figures released last Monday. More than half of the state's 3,800 full-time wildland firefighters are Department of Corrections and California Youth Authority inmates earning $1 an hour as they work off sentences for nonviolent crimes such as theft and drug possession. A resolution by Assemblyman Mark Leno, a Democrat from San Francisco who chairs the Public Safety Committee, says the firefighters and their supervisors at the corrections and Forestry and Fire Protection departments worked "under the most difficult and dangerous conditions," performing duties "that were truly beyond the call of duty." Two orange-clad inmates were singled out as examples: Kimberly Willard of the Rainbow Conservation Camp at Fallbrook, who led her team to safety as a fire threatened to overtake them; and Kenneth Zitter of the Pilot Rock Conservation Camp at Crestline, for leading a crew credited with stopping a blaze. "We save million-dollar homes for a dollar an hour," an inmate told Associated Press in November after inmates trained in wildland firefighting found themselves fighting fires house to house in San Bernardino County. The crews are neither trained nor equipped to fight house fires, but the 28-inmate strike team happened to be one of the first to arrive and fought the wind-whipped blazes with borrowed garden hoses and chain saws. Burglars and thieves risked their lives to rescue prized possessions from doomed homes. |
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