VIDEO: A crew out of Placerville that operates heavy equipment to help fight the Mosquito Fire was forced to run from the flames.
“Over on CAL FIRE radios, it came up to watch the smoke. And then it was, ‘Hey, get out of there now. Pull your crews now,’” Jeremiah “Bear” Schenck, with On-Site Equipment Inc., said.
The rapid spread of fire on Tuesday put the men in the path of unrelenting flames as they operated heavy equipment, known as the masticator. “Yesterday, when we were down on that dozer line down there, that fire came up so quick, with all of those masticators. The masticators don’t move very fast. So we ended up, actually just leaving the masticators, jumping out and running to the nearest truck and trying to get out of this canyon,” Blake Prall said.