Dana Cole
One year ago, the Calistoga Fire Department took delivery of Engine 319, a parting gift from a generous Calistoga donor, facilitated by the Napa Valley Community Foundation.
When E-319 went into service last July, it was the newest, most state-of-the-art wildland fire engine in Napa County. It is also the finest fire apparatus in Calistogaâs fire fleet history, a âType 3â heavy-duty 4-wheel-drive truck that carries 500 gallons of water.
The Type 3 is the workhorse fire engine for wildland firefighting. It is designed for mobile attack, pump-and-roll firefighting, able to connect to fire hydrants for continuous flow or to refill on the run. It is the frontline ground attack vehicle for the kind of difficult terrain often encountered on âwildland-urban-interfaceâ fires, which have become the most destructive type of fire in the U.S.
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FOR THE REGISTER
Napa Valley Community Foundationâs Board of Directors has approved nearly $2.2 million in new wildfire grants. The largest grants, up to $2 million in total, will help last yearâs wildfire survivors with continued rebuilding and long-term recovery. Two grants totaling $175,000 were approved for the Napa Communities Firewise Foundation (NCFF). The grants will enable the organization to hire its first paid staff, including its first executive director, at an opportune moment: NCFF is slated to receive and spend at least $35 million over the next five years for county-wide fuel mitigations projects including shaded fire breaks, focus on safe egress and ingress routes, and other projects.
The outbreaks at River Ranch Farmworker Center began in the summer of 2020. Amid the stress and uncertainty the pandemic had already inflicted on the residents of the county-owned facilities, the center was forced into a kind of lockdown, and each of its almost 60 residents were put into quarantine.
Every single resident was quarantined for at least seven days, county officials confirmed. After that, the men were retested, and those who tested negative were released. In line with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), residents who tested positive were quarantined for 14 days.
Each of the three county-owned farmworker housing centers suffered a mass outbreak of the coronavirus, likely because residents there live in âefficiency units,â with two to a room, according to Napa County Staff Services Manager Jen Palmer, who headed the isolation and quarantine sheltering branch of the countyâs Emergency Operations Center.