This Rancho Cucamonga woman and her dog searched the ruins of the Camp Fire for remains
Sharon Gattas spent Thanksgiving this year among the ruins of the largest fire in modern California history, the Camp Fire that leveled the Northern California town of Paradise.
“I am not a firefighter, I don’t run towards fire,” the Rancho Cucamonga woman said. “My husband did that; he’s nuts.”
What she can do, however, is train dogs to help in times of disaster.
“The dogs we choose to do this are the dogs that most people throw away,” Gattas said. “They are terrible pets. They chew up your sprinkler wires, they dig holes in the lawn, they jump over fences, they bark all the time. They are terrible pets.” But these high-energy, intense dogs make great search and rescue dogs.
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Gattas normally spends her days managing the radiology department at San Antonio Regional Hospital in Upland. But when disaster strikes, Gattas and one or both of her dogs head out to find people trapped in the debris of earthquakes or in the aftermath of a wildfire.
“It is very much a commitment you make for service,” she said. “You want to help in times that very few people can help.”
Gattas has been a U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s FEMA Urban Search and Rescue team member since 1995 and has been doing search and rescue work since 1998.
She and her dogs searched the ruins left behind by the April 1995 terrorist bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, looking for survivors or bodies. Since then, they have participated in searches in Atlanta after the 1996 Olympics bombing, in New York following the 2001 terrorist attack at the World Trade Center, in communities hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, in the Santa Barbara County foothills following the Montecito Fire in 2017 and more.
On Nov. 17, Gattas and the 35 other volunteers in FEMA’s California Task Force No. 6, based in Riverside, were deployed to the site of the Camp Fire. They spent eight days based in camps in Oroville and the Silver Dollar Fairgrounds in Chico. She and her fellow dog handlers searched the devastation left behind by the Camp Fire.
This time, Gattas brought only Tosca, her Belgian Malinois, one of 50 FEMA certified Human Remains Detection dogs nationwide. (Gattas’ other Malinois, Night, is trained to find survivors, and stayed home.) At least 85 people died in the Camp Fire in November.
“We know, going in, we know everybody’s dead,” Gattas said. By the time her team arrived, it had been eight days since the Camp Fire had started.
“For the first responders that are there for the first 24, 48 hours it’s much, much more difficult for them,” she said, “because they are finding the bodies, the whole things.”
Gattas and her teammates were more likely to come across bones and little more in the ruins of the homes, housing developments and mobile home parks in and around the once-wooded region of Paradise.
“The last thing you want is for someone to come back in and find Grandma,” she said. “That’s never going to be good.”
Even after decades of experience doing search and rescue, the Camp Fire was devastation on an unreal scale, Gattas said.
“There are people they’re never going to recover from that fire,” she added. “The fire was never put out. There was never suppression on this fire. So it came through and it burned, and burned until it burned itself out. And there was a lot of fuel. So it burned hotter and longer than is imaginable.”
Normally, the main street of a town like Paradise would have served as a fire break, with brick and stone and asphalt preventing the fire from spreading. But the Camp Fire burned hot and long enough to burn down even brick buildings.
“Most places, there were one or two house. In a few places, there was four or five. But there was never more than that. And a hundred were gone. And the businesses were gone.”
The Camp Fire’s devastation was so severe that it made the happy moments awful. A family whose home had survived gave Gattas’ team information about who lived in their neighborhood and which houses and vehicles they should be searching.
“We were searching across the street and we were watching them, and they were playing radio and dancing,” Gattas said, choking up. “And they were trying to move on. And they had a home and they were the only ones. So, for them, they’re going to have to come back, and they’re going to know that their neighbors didn’t make it. A lot of their neighbors didn’t make it.”
And for the survivors, the tragedy of the Camp Fire will continue.
“Those people have to go back. So many of those people have to go back. And that’s going to be hard for them to live with. We can go back and debrief and have our little moments, but they have to go back and live there.”