Colleagues praise Stockton Battalion Chief Kim Olson

STOCKTON - This is what Stockton Fire Department Battalion Chief Kim Olson does.

On July 26, Daniel Packer, a 49-year-old firefighter from Washington state, was killed while surveying a lightning-sparked wildfire in the Klamath National Forest.

Packer, the chief of East Pierce Fire and Rescue in Bonney Lake, Wash., was caught when the Panther Fire made a sudden run toward him and two other firefighters. Packer was born and raised in Montana and was a bull rider on the rodeo circuit before he was a firefighter. He died in his shelter, deployed on a ridge about 15 miles south of a place called Happy Camp. He was 49 years old.

The other firefighters at the Klamath wanted to recover him, but the intensity of the fire made that impossible.

“They had pulled all the crews off the fire, because the fire was just nuking,” Olson said. “It was just burning everything in sight.”

The next morning, Olson, who was working another fire in Siskiyou County, went to his boss, Mike Dietrich, and volunteered to retrieve the fallen firefighter.

Olson and Safety Officer Jim Walker took three engines and a team of timber fellers into the Klamath. They drove 21/2 hours from base camp to a place called Drop Point 16. The fire roared all around them but couldn’t be seen through the smoke.

So Olson and Walker decided to go on alone, on foot. After about an hour’s hike, they found pieces of Packer’s gear, which he had shed as he fled the fire, and then his body, inside the remnants of his shelter. The fire around them began to surge again.

“You could hear it and feel it,” Olson said.

From the sky above, an air attack supervisor warned Olson that he and Walker were nearly surrounded by flames. Concerned that the fire’s movement would close off his escape route, Olson called in a helicopter to make targeted water drops but eventually was told it couldn’t hold off the fire’s advance.

“OK, see you tomorrow,” Olson replied, settling in for an overnight stay inside a 250-acre wildfire.

But a reprieve came in the late afternoon, when the fire broke long enough for Olson and Walker to be retrieved, along with Packer’s body.

Olson said he was just doing what he had to do.

“We don’t leave firefighters,” he said. “We don’t leave anybody behind.”

As a division supervisor with California Incident Management Team 5, Olson spent almost the entire summer battling wildfires around the state. The team is one of 17 in the nation that is called to respond to the worst disasters. Before the Panther and Siskiyou fires, Olson was in the Carmel Valley fighting the Basin Complex Fire, which burned more than 162,000 acres and 26 homes before it was contained.

It’s a job he has been doing, in addition to his regular duties in Stockton, for the past three years.

That experience, coupled with an adult lifetime spent fighting fires, has granted Olson expertise in an unusually broad range of firefighting.

“He’s got vast experience in wildland fires and emergency management,” Stockton Fire Chief Ron Hittle said. “He’s the first guy you put at the top of the list.”

Olson, 51, has been a firefighter since he was 18, when he joined the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. He joined the Stockton Fire Department on Aug. 4, 1980, and has spent his entire career on the fire ground.

Over the course of that career, the walrus-mustached veteran has earned a reputation for invincible composure in the firehouse and in the flames, many of his colleagues said.

“He’s quiet, reserved; he speaks up when he needs to speak up,” Hittle said. ” And he’s extremely calm on a fire.”

When Hittle was a newly minted captain, Olson often reminded him to keep his composure.

“Slow down. You didn’t start it,” Hittle remembers Olson telling him.

Capt. David Macedo said Olson’s cool is appreciated through the ranks. It’s a virtue in a leader of firefighters, he said.

“If he’s amped up or spinning around in circles, your crews are going to get that way,” Macedo said.

Dietrich, chief of the San Bernardino National Forest’s Fire and Aviation Management, said every fire has four fronts: operational, political, fiscal and public. A good team is well-rounded. Olson’s expertise is in operations - choosing tactics, placing firefighters and equipment - and Dietrich can count on him to do the job right without oversight.

“I rely on my field generals, if you will, to make good decisions,” he said.

Experience is vitally important in fighting wildland fires. If a structure fire is a mystery, a box to be opened, then a wildland fire is a book. Every year, wildfires break out in the same places. Too strong to fight directly, they have to be contained and allowed to burn out. To do that, a firefighter has to know the terrain, how the fire moves and what has worked before, Dietrich said.

“In the last few years, that has been the nature of (wildland) firefighting - looking at the fires of the past,” he said.

Olson, who with Incident Team 5 has led firefighters twice in the Los Padres and Klamath national forests, is invaluable, Dietrich said. It would take 10 to 15 years to train a replacement.

“If we were to go on the fast track,” he qualified. “You can train fighter pilots faster than division supervisors.”

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