California Team 7 has been sent to eastern Washington state, where wildfires have destroyed hundreds of buildings and forced thousands of people to evacuate over the weekend.<\/p>\n
The specialized emergency response unit is made up of local, state and federal personnel, and a deputy chief with the Santa Monica Fire Department is one of the incident commanders part of the team.<\/p>\n
As of Sunday evening, the three fires \u2014 now known as the “Spokane Complex Fire” \u2014 have burned more than 5,000 acres, with 0% containment, according to a federal incident management team. Officials say at least 600 buildings have been destroyed.<\/p>\n
The mayor of the city of Spokane, Washington, said the wind could make the firefight more difficult.<\/p>\n
Two of the federal interagency incident management teams helping are based in California: Team 4 and 7. The Los Angeles County Fire Department said it also has crews on standby.<\/p>\n
“They train year-round for this,” LA County Fire spokesperson Pauline McGee said. “They’re familiar with steep terrains, weather conditions, you know, whatever comes their way. We’re trained for any given situation.”<\/p>\n
McGee said the department’s response includes its urban search and rescue team USA-2, which recently returned home after a deployment to Venezuela following the powerful back-to-back earthquakes in June.<\/p>\n
“Our team is equipped with going through various situations to ensure that they help assist by suppressing those fires, wherever they are called to go,” McGee said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"California Team 7 has been sent to eastern Washington state, where wildfires have destroyed hundreds of buildings and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":422259,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,6305],"class_list":["post-422258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-washington-state"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=422258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422258\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/422259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=422258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=422258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=422258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}