Angels in turnouts: What strike team out of Turlock did for Ferguson fire evacuee

Four “fireman angels” from Turlock landed at Brenda Marks White’s doorstep in the Mariposa Pines community Thursday morning.

After her home was without power for 10 days, the newly returned Ferguson fire evacuee faced, just to start with, a fridge full of rotting food. She had no idea where to begin.

And when she opened the door to the Strike Team 4803A in their turnouts, White asked, “I have to leave again?”

No ma’am, she was told. Capt. Shaun Walker, engineer Cameron Kaiser and firefighters Steven Kramer and Corey Thibault, members of the Turlock Fire Department deployed with the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, were there to help with whatever she needed.

So they dove right in and did. As the men toiled, White offered them bottled water, which they politely declined because they brought plenty with them.

She was a bit disappointed they didn’t take her up on the water, because she’d have felt she’d repaid their kindness in a small way, she said in a phone interview Friday.

So instead, she repaid them with her words. White posted an account of the firefighters’ visit on her Facebook page Thursday afternoon.

She wrote that a firefighter asked, “Do you have a lawn mower? Your lawn needs mowing and we want to do it!”

So while one of the guys did that, others emptied and cleaned her freezer. As they carried the freezer back into her house, they had to step over water in the hallway.

“I had a ice chest that was leaking water inside the front hallway,” White wrote. “Well, I’m sure you can guess he took everything out, transferring it to a good freezer next to it!

“I also had a lot of pieces to the inside of the refrigerator freezer propped up in the hall drying from being cleaned. ‘Ma’am, can I put these pieces back in the freezer for you?’ ... And before I knew it he had put everything back in and screwed down all the pieces taken out to get yuk stuff cleaned up.”

White, 61, is disabled and without much strength in her hands and arms, she said. Never in her life have people gone out of their way to help her as the Turlock firefighters did. “Maybe they do know, maybe they don’t, how much it meant for them to step in,” she said. “I’ve got no family here, no one with me, and I was looking at the mess and thinking, ‘What do I do?’”

The members of the strike team that helped White could not be reached Friday, as they were still working to repopulate the areas where the Ferguson fire evacuation orders have been lifted, Turlock Fire Department spokesman Capt. Kevin Tidwell said. By Friday morning, the fire had grown to 45,911 acres and was 29 percent contained.

The men found White in need “and took it upon themselves to do those extra deeds,” he said. “That is the mission of Turlock Fire and Cal OES — to see the incidents all the way through from fire suppression to helping residents move back into their homes.”

Even if they were just doing their job, White said, their actions meant so much to her.

She realized after the men had left to help her neighbors that she hadn’t taken any photos of them. So she jumped in her car and caught up with them at another home to snap a picture. As it turned out, the firefighters had photographed their work at her home, so they shared shots with her, which she included in her Facebook post.

She wrote her account, she said, because “I want their kids — for those who have them — to see what their daddy does in the way of helping people.”

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This story was originally published July 27, 2018 at 2:05 PM.