DAVIS, Calif. — Misinformation about the Southern California wildfires is spreading rapidly, and the Cal Fire Davis Equipment Facility lot is getting national attention on social media over what inspections happened there before crews were sent to the Los Angeles County fires.
Every single Cal Fire vehicle starts at the Mobile Equipment Facility in Davis before being sent to its department to be in service. Cal Fire owns and operates more than 3,000 vehicles, everything from bulldozers, fire engines and snow mobiles.
Staff is responsible for design, acquisition, maintenance, major repairs, replacement and disposal of all Cal Fire-owned vehicles They make sure the vehicles going into dangerous situations are safe and not in need of repair.
But last week their workload grew as fire departments from Idaho, Washington and Oregon made their way to the Southern California wildfires. Darren Law, the senior forestry equipment manager, says they did a "premobilization inspection."
“It’s a DOT (Department of Transportation) inspection, a safety inspection. They would pass or fail. If anything failed, we would set them aside and a different team would start on repairs could be brakes, tires, leaks,” Law said.
Law said they inspected 216 assets; 29 needed some sort of repair. Cal Fire said the average inspection time was 45 minutes.
The most common repairs were new tires and oil leaks. Law said they came across trucks traveling on 20-year-old tires, or needing a gallon of oil every...
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