Mark Whaling and a crew raced up and down a hill in a tanker truck as they battled a wildfire in Los Angeles County, scrambling to get water from a street hydrant in time to stay ahead of flames moving up a ridge. A helicopter flew in to drop water, but it had to fly a long distance to refill — and a fire that might have been stopped went on to destroy homes.
As they fought that early 2000s blaze, Whaling says, he spotted a sealed, million-gallon water tank nearby that firefighters had no way of accessing. He thought that was ridiculous.
