When fire surrounded their home near Chelan last month, Avé and Drew Dover packed their cars to evacuate, but in an effort to save their property, Drew began clearing fire lines with his tractor while the flames encroached.

As the situation grew more dire — no electricity or water, thick smoke in the air and the fire advancing — Drew, a former Green Beret and registered nurse, insisted on staying. Unwilling to leave her husband behind, Avé resolved that they would remain and fight the fire with one lone neighbor.

The three had gathered in the driveway, when — without warning — a Vashon Island Fire & Rescue (VIFR) vehicle pulled in.

“I was shocked to see ‘Vashon Island’ on the truck,” Avé recounted by phone last weekend. “It was like a little miracle — if not a big miracle —  to see the Vashon truck all the way at our ranch.”

The team included two island firefighters, Brett Kranjcevich and Wesley Paulsen, and a third firefighter from Bothell. They were in the area as part of a South King County Strike Team mobilized by the state to protect homes and other structures.

The group’s arrival on the Dovers’ doorstep began with a  text message, according to Kate Davidson, one of the Dovers’ two daughters living on Vashon.

The five Dover siblings had been sending worried messages back and forth as the Chelan-area fires raged and none of them could reach their parents, she said. One of her brothers then drove from Seattle, talked his way past checkpoints and arrived at their house in the middle of the night. The next day, he sent a text to Kate with a photo of their dad on the tractor, the flames close and clearly visible.

“Here is my dad against this powerful and destructive force, head down, trying to save the house and animals,” Kate said. “It was a desperate, desperate feeling for us.”

Kate’s husband Ben Davidson was on duty as a firefighter/EMT with VIFR, and she turned to him for help.

“I asked him what in the world can we do? My dad is out there taking on the fires,” she said.

She sent the photo of her dad on the tractor to Ben, who in turn sent it to Kranjcevich, a volunteer assistant chief with VIFR and the department’s mechanic, whose South King County team was not far from the Dovers. Kranjcevich’s response, Kate said, was that he and his crew could be there within 20 minutes.

“I was sitting there white-knuckled,” she recalled. “I was trying to estimate how long it would take for the fire to get to their house.”

Upon arriving at the Dovers’ home, Kranjcevich took charge and the men got to work, Avé said. “When the Vashon guys got there, it was like the cavalry had come.”

Fire was advancing closely on one side, while also moving in from the back, and another fire was burning in a field across the road, she said. To make matters worse, neighbors who had evacuated had dropped off horses, and instead of having just their own, the Dovers were housing nine of the animals, several of which had begun to fight. The gates were open for them to escape if needed, but some had knocked the fence down, and they were running wild in the yard and road, chased by the Dovers’ dogs.

“It was a zoo,” Avé said. “We were fighting a fire and had a stampede at the same time.”

Through it all, she added,  the men, with Kranjcevich in the lead, stayed focused on their task, and she credits them with saving their home, though firefighters from the Department of Natural Resources arrived later and helped as well.

“There is no doubt the house would have burned down in another 20 minutes if they had not come,” she said.

On this fire, Kranjcevich said, his strike team was comprised of five brush trucks and one tender with 17 personnel. Typically, strike teams stay together, but that was not the case in this situation. After he received Ben’s text, he obtained special permission to check on the Dovers, and his own small team drove alone to their home.

Once satisfied the two were in good health — a concern particularly because Drew has had three heart attacks and a stroke — the men discussed their options.

“We were not supposed to stay,” Kranjcevich said, “but I realized we could not leave them.”

While obtaining permission to remain, they began digging a control line behind the house and then let the fire burn down to within 20 feet of the home.

“It seems like pandemonium to some people, but it was very controlled,” he added.

In all, Kranjcevich said, they remained for about six hours, until fire was no longer a threat.

Kranjcevich has been a firefighter for 35 years and first joined VIFR when he was 16. Between his family and his wife’s family, he said, they have put in more than 250 years of volunteer service to the department.

In the last 15 years, he has fought more than 45 wildfires. This one, he said, required a great deal from those working on it.

“I have never run so long so far from one place to the next, to the next, to the next,” he said.

Kranjcevich and Paulsen left Vashon for duty on Aug. 14 and tended to the Dovers the next day. Four days later— the day the firefighters died in Twisp —  their strike team was called to go there. The team was high up a forest service road, he said, and had to make their way down carefully and quickly with the heavy trucks.

“Then it was full code, lights and sirens up to Twisp, an hour away,” he added.

Coming down the mountain, he said that they heard that one firefighter had died, and then learned that three had been killed.

“At that point I sent my family a text: ‘We are safe, going to Twisp,’” he said. “It was very sobering that we were headed there.”

That night they were stationed in the same valley where the firefighters died, and they worked all night with other crews supporting the hotshots and making sure the fire — extremely active — did not cross the road.

“At 1 a.m. the fire was raging, throwing 40-foot flame lengths. That is just incredible for 1 a.m.,” he said.

Finally, at 1:30 p.m. the next afternoon, some 32 hours after starting their day, they were let off the clock to sleep, having accomplished what they had set out to do.

“We saved the town collectively through all our efforts,” he said, stressing the large number of people involved.

Kranjcevich returned home last Saturday, as did Ross Copland, a resident firefighter/EMT who also serves as the department’s recruitment and retention coordinator. Copland had headed to the area a week previously to spell Paulsen.

He recounted one notable event when the strike team was working high up a forest service road, and the fire blew up the hill and blocked them in.

“We were not in an imminent threat of being burned, but there was no way out,” he said. “We all camped out in the safety zone, waiting for the heat to die down so we could leave the following day.”

The next morning, he said, they got back to work and left at 10 p.m. that night.

Vashon has one of the smallest departments in South King County, Copland added, and members make it a priority to send help when it is called for.

“No matter what time or what day, we always send our guys and our team,” he said. “We believe in helping and want to make ourselves available to other districts when they are in a time of need.”

In addition to the three men who have helped in the Central Washington fires, two Vashon firefighters, Tony Puz — Paulsen’s brother — and Billy Schwitters, have recently been deployed to the Carpenter Road Fire northwest of Spokane. Firefighting resources have been stretched this summer, and Puz said that fire burned for two days before crews were sent to it. Even now, he added, there are not enough people available to fully tend to it. Schwitters went out several days ago to give him a break, but Puz will be going back this week.

Meanwhile on Vashon, Kate says she is not advocating remaining in place, as her parents did, when evacuation orders are given, but she understands that facing losing a home and animals is an extraordinarily difficult situation.

“You see a fragile human fighting a big force of nature, and it’s your dad and you want him to be safe. You do not want him to be so stubborn, but you have to admire he is doing everything to save his home and his animals,” she said.

Not far from her parents’ home the fires are still burning and are expected to continue until the snow falls. Sometimes the smoke has been thick and irritating, Kate said, and hot spots have popped up in the charred land around her parents’ home, and they have put them out with buckets of water. Mostly, though, she said, everyone is grateful that they are all right and that the house and animals were saved.

“I do not even know how to thank Brett and Wes,” she said. “I hope they understand how much it means to our whole family.”

Drew, who grew up on the East Coast and is more familiar with hurricanes than wildfires, said after being through this experience, he encourages others to think seriously about the prospect of disaster.

“You need to prepare and think about these emergencies and thank the good Lord for those that help us out,” he said.

Thousands of acres have burned in Washington fires this summer and more than 160 houses have been lost in the fires, including those belonging to some of the Dovers’ neighbors.

Drew and Avé say they feel the weight of those facts and  know they were lucky when others weren’t.

“When you see those firefighters,” Drew said, “give them a hug for us.”

Editor’s note: The Beachcomber thanks firefighter Brett Kranjcevich for sharing photos he took while he was working with the strike team in Central Washington. Some of those photos are presented here in the slideshow.