 Coming up on this edition of Inside Look they are the two most important words in California's massive firefighting efforts mutual aid. It's really neighbor helping neighbor but it's an extensive elaborate fabulous system that is in place in California doesn't exist any other place in the world. We're going behind the scenes to get an inside look at what happens when the fire season heats up here in California. Plus we'll take a tour of one of the specialized firefighting rigs headed to a community near you. Welcome to Inside Look I'm Brian May in the Cal OES newsroom and today we are talking about mutual aid. It's what happens when your local fire department needs help from outside. You may not know it but it's in use every day battling California's most difficult wildfires. Simply put mutual aid is truly neighbor helping neighbor. It's the system that gets help from anywhere to anywhere at any time. Every day at Cal OES headquarters in Sacramento there's constant coordination happening between incident commanders at the wildfires and those responsible for deciding the next best move. Think of this as a 911 call for first responders who needs what where can we get it and how long will it take to get there. Everything from fire engines to specially trained firefighting teams. There is no real fire season specifically anymore. It's kind of an all year kind of event in California but but we are an all risk mutual aid system which means that we have to be able to respond to all kinds of events and it's not uncommon year-round that we're having to move these mutual aid assets up and down the state and it's not uncommon to see resources from San Diego as far north is humble at Donor County or vice versa. As well as we do business it has some fragile sides of the house. It depends on neighbor helping neighbor. In the old days that was literally your neighbor. Today it's actually Siski County going all the way down to San Diego or San Diego all the way up to Siski County. It's a very great system very robust but our job is to manage that coordinate it and feed it as best we can and try to make the adjustments accordingly. Keeping that complex system working effectively as you can imagine is a constant juggling act for fire officials. During the summer fire season there's often hundreds of firefighters traveling from one incident to another in California and you've probably seen them caravans of fire trucks headed somewhere but you just weren't sure where or why they were all together. Well here's the inside scoop. What you saw is what the fire service calls a strike team. It's a caravan of five engines usually 20 to 25 people and it's usually a combination of local state and Cal OES resources. A tell-tale sign that it's a strike team? Well look for the mix of different fire departments working together as one single team. And at Cal OES there are over 140 engines and equipment specifically for mutual aid. These are strategically placed throughout the state for quick response. All right I want us to take a closer look now at one of these strike team engines so we are joined by Bill Bonchu assistant chief with the OES fire and rescue division chief so much thank you so much for joining us I know you've got one of your engines behind us can you describe what this is and what all it can do? Sure be happy to. This is a 2016 HME what we call our model 34 it's a type 3 engine purchased by OES we have 40 of these in the state and they're assigned to various departments around California and their staff and used when we request them. It's a four-wheel drive unit it's high-wheel base so it can get into tough country it carries 500 gallons of water pumps 750 gallons a minute it has foam capabilities and like I say carries four people this is their brass compartment there's all kinds of adapters in here for example this adapter here is used to tap into an existing line to branch a line off for mop up and you can see it reduces different sizes as well the pump panel here is the feature for the apparatus engineer he can determine how much water he has in his tank he can monitor the pressure that's going out on the hose lines he can inject foam into the hose lines to help the firefighters more effectively extinguish the fire a lot of things that this can do there's a lot of compartmentation in here for the folks because they're out on 14-day assignments so they carry their line gear their fire bags out of county bags they're out for 14 days sometimes so they have to have their creature comforts or sleeping bags or tents there's long-handled tools there's chainsaws we also carry thermal gel in the back there's a portable pump that they can use if they're near a creek bed they can replenish the engine's water and continue the firefighting effort it carries medical equipment for medical purposes for the firefighters themselves or if we run across something from the public and yeah they're very nice engines they're very very sought after and when these engines get assigned to a local agency you can tell where they're assigned because the local agency will put their name on the side of these engines correct yeah that's correct and so we like when they're at fires they'll be grouped up sometimes we'll have 20 of them and we can tell by the side door who they belong to but we can also tell by their strike team designator where what part of the state they came from to our fire chief let me just ask you and I know this probably seems like a simple question but how crucial are engines like this to California's mutual aid system this is probably the most critical asset that we have that we can offer up to the forest agencies the demand for these this year is exceeded more than we can all provide and I think it's primarily because of the wildland urban interface these engines can get up into those narrow driveways and do a lot of good in protecting structures and doing structure defense than the the big you know city engines these are much more suitable for that kind of environment so you're saying this one will not be sitting on our lot very long before being reassigned and no I don't think so I'm I think this one's gonna get going here pretty quick chief thank you so much for taking time and joining us and showing the ins and outs of these beautiful trucks okay thanks for having me it's been a pleasure if you'd like to learn more about California's mutual aid system you can visit the Cal OES fire and rescue branch page at Cal OES.ca.gov or if you're in the fire service visit firescope.org for helpful resources and as always we encourage you to watch more stories like this at our online newsroom OES news.com we also like hearing from you so join the discussion on our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter and Instagram and that will do it for this edition of Inside Look I'm Brian May for all of us here in the Cal OES newsroom thanks for watching