Fire crews take almost 100 calls for service in Pebble Beach and Carmel

It was a very busy 24 hours for crews around the Central Coast helping residents clean up following Thursday’s storm. As they continue to monitor the weather closely, tonight we’re finding out it’ll go down as one of the busiest nights crews have seen in a while.

On Friday night, residents on the Monterey Peninsula are being asked to remain vigilant in protecting their property. Crews said many of the trees in the Del Monte Forest area are already leaning and homeowners need to keep an eye out.

Some firefighters are catching their breath while the weather remains calm for a bit, but they said Thursday’s calls added up quickly.

There were almost 100 calls for service in one day. Firefighters serving in the Cypress Fire, Pebble Beach and Carmel Highlands fire protection districts said they just went from call to call.

“This is typical but this is definitely a much larger volume than we’ve seen in past couple of months,” said Mike Reimer with CalFire Monterey-San Benito Counties.

With less than 20 crews on hand, large downed trees were pushed aside and roads were cleared.

“A lot of those were power lines down, a lot of those were trees falling down, trees in the road. That sort of thing,” Reimer said.

CalFire firefighter Mike Reimer said prison inmate crews were also utilized to help construct and haul sandbags to homeowners who needed them most. He also has a reminder for residents.

“We did see some flooding. One of the things we want people to do is clean their gutters out, that sort of thing. We haven’t had a lot of rain in the last year, so that means a lot of the gutters have built up and no one’s noticed,” Reimer said.

Reimer said most roads in his protection area are clear now. But that doesn’t mean things can’t chance quickly once trees start to settle into the soil that’s much wetter than before the storm.

“You know we always hope that people would be very very careful in situations, we want people to treat all power lines down as live,” Reimer said.

Crews said they’re required to respond to calls within seven minutes and in July they added a station on Garden Road in Monterey to provide better service.