Fifty-foot flames flaring down Agua Caliente canyon in the earliest hours of October 9 were about to devour the Mission Highlands neighborhood and race into the backyards of Boyes Hot Springs. That’s when Glen Ellen Cal Fire Capt. Sean Jerry studied the situation from a crest on High Road and said, “OK, this is what we’re going to do.”
What followed involved a bulldozer driving up asphalt roads and bursting into the canyon to dig a firebreak while Jerry and other firefighters set a back burn below it that kept the fire within a few feet of reaching 66 Mission Highlands homes and 15 minutes away from the thickly populated Springs area with 2,500 homes.
“It would have been there — 100 percent,” he said. But they stopped it.
In Mission Highlands, Jerry was guided through the smoky night by longtime neighborhood resident Tim Gray, and together they found a path for the dozer to get through on little-known back roads.
From a hillside post Gray watched the entire firefighting plan take place. “Sean Jerry, now he’s the guy,” Gray said in praise of the captain who saved his home and many others.
Jerry, 40, grew up in Boyes Hot Springs and knew since he was a young boy that he wanted to be a firefighter. He joined the Valley of the Moon Explorer Post when he was 15, and became a volunteer there when he graduated from Sonoma Valley High School in 1996. His career with Cal Fire began as a seasonal worker in 1999, becoming year-round in 2009. After extensive experience including helicopter firefighting, arson investigation and serving as fire truck engineer, he became the Glen Ellen captain in 2015.
“When fire is threatening your hometown it’s a different experience,” Jerry said. On that first night he was off duty and awakened by a call to come in. His firehouse on Highway 12 was empty when he arrived, and he jumped in the last remaining pickup and started driving through Glen Ellen, reporting conditions to the command post and then guiding firetrucks and bulldozers from out of the area to spots where they could dig breaks and hold the fire line. It was that night Jerry saw the home where he spent his early boyhood burned to the ground.
As for many firefighters, it was the beginning of six days when he would sleep only 10 hours total. “We were beyond exhausted,” he said. His daughters, Hailey, 15, and Lia, 11, anxiously followed the fires from their home in Sonoma, knowing their Dad was out there. “They wrote me letters saying thank you,” Jerry said softly.
Jerry is a big man of few words, who goes on and on about the fires, saying almost nothing about himself. It’s not his way. He realizes this tale is one of many heroic experiences of first responders during this epic fire.
Jerry’s Battalion Chief Kirk Van Wormer also knows of many heroes, but his praise for Jerry comes easily. “Sean just makes things happen. He knows the Valley, he has a world of knowledge and he went out there and made it happen with very limited resources.”
For his part, Jerry is more comfortable explaining the fires were fought using satellite maps on his computer screen than he is with personal conversation.
When people say thank you, he responds humbly and politely, “You’re welcome.”
