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The department added a horse-drawn wagon in 1906. The first motorized engine was secured in 1929. The department still has it today and is working on the carburetor.
“If you have been around, you have seen this,” Vincent said.
It’s often used in parades, he said.
Vincent noted that in some of the pictures he was sharing, the all-volunteer firefighters did not have turnout gear. They did possess a lot of bravery, he said.
Five Dover Terrace homes were partially destroyed by fire in 1978. That same year, Elmo’s Bar caught fire.
Vincent shared details on the community effort, which included former Councilman Mike Segala, to have a second station.
“It was true volunteer spirit,” Vincent said.
The department secured two steel beams from the World Trade Center in time for the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The beams are on display in front of the station.
More than 50 years ago, the department launched the city’s annual Easter egg hunt. For the past two years, with Covid-19 regulations in place, the tradition continued with the Fire Department delivering eggs throughout the community.
Vincent said he expects the annual Halloween parade will return this year, offering a safe place for families to have fun. He also shared pictures of musters that were held until about 10 years ago. The firemanship games sort of died out, he said. The department is also home to a bike team, dive and rescue team, and water rescue team.
Vincent, in marking the anniversary, said he considers the department as offering 160 years of excellence. Mayor Lori Wilson agreed. When Vincent said he hoped for 160 more years, Wilson said, “To infinity and beyond.”
Other City Council members offered praise to the department.
“I’ve watched them for a lot of years,” Councilwoman Jane Day said. “They have achieved a tremendous amount and one of the best jobs we can ever ask them to do.”
Councilman Mike Hudson thanked the department for dropping by his church for a Fourth of July barbecue.
“The kids loved it,” he said. “You are setting an example for the next generation.”
Councilwoman Wanda Williams praised the department’s growth under Vincent’s leadership. She said she can rest comfortably knowing the Fire Department is there.
“There are so many other fire departments you guys could be working for,” she said. “I thank you.”
Mayor Pro Tem Alma Hernandez thanked the entire department for “selflessly putting themselves in danger every day.”
It’s a department dedicated to the call, not the dollars, Wilson said.
“The city has received the benefit of you putting duty above all else,” she said. “It’s time for us to put duty first as well to ensure we fund the department.”
Hundreds and hun-
vincent dreds of firefighters have worked in Suisun City over the years.
“The lessons learned, good and bad, have shaped the Fire Department to what it is today,” Vincent said.
Photos courtesy of Suisun City Fire Department
CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP: Firefighters battle a fire on Main Street; a shot from a muster, a favorite on Main Street for several years; the Fire Department’s first motorized engine.
Payton Bruni/AFP via Getty Images/TNS file A helicopter flies with a load of water to the Bootleg Fire near Bly, Oregon, Thursday.
Blazes
From Page One
continues to chew through dry chaparral and pine trees, aided by gusting winds and temperatures projected to peak in the low 90s on Sunday. It was one of two lightningsparked forest fires that together make up the Beckwourth Complex fire.
During a recent briefing, U.S. Forest Service Operations Section Chief Jake Cagle said the 100,000-acre “megafire” milestone is no longer uncommon in California, which experienced a record wildfire season in 2020 and is already outpacing those numbers this year.
“These are the new norms now,” Cagle said. “We used to say ‘unprecedented and historic.’ We’re past that now.”
Climate experts have said that vegetation in Northern California is at record-dry levels for this time of year, fueling blazes that are burning faster and hotter than firefighters expect to see this early in the fire season.
Another fire burning south of Lake Tahoe near the California-Nevada border has grown to more than 18,000 acres, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Dubbed the Tamarack fire, the blaze, which was ignited by lightning on July 4, remains 0% contained and has forced evacuations in and around the small mountain town of Markleeville.
The Death Ride, a 103mile bike ride that starts and ends in Markleevlle, was canceled Saturday.
In Butte County, the Dixie fire, which began burning Wednesday, had charred more than 15,000 acres by Sunday morning. The fire is burning along remote, steep terrain and is only 15% contained, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. As of Sunday morning, Caltrans had closed part of State Route 70 near its junction with State Route 191.
A fourth fire – this one burning near Yosemite National Park and dubbed the River fire – started a week ago and has spread over more than 9,600 acres, destroying 12 structures and damaging two more, officials said. The fire is now 75% contained.
And along a rural stretch of southern Oregon just north of the California state line, the Bootleg fire, the largest wildfire burning in the nation, had covered more than 298,000 acres by Sunday morning. The gigantic fire, which at one point threatened to derail California’s power grid, is now 22% contained.
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Rocket
From Page One
pursuit for people with money to burn, that’s not how Bezos sees it.
For him, space tourism is a way to advance and fund the technologies needed for his long-term ambitions: to make possible, in some far-off future, a sustainable space ecosystem where millions of people will live and work.
To achieve that farreaching goal, he’s built at Blue Origin a company culture reflective of the Silicon Valley venture capital values that created Amazon and the other tech giants: an unshakable belief that technology linked with the capitalist profit motive will change the world.
Blue Origin engineer Gary Lai, one of the company’s first 20 employees and lead designer of the 60-foot-tall New Shepard reusable rocket that will boost Bezos into space, outlined in an interview the company’s rationale for space tourism.
“Even if the ticket prices are high, there are still a lot of high-networth individuals in the world . . . So there is a very healthy potential to fly very often,” he said. In turn, “Flying more and more will allow us to perfect those techniques, which will benefit all programs at Blue Origin.”
Bezos, on a 2016 press tour of Blue Origin’s Kent headquarters, likewise compared space tourism to the early aviators who flew biplanes around the U.S.
“The barnstormers who went around and landed in small towns and gave people rides up in the air, that was entertainment – but it really advanced aviation,” he said.
“You don’t get great at anything you do only 12 times a year,” Bezos said then, referring to the low frequency of NASA’s big space launches. “With the tourism mission, we can fly hundreds of times a year. That will be so much practice.”
For him and for Blue Origin, the New Shepard rocket – named after the first American to go to space, Alan Shepard – is the precursor to bolder steps later: putting rockets into orbit around the Earth, sending them to the moon and beyond.
Bezos sees space tourism on New Shepard as a steppingstone to that future.
“It’s not frivolous. It’s logical,” Bezos said in 2016. “It’s actually a critically important mission for taking this thing to the next level.”
In Virgin Galactic’s quite different approach to lifting tourists into space, a crewed rocketpowered “spaceplane” is released from underneath a “mothership” at an altitude of 50,000 feet, then fires its engines and launches into space. It’s guided back to land by two pilots.
Branson projects building several global spaceports, enabling 400 flights to space a year on multiple models of the spaceplane.
On the Blue Origin rocket, in contrast, there’s no crew controlling the vehicle at any point, only passengers.
The booster rocket soars upward burning a mix of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Its exhaust is a trail of water vapor with no carbon emissions.
Near the top of New Shepard’s arc the sixseat passenger capsule detaches. It descends on parachutes while the reusable booster rocket is guided down to land vertically, its descent softened by reigniting the engine as it approaches the ground.
Three people will join Bezos on Tuesday’s flight, two of them by his personal invitation: his brother, Mark Bezos; and 82-year-old Wally Funk, one of the original female NASA astronauts trained for the Mercury missions who never got to go to space.
The fourth passenger is 18-year-old Oliver Daemen, son of the CEO of a private equity investment firm whose bid in Blue Origin’s charity auction had initially secured a seat on the second flight. Daemen was moved up after the auction winner, who had bid $28 million, chose to postpone to a later flight.
Rocketing into space is clearly a passionate dream for Bezos.
He often relates being captivated as a 5-yearold watching on TV as Neil Armstrong first stepped onto the moon. Bezos chose Tuesday for the flight because it’s the anniversary of that day 52 years ago.
On that 2016 press tour, he cited two reasons why humans need to go to space. The first, couched as an altruistic ideal, was to create an industrial ecosystem in space to preserve the finite resources here on earth.
The second might have come from his 5-yearold heart: “It’s a glorious adventure,” Bezos said.
Now it must also be a business, said Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin’s astronaut sales director, responsible for selling tickets to individuals who want to ride on New Shepard.
“Our founder has one of the most brilliant business minds around. So, this is a business. I can say that for sure,” Cornell said. “Absolutely. It will make money.”
She said more than 7,600 people registered for the company’s auction to buy a seat on the first flight. Since then, “I have been very busy on the phone talking to very serious customers from around the world.”
“While it’s a nascent market, I can tell you there’s a lot of pent-up demand to go to space,” she added.
After Tuesday’s flight Blue Origin has two more launches with passengers lined up for this year, “and many more to come,” Cornell said.
“People are clearly interested in paying more to be first certainly,” she said. “As more people go, we do see the price coming down.”
And she said the total package offered by Blue Origin is not so ephemeral. Ticket buyers will go to the Texas launch site to train for two days ahead of the rocket launch.
“All of that is part of the experience, not just the 11 minutes off the ground,” Cornell said.
Cornell pitches the climactic ride to space as life-changing.
“You’re on top of a rocket. You’re going to get the rumble of the engine as you take off, you’re going to feel the G’s come on and you’re going to get that evolution of the colors outside those huge windows,” she said.
The space tourist market
Doug Harned, a financial analyst with Bernstein Research who covers the space industry, believes the space tourism business can make money near term.
“You can generate a lot of cash with these expensive tickets,” he said. “The operating costs are just dwarfed by what you can bring in revenues.”
Yet he worries the revenue might not be sustained for many years.
He said the twoand-a-half-hour webcast that surrounded Branson’s Virgin Galactic ride last Sunday, hosted by Stephen Colbert, fell flat and prompted scathing Twitter reviews.
“There was so much discussion about what an epic event this is,” said Harned. “Well, you go up there, you’re weightless for three minutes, pretty cool, and then come back down. People look at it and say, ‘Really, is it that exciting?’ ”
Taber MacCallum, CEO of Space Perspective, has a very different space tourism experience in mind. His Tucson, Ariz.-based company is touting “the world’s most radically gentle voyage to space” in a high-performance space balloon.
It will climb serenely over two hours to an altitude of just 100,000 feet, or 19 miles up, which is less than a third as high as New Shepard. But a successful unmanned test flight from Florida last month showed that’s high enough to view the curvature of the earth and the blackness of space.
Though it won’t provide the experience of weightlessness, Space Perspective’s enclosed passenger cabin – with a fallback safety parachute in case the balloon fails – will float in the stratosphere for two hours before it starts to descend.
MacCallum is targeting taking passengers up in 2024, though with just one test flight completed he concedes that’s “an aggressive schedule.”
“We will fly when it’s safe,” he said.
