Monty Bell has been a volunteer with the San Diego County Sheriffs’ Search and Rescue Unit for over 16 years as a Search Manager. He also teaches courses for the State of California Office of Emergency Services in Search Management and Child Abduction and on the State’s Incident Support Team. He is on call 24/7 to respond to search and rescue and other major incidents and spends most of his free time traveling the state teaching sheriff deputies on how to manage a search in their county. When Monty is not occupied with that, he is attending to his duties as the Vice-President of the Mountain Rescue Association National Board of Directors. Somehow he finds time to be the Vice-President of Operations at New Way Landscape and Tree Services.

During the San Diego Firestorm, Monty was activated at 2 AM Sunday morning to set up a command post for the Sheriff’s Department in Lakeside. The first few days were some sort of organized chaos as this fire was moving extremely fast at over 200 acres a minute. This was the fastest moving fire Monty had ever seen before and he has worked every major fire over the last 16 years. Trying to stay ahead of the fire from an evacuation stand point was virtually impossible. During those days he was tasked with planning assignments, evacuating people, rescuing animals, patrolling for looters and establishing road blocks. On day four Monty was working in the Julian area evacuating animals when he got a call on his radio that he had firefighters trapped and they needed medical assistance immediately. Monty and his fellow Search and Rescue team took the call and were on scene within minutes to help out medically and then coordinate their evacuation via CDF Helicopter and Mercy Air Helicopter.

For the next six hours Monty was assigned to stand watch over the scene of the fallen firefighter and keep people away. He finally returned home that evening after spending four very long days away. When he checked his messages he had a very moving message from a friend of his who is a Fire Captain in the Bay Area. His friend saw Monty on television that day evacuating injured firefighters whom his friend knew. Though he was not there to be with them, he was comforted to know that Monty was able to help them. Monty had this to say of his recent experiences, “After all is said and done, I hope somewhere I was able to make a small difference for some people.”

Submit your “Funniest thing that happened to me as a Property Manager” story to appear in an upcoming issue of The Walk Through News! Arthur Raybold, Editor • araybold@gencoat.com

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