La Salle firefighter returns home from wildfires

Seemingly every day in the national news there’s a story about a wildfire out west.  A local firefighter recently saw the destruction first hand.

A group of 20 specialized firefighters from Illinois battled a wildfire in an Oregon national forest for two weeks before coming home earlier this month.  One of the firefighters was Jason Sartin of the La Salle Fire Department.  Sartin and the others spent nine days creating fire line barriers with shovels and chainsaws by clearing brush and fallen trees so they couldn’t fuel the wildfire.

Sartin and the rest of his crew were initially deployed to Salt Lake City but fears of fires there never materialized.