Navajo Nation firefighters battle wildfires in Los Angeles

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Firefighters from the Navajo Nation worked tirelessly through a haze of dust to cut away dirt from a narrow road at the side of a mountain struck by a landslide in Southern California, coughing and sneezing amid the backbreaking work.

It was the Navajo Scouts’ eighth straight day battling the Eaton Fire outside Los Angeles and their assignment Friday morning was two-fold: restore vehicle access to the mountain on the outskirts of Altadena and check on the fire damage to structures at the top.

The team of 23 crew members had traveled for two days to Southern California from the Navajo Scouts’ headquarters along the Arizona-New Mexico state line at Fort Defiance to join the fight against wildfires that have killed at least 27 people, destroyed more than 12,000 structures and put more than 80,000 under evacuation orders. The crew is one of several firefighting teams from Native American tribes and the Bureau of Indian Affairs battling the blazes.

The Navajo Scouts’ “initial attack” crew, which includes several elite hotshot-certified firefighters, have helped Los Angeles residents cut through landslides and mangled trees and worked to snuff out lingering “hot spot” fires.

“We all feel like we’re giving back to the people,” said Brian Billie, an emergency coordinator for the Navajo Scouts. “Just talking to the locals, some of them have been here ever since childhood and they lost their homes.”

Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren praised the crew for “answering the call" to protect people in Los Angeles, including the diaspora of Navajo people who live there.

“Let us send them our heartfelt wishes for protection, so that they may return home safely,” he said of the Navajo Scouts in a post on the social platform X.

Eleven electric utility journeymen from the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority also have deployed to Los Angeles to assist in the wildfire response and recovery, with qualifications to work on both new construction and “hot” lines.

They’re repaying a debt of gratitude after utility workers from the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power traveled to the Navajo Nation repeatedly in recent years on a training mission and helped extend power to 170 Navajo households that didn’t have service previously, said Deenise Becenti, a spokesperson for the Navajo utility.

More than 10,400 families live without electricity across the Navajo Nation — which spans an area the size of West Virginia — a lingering legacy of gaps in the U.S. rural electrification efforts of the 1930s.

Becenti said that Navajo utility crews are accustomed to living away from home periodically to complete major construction projects on the vast reservation, but the deployment to Los Angeles marks the first participation in a major mutual aid project beyond that homeland.

“There's a deep sense of pride not only for our utility employees here but people throughout the Navajo Nation ... in sending firefighters and now utility workers to help an area that's been just hit severely by a force of nature," said Becenti, noting that Los Angeles is home to many Navajo citizens. “As far as we know we're the only tribal utility that is sending crews" to Los Angeles.