A firefighter with a shovel along Spring Mountain Road monitors a backfire that got out of control and started burning up a hill and moving towards the Charbay Winery in St. Helena in October 2020. Cal Fire investigated whether a private firefighter crew started the backfire.

As the devastating Glass Fire ripped through the Napa Valley in October 2020, a state investigator made an unusual move: He ordered all the private firefighters who’d been hired by wineries and other wealthy interests in the area to pull into a dirt lot next to the St. Helena Reservoir.

Someone, the investigator suspected, had intentionally ignited what is known as a “backfire.” The defensive blaze — a potential crime — had burned out of control, setting off spot fires and burning into at least two vineyards, according to records obtained this month by The Chronicle.

The people summoned to the lot on the west side of the famed valley were part of a group that is becoming a bigger part of the wildfire crisis in California. As government resources have been stretched thin, insurance companies, moneyed landowners, wineries and even Lake Tahoe ski resorts have turned to private crews to shield their properties.

But those crews aren’t allowed to light fires or to operate in evacuation zones without permission. Their role by law is to primarily focus on what is known as pre-fire treatment of the landscape.

And so, as it unfolded, the Napa case highlighted the growing tensions between agencies like Cal Fire, whose resources have been stretched by the catastrophic burns of recent years, and independent crews who officials say can obstruct firefighters, cause damage and risk lives.

The unusual incident would come to involve a U.S. congressman who notified Cal Fire after he saw what he believed was a private crew lighting a backfire; a large winemaker that deployed a small army of firefighters, including the one accused of wrongdoing; and neighboring wineries whose vineyards were damaged.

“Private firefighters’ specific role should be nothing but defensive,” said Jack Piccinini, a retired Santa Rosa firefighter of four decades who reviewed documents related to the Napa case for The Chronicle. “This is exactly what we fear with private and insurance firefighters.”

On the day of the alleged backfire, the state investigator, Cal Fire Capt. Gary Uboldi, tore off pieces of paper and handed them out in the lot as smoke choked the hot fall air. Write down what you recall happening today, he told members of the half-dozen or so crews, and what you may know about an unauthorized burn along narrow and winding Spring Mountain Road.

It would be the start of an investigation that, according to the documents The Chronicle received through California’s public records law, led Uboldi and his team to recommend 13 criminal counts — including arson, trespassing and setting an illegal backfire — against the owner of Bella Wildfire & Forestry Inc., a private crew based in Placer County that was working for a winery.

The owner’s “actions and decision to conduct an unapproved backfiring operation during the incident violated several state laws, department policy, industry practices, and showed total disregard for the life safety of the citizens and assigned fire personnel on the Glass Fire,” Uboldi wrote in a 41-page report.

The backfire burned a couple hundred feet of guard rail and spotted across the road into private wineries. Firefighters battling the Glass Fire on the ground and in the air had to be redirected to extinguish it.

In the end, though, the case fell apart.

After Napa County prosecutors received the charging recommendations in March, their arson unit spent six months investigating before declining to file charges due to “insufficient evidence,” said Assistant District Attorney Paul Gero. He said it was difficult to prove who started the fire.

Reached last week by phone and email, the company owner, Ryan Bellanca, said his crew had not ignited a backfire on the day in question and had actually saved many homes and businesses.

“Who let 30-plus wineries burn cause they were so spread thin and couldn’t advance quick enough?” he asked, referring to Cal Fire.

The Glass Fire erupted Sept. 27, 2020, among vineyards in the rolling hills of Napa County. To this day, its cause is not known.

Over three weeks, the fire spread into Sonoma County and burned more than 67,000 acres, destroying more than 1,500 structures, including the Chateau Boswell winery near St. Helena and the Castello di Amorosa winery near Calistoga, which lost $5 million worth of wine.

More than 2,000 firefighters battled the blaze, among them private crews hired by wineries, property owners and insurance companies to help the state’s overwhelmed firefighting force amid a historic burn season.

On Oct. 2, an unburned 2,700-acre island just west of downtown St. Helena, bisected by Spring Mountain Road, became a priority in the firefight. Temperatures in the area reached the mid-90s that day and winds blew 10 to 15 mph.

Jackson Family Wines’ Lokoya Winery was prepared. The company earlier that year had hired Firestorm Wildland Fire Suppression Inc. of Chico to provide vegetation management, training and staffed engines in the event of a wildfire, according to the Cal Fire report. With the Glass Fire encroaching on the properties, Firestorm had subcontracted work out to Bella.

Bella, a small operation out of Weimar in the Sierra foothills, opened in 2008. The company specializes in fighting and preventing wildfires, doing prescribed burns and creating defensible space around properties.

Companies like Bella are proliferating. The National Wildfire Suppression Association, a trade group that oversees more than 300 private wildland fire services contractors, has trained more than 30,000 firefighters in the industry and repeatedly defends their work. A decade ago, the organization had less than 200 represented companies.

The night Bella arrived, Bellanca told The Chronicle, his crew worked with a state strike team assigned to the Glass Fire and had full communication with incident commanders. He said they held the fire from descending off a ridge and lit a backfire “to stop the flaming front from impacting our clients buildings,” but asserted that state firefighters were in charge of the operation.

Officials at Cal Fire’s headquarters and its Sonoma-Napa Unit did not respond to requests to comment.

At 8 a.m. on Oct. 2, Bellanca said, the state firefighters left “and we were left to hold the mountain until 11 a.m.”

It was a busy day for a small network of private firefighters working to protect some of Jackson’s six vineyards in Napa County, as the Glass Fire had devoured much of the west side of the valley. Some cleared a fallen tree from a roadway, while others prepped a house and widened roads.

Around 9 a.m. that day, Brad Onorato picked up Rep. Mike Thompson and his wife from their St. Helena home to drive them to a Glass Fire briefing in Santa Rosa. It had been a chaotic week for the Thompsons. On the first day of the blaze, the congressman’s wife evacuated their home and slept in her car in Napa before Thompson flew out the next morning from Washington, D.C., to join her.

Onorato, Thompson’s deputy chief of staff, described the drive up Spring Mountain Road in a one-page statement to Cal Fire investigators. He said that as he drove westbound, and as the road flattened out, they hit a thick plume of smoke.

“As the smoke cleared a bit, I observed several men on the south side of the road. One of them was pouring flames out of a can over the guardrail,” Onorato wrote. “I was a bit confused because these gentlemen did not appear to be firefighters. The Congressman told me it was clearly a private fire crew probably hired by an insurance company.”

Onorato wrote that he saw a man in a red shirt and brown pants operating the drip torch and placing it in a truck. Cal Fire indicated in its report that Onorato identified Bellanca as that man.

The congressman had a similar recollection. He told Uboldi that, as they passed the upper gate to Keenan Winery, they were stopped by a man in firefighter gear standing near a Bella truck. With flames on both sides of the road, the congressman said he rolled down his window to ask what was happening, with the man responding that they were trying to catch a spot fire. He said the man denied they had been doing a backfire.

A drip torch on the bumper of a Bella Wildfire & Forestry fire truck. Cal Fire redacted the photo, which was part of its investigation into an illegal backfire, to obscure the license plate.

He also spotted a drip torch on the guard rail. In a phone interview with The Chronicle, the congressman said he was so bothered by what he saw that he reached out to Cal Fire.

“It didn’t strike me as the usual operating procedure for private firefighters,” Thompson said.

Bellanca questioned the witness accounts after reviewing the Cal Fire report.

“Folks saw me light a backfire?” Bellanca wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “That’s wild cause I thought the entire area was evacuated? How could we light a backfire when the flaming front impacted the ridge the night before and was already burning at us that morning from the east.”

Napa and Sonoma County fire officials look over maps along Spring Mountain Road in St. Helena after a private firefighter crew allegedly lost control of an unauthorized backfire that spread in an area near them in October 2020.

Around noon on Oct. 2, Uboldi was at the St. Helena Cal Fire station making phone calls in an effort to determine the cause of the bigger Glass Fire. Upon hearing reports of an unauthorized backfire, he jumped in his truck and drove south, past storied wineries, rising 2,000 feet above the valley.

He stopped and directed private fire companies he encountered to meet at the reservoir dirt lot, across the street from Spring Mountain Winery. Most told him they worked for Jackson. But when the investigator told them to write down what they could recall about the alleged backfire, they all cooperated — except one.

The entire Bella crew became “unreceptive and uncooperative,” Uboldi wrote. They refused to give their names, lawyered up and recorded him with their phones. Members of Bella, records show, each handed back notes refusing to make a statement, as one of them wrote, “under duress and intimidation of Cal Fire.”

When asked if his crew refused to talk to investigators, Bellanca said, “you’re damn right!” He told The Chronicle, “Once they approached my battalion chief and got in his face we started recording them. They were way out of line and we made sure to document for our own protection from there.”

A fallen guardrail with burn damage near the origin of an alleged backfire set along Spring Mountain Road during the 2020 Glass Fire in St. Helena.

But other witnesses pointed fingers at Bellanca’s company. A crew member for Firestorm, Bob Alvarez, told Uboldi he saw Bella personnel conducting a backfire along a driveway. He said he thought they were working with Cal Fire, according to the state report.

Michael Howard of San Diego County-based Capstone Fire and Safety Management told Uboldi, according to the report, that Bella crew members had told him they had “lost a backfiring operation along Spring Mountain Road.”

Capt. Matt Churchman of the American Canyon Fire Protection District said his engine had been assigned structure defense. When his crew arrived, he told Uboldi, they found 15 to 20 private firefighters prepping the properties’ structures for a backfiring operation. Churchman told the crew to stop the firing operation, according to the report.

Churchman wrote in a note to Uboldi that the crew boss in charge of the firing operation had not notified incident command and wasn’t on radio communications with other firefighters. “A firefighter on the crew in the red shirt stated they had put fire on the ground earlier and that he was within his rights as a property rep to do so,” he wrote.

As he wrapped up his interviews, Uboldi told the Bella employees he would cite them for entering an evacuated zone. While writing them up, “they continued to verbally berate my partners and I,” Uboldi wrote.

Bellanca said his team was removed from the area.

Statements by Bella Wildfire & Forestry firefighters responding to inquiries by Cal Fire.

Three days after his field interviews, on Oct. 5, Uboldi met with Firestorm President and Operations Manager Jess Wills in St. Helena. Wills, who also serves as treasurer and secretary on the private firefighters’ trade association board, said there had been no prior discussion of backfiring or rules of engagement between his company and Bella, according to the state report.

Wills said Bella had been backfiring along a downhill stretch of land belonging to their clients, but Uboldi said Jackson was farther south. Uboldi said he saw evidence the backfire was on Keenan Winery land.

Wills did not return a request for comment.

In his report, Uboldi said Keenan Winery and neighboring Kieu Hoang Winery lost “land and vegetation” due to the illegal backfire.

A Jackson Family Wines spokesperson, Sean Carroll, said the company was not part of any Cal Fire investigation. In the state report, Uboldi said he interviewed the corporate security manager at Jackson and determined the company “was uninvolved and unaware of the backfiring incident which had occurred.”

After this article was initially published online, another Jackson spokesperson, Kristen Reitzell, said the company “did not set any backfires or approve any backfires to be set during the Glass Fire. ... Jackson Family Wines works collaboratively with all fire agencies — including Cal Fire — in multiple counties. We hold any and all contractors we work with to that same standard of cooperation.”

A year later, signs of the alleged backfire along Spring Mountain Road are still apparent. The silver guardrail lays flat on the shoulder of the road with charred wooden posts buried beneath. Melted sign posts bend awkwardly above the wooded slope where investigators say the private firefighters attempted to burn the brush to create a wider buffer around their clients’ vineyards.

Reilly Keenan, whose grandfather bought the vineyards in 1974, is still angry about the turn of events. He said he initially evacuated the day the fire started, but returned a few days before the alleged backfire to protect his family and co-workers’ homes on their property.

Matt Gardner, general manager of Keenan Winery, walks near a hill full of vines as he recounts the 2020 Glass Fire in St. Helena.

Keenan recalled when the fire, “seemingly out of nowhere,” flashed above the winery’s “upper bowl vineyard,” below Spring Mountain Road.

“It burned the entirety of the forest that buffers the vineyard from the road and then exploded across the street and raced up the mountain above us,” Keenan recalled. “Seemed like it took the firefighters above and across the street from us by surprise based on the frantic yelling and repositioning of trucks and other assets that I witnessed. We had no idea backfires were being lit nearby or on our property.”

Keenan said his family was “extremely lucky.”

Editor’s note: This article was updated after it was initially published online.

Matthias Gafni is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: matthias.gafni@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @mgafni

Matthias Gafni is an enterprise reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle. He investigates stories in the East Bay and beyond. For almost two decades, Gafni worked for the Bay Area News Group - San Jose Mercury News, East Bay Times and Vallejo Times-Herald - covering corruption, child sexual abuse, criminal justice, aviation and more. In 2017, Gafni won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for his work on the Ghost Ship fire. In 2018, he was named SPJ Reporter of the Year in Northern California. The following year, he was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for his work covering the Camp Fire. In 2020, he won a Polk Award for military reporting for his coverage of the Capt. Crozier saga involving a COVID-19 outbreak aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier. He was born and raised in the Bay Area and graduated from UC Davis. He lives with his wife and three kids in the East Bay.