Fuller video with description: https://youtu.be/vIzdZSsq1fg >This is the heart-racing footage from September 10, at nearly 1 am, as the Antelope Fire raged with hellish fury near Macdoel, California as Russell Padfield and his crew headed towards the blaze. The nearly 100-foot wall of fire that hit a company of engines and threw them off the road was like "driving through hell" Padfield said, and that only "through heroic acts of courage there are no fatalities." "We were lucky, we all were lucky," said Padfield in what he is calling "unnecessary risks that they were put into. We shouldn't have been engaged, at all." "We're only firefighters when we die, otherwise we're forestry technicians. The federal government doesn’t consider us firefighters because they’d have to listen to a myriad of OHSA and regulations," said Padfield, who wants to be a whistleblower on the unnecessary risk he and other firefighters have to endure. "I haven’t seen my family more than 12 hours in the last 3 months. You hear about Joe Biden talking about we’re giving firefighters this and that! We’ve had a smoke jumper diagnosed with lung cancer and saying it’s not an on-job injury. It's ridiculous," Padfield said. "We luckily survived because of our Ford F-550, it really survived. But other vehicles were completely black,"

Extremely lucky