NAPA — Heading into the Wine Country wildfires, veteran Oakland firefighter Nicholas Luby didn’t let the astounding loss of life and homes, high wind speeds and steep terrain intimidate him.

When he called his wife Wednesday evening, in the midst of a 96-hour shift, he brushed off her “Hey, be careful out there,” as he always did.

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“We thought we were going to die,” Luby said. “We both had the same thought — that this is the end.”

In 20 years of fighting fires, Luby had never before had that thought.

Luby and Bowron’s terrifying experience Thursday illustrates something already evident in the staggering statistics of the Wine Country fires — California has never seen anything like these blazes. With 35 people killed, thousands of homes destroyed and tens of thousands of acres burned, the more than a dozen wildfires raging across the North Bay, taken together, are the deadliest in the state’s history.

Several factors are at play. High winds whipped up the flames. Years of drought have created an excessive amount of dry brush to feed their spread. And there are so many fires that crews don’t have the resources to fight them on all fronts. The lack of manpower is forcing some firefighters — who are supposed to work just 24-hours on and 24-hours off — to stay on duty for as many as four days at a time, with hardly any rest.

The conditions have created nightmare scenarios even for seasoned veterans like Luby and Bowron, both Oakland Fire Department battalion chiefs.

The two men were stationed in the hills above Sonoma early Thursday morning when they got called to save several homes from what was supposed to be a small blaze that had picked up nearby. So they headed to Admiral Cook Road in their red Oakland Fire pickup, with Luby driving and Bowron riding shotgun. Their job was to drive on ahead and scout out the situation, then report back to the firefighters in the three engines behind them.

Luby and Bowron saw several addresses at the base of a long driveway, and headed up. They passed one home where firefighters were already hard at work, so they kept going. But the second and third homes they found were on properties overgrown with vegetation, and Luby and Bowron decided they couldn’t be saved.

That’s when they saw that the red glow in the hills was getting bigger — a sign that the wind had picked up, and the blaze was coming closer.

“We gotta go,” Bowron said. But it was already too late.

“Within a matter of 15 seconds, conditions changed and we realized the fire was coming at us like a freight train,” Luby said.

Flames were exploding all around them. The trees were burning. The brush was burning. Everything seemed to be burning.

As they’re trained to do, Luby and Bowron tried to retreat to a safe area — they picked a section of land that had already been burned, so it would provide no new fuel to feed the flames. But multiple fire engines trying to flee created a traffic jam on the narrow road. Luby and Bowron’s pickup was stuck on the outside of the safe zone, with nowhere to go.

The pickup was getting hot, so the two men did something desperate — they made a run for it, bee-lining to the nearest fire engine and crouching down behind it. They huddled there, fighting off the flames as best they could with a hose.

They couldn’t breathe in the smoke-filled air. Next to them, the pickup they were sitting in just moments before was on fire. Propane tanks were exploding. Some of their fellow firefighters were running to a structure to take shelter.

And so they waited. Miraculously, the fire passed them by.

At 3:17 a.m., Luby was able to text his wife and tell her he was OK. She was right, he thought, to tell him to be careful.

On Friday morning, firefighters preparing to head into the wildfires were buzzing about the team that got “burned over” — firefighter lingo for Luby and Bowron’s harrowing close call.

“It definitely makes you a little nervous,” said 25-year-old Kevin Cole, from Big Bear Fire Department, who had just arrived for his first shift in Wine Country.

With more than 4,000 firefighters from across the state chasing more than a dozen wildfires in Northern California, fire officials have one incredibly fortunate piece of news to report from this week’s tragic events: no fatalities or major injuries among their fire crews.

Quickly after their scare, the Oakland firefighters had to put their shaken nerves behind them. It’s always like that in their line of work, but this year has been especially rigorous and challenging; Bowron had just returned last month from Texas and Florida after leading an Oakland-based elite urban search-and-rescue team for weeks at both Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. And both men worked the Ghost Ship warehouse fire that killed 36 people last December in Oakland — Bowron was fighting the blaze that night, and Luby led victim recovery efforts in the following days.

On Friday morning, after just one day’s rest, they headed back to the fire lines in Wine Country, driving a convoy of fire engines up Mount Veeder Road in Napa. As of Friday morning, Luby said his East Bay team had already saved more than 100 homes.

Alameda County firefighter Percy Brown, 44, who also experienced Thursday morning’s close call, said seeing the red glow of the approaching flames that trapped them did more than shake him up — it scarred him for life.

But it hasn’t swayed his motivation.

“Everything people strive to have is there — people’s homes, people’s lives,” he said. “I do it to preserve people’s life.”