Guy Fieri is taking no chances when it comes to protecting his beloved Northern California home.
The Food Network star, 56, took reporter Graham Bensinger on a tour of the 42-acre property in Santa Rosa for In Depth with Graham Bensinger. There he opened up about the huge forest fire that once ravaged the area and threatened to destroy his home.
Fieri told Bensinger he was fortunate to have precautions in place to protect the property — including fire engines on site.
“We’ve had big fires here. We just built a house, and I had all the equipment. We have a couple of fire engines and a bulldozer, and I’m pretty self-sufficient – I have to be. I’m redundant,” the Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives the host explained as the couple stood next to the fire trucks.
When Bensinger asked Fieri what worried him, the celebrity chef replied, “Oh, that it’s going to end. It’s going to burn.”
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“But I’m not going to let it burn, I’m going to stay here and fight it,” he continued. “We have hoses ready with something called a trash pump. Drop the end into a pool with, you know, 50,000 gallons [of water] in the pool, and this thing’s going to shoot—shoot like a fire hose.”
Fieri then went on to say that when the last wildfire hit, his neighborhood was evacuated, but his family — wife Lori and sons Hunter and Ryder — decided to stay put until the situation became more dangerous.
“So we stay here and everything is pretty calm, we’re fine, as long as [the fire] gets under the solar panels and they start exploding. Now the solar panels are on fire. Then we get scared,” he recalled. “We fought, you know, for five, six hours, we finished everything. The whole hill was smoking”.
After getting the situation under control, Fieri and his family drove their “rescue trailer” to a nearby fairground, where residents were sheltering at the time. “We started feeding people,” Fieri told Bensinger as he showed off the large custom-built trailer and all its features.
Guy Fieri.
In Depth with Graham Bensinger
“It has 400 gallons of propane, its own water source, its own generator source, its own Wi-Fi. We can smoke 50 to 75 pork butts at a time, and that’s the best way to feed people in large quantities, when you can do low and slow meat,” he described. Fieri. “[We’ve got a] A 40-gallon tilting pan — I mean, it’s a monster and we can go cook [food for] up to 5000 people per day. So we built this for the disasters that happened.”
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As part of his non-profit organization, the Guy Fieri Foundation, the trailer has been deployed to various locations to feed people affected by the fires – and to date, more than 120,000 meals have been served.
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“When we don’t have disasters, we take the trailer to different municipalities around the country and just hold events celebrating first responders, active duty military and veterans,” Fieri told Bensinger, noting that he also has a nearly duplicate version of the trailer. built for the east coast.
For Fieri, the announcements are about control and maintaining self-sufficiency in uncertain times. “I built this and paid for it because I didn’t want to owe anybody,” he said. “I wanted to be able to do it my way on my timeline.”
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Source: HIS Education