With the big fires in California and in other areas of the country, I was asked to describe what I experienced on the fire lines of a large fire. I don't know how many other Kossaks have this experience/exposure, and I hope this might help you appreciate what the firefighters may be going through now or on another fire.
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Saturday, as the day heats up, the smoke clouds rise. The fire would double in size this day.
The temperature reached into the upper 90’s and the fire, which had been calmer, raged and expanded.
As the light shifted westward, the clouds showed more color.
Sunday’s temperature was in the 80’s. More than 15 miles away, I could still see the movement as the clouds roiled up, carrying the remains of thousands of trees into the sky.
The fire is about 20 miles north of us, but it’s too big to fit on the camera screen.
Taken after sunset, as the colors start to become muted. Monday into Tuesday, there is a cold front that’s expected to drop rain followed up by more than a foot of snow, which will hopefully help end this fire. It tripled over the weekend to about 90,000 acres.
Thirty+ years ago I worked for the National Park Service and was part of a regional fire team, responsible for fighting fires in my own park unit but also subject to deployment to another area of the country. I watched news reports of the bad fire season out west and started to get excited about the possibility of a trip to a western forest, a chance to see one of these huge fires in person and hopefully do my part to end it. Things may be better coordinated now, but back then, when I received the word, I had to take my gear, get to the feeder airport and then get to the main airport to meet up with the other firefighters. I looked very different from the other passengers on the commuter jet. Thus began many episodes of "Hurry Up and Wait".
We rushed to assemble, then waited hours for our charter airplane. We flew across the country (not knowing where we were going, but rumors abounded) and got to the airport at Medford, Oregon. There, we waited on the runway, trying to catch a little sleep because it was about 4AM, until we boarded a series of school buses and headed off into the darkness. We arrived at a bustling forest camp that had a few permanent buildings but many more temporary facilities, including a large mess tent. We disembarked and grabbed our first meal - not bad, but not gourmet either.
Word filtered through our squad that once we were fed we were immediately going on the line - most of us without any sleep from the trip. The forest was Umpqua National Forest and it was one of those forests in the Pacific northwest (southern Oregon) filled with towering Douglas Fir, pine and spruce. We rode our buses up through various logging roads, then disembarked and were assigned tools and roles.
The main organizational unit was a squad (fire team) of 20 people. Of those 20, there would generally be a squad leader, a third of the crew doing cutting of bushes and trees, a third doing digging and clearing and a third for other tasks, like lugging a watercan or being assigned (one or two) to assist the guys with the chain saws who are tackling bigger challenges than we could. The tools include shovels, the pulaski (an axe on one side, and a hoe on the other side of the head),
Pulaski (USFS and Wikipedia)
the McCloud (a kind of rake on one side and a longer hoe on the reverse),
McLeod tool (wikipedia). You can also see the yellow Nomex fire clothing, a hard hat and a happy firefighter (not me).
clippers, a backpack pump which would hold five gallons of water with an attached pump squirter so that you can send a stream of water several feet precisely. There are some other various tools, but those were the main ones we used. Beyond these hand tools, key items include backpacks with canteens, lunch and snacks, the fire resistant shell tent-cover (can't recall the exact name, though they have been referred to as wraps for baked potatoes), helmet, leather gloves, work boots (not steel-tipped) and the yellow Nomex infused clothing that is highly fire resistant.
We lugged our tools, backpacks, and various other accompaniments up and over trails, following our squad leader as he tried reading the maps drawn onto topographic maps by the fire commanders. We didn't have much of a grand plan that was disclosed to us. We just hiked to a designated location where we found a relatively quiet area of fire and we began to build fire lines at the direction of our squad leader.
The goal when fighting a fire is to rob it of one of the three legs that fire depends upon — heat, fuel and oxygen. You can take away heat by cooler weather (attacking the fire directly in the morning or at night, but staying farther back in the mid-afternoon) or putting water on the fire, which causes the fire to have to expend energy to warm up fuel and then it can burn it. You can take away fuel by physically removing it (raking, cutting trees down, setting a backfire, utilizing fire breaks like trails and roads). You can remove oxygen by burying the fire with non-combustible materials (dirt, sand, water, even blowing it out with air, if it’s strong enough). Fire gets stronger in hotter temperatures, when it burns lighter, drier materials like grasses and twigs, compared to logs, and with wind that brings fresh oxygen.
The goal of most wildland firefighting isn't to extinguish the flames directly. Rather, it's to dig lines into the soil so that "mineral soil" is exposed. "Mineral soil" is the bare dirt or rock that's not flammable. To expose it, you need to scrape off or dig out needles, leaves, roots or other burnable materials so that you have a continuous line that is wide enough that a fire will burn up to the line and not be able to burn any farther. This is removing the fuel from fires, and letting the fire burn only what you are willing to let be burned.
Backpack pump of the style we used. Now it appears many are made of plastic or rubber of some sort so they’re collapsible. (Wikipedia)
Our first day, after breakfast we were bused to a starting point, walked to a spot and we were given a line to follow where we would be building a fire line about three feet wide through a meadow and clearing. We were not close to the fire — it was tough to even see the tops of the clouds of smoke through the tall trees. However, from the worried looks on our crew leader’s face, it soon became clear that we might be in the way of the fire while it was burning at its fiercest.
The fire had two directions that it could go. One was away from us and one direction would head straight for us, without our having an opportunity to be able to get out of the way. Our fate would be decided by the wind, topography (fires like to burn uphill much faster than downhill) and chance. Our crew leader discussed the situation with us and had us verify that we all had our little fire shelters and knew how to use them. Years later, in Glenwood Springs in Colorado, a hotshot crew of fourteen, (the best and most experienced wildland firefighters) was caught by a fire and those little shelters were not able to protect them from the might of the fire. Fortunately for us, the fire headed away from us and we were able to finally be picked up from our location, bused back to camp, and finally we were able to get to the mess hall and then be assigned locations for our sleeping bags. We were able to have our first sleep in about 40 hours.
I was on this fire crew for the next two weeks. The first week was spent actively fighting the fire, working very long days and varying my duties. Some times I was actively fighting the fire by building fire lines right where the fire was burning. I would use a McLeod or Pulaski, occasionally a backpack pump and a couple of times I was assigned to carry tools and equipment for the chainsaw lumberman who was an independent contractor. I would chop down bushes, scrape off vegetation and chop through roots to make sure no fires were burning below the surface. It was likely, had we not done that work with the roots, that a fire might linger in the base of a tree or travel under our fireline and pop up hours or even a few days later and ruin the work we had done.
The second week was mostly mop-up duty, with a great deal more of the digging up of potential hot spots, checking with our hands whether there were still fire and coals out of sight that needed water or just exposure to the cool air to help put out the final bits of the fire. We shifted our base of operations to a location by Umpqua Community College and I can remember bedding down next to long rows of blackberry bushes, heavily laden with fruit. I don’t recall ever thinking about bears coming to store up food for their winter hibernation — but I was definitely happy to eat them myself. Earning overtime the first week was great. The second week, without overtime but just the same pay as back at my home park, started to try my patience. I was ready when I returned home.
Some of the various scattered memories from the trip:
- Trying to catch some sleep on a chilly, windy airport tarmac while waiting for buses to arrive and take us to the fire.
- The confusion and just doing as I was told while having far less information I am used to about where I am, where my efforts are being placed, where the fire is and why I’m doing what I’m doing. Mine was not to wonder why, but it was to do and live.
- Being pleased I was in good enough condition to do the hiking through the mountains and stopping to do hard manual labor to build trails and stop the fire. Thank you Tae Kwon Do.
- Lunches of white or wheat bread, coldcuts or peanut butter, bag of chips, piece of fruit and sometimes a candy bar. I learned to like Payday bars and I still think about the fire line when I see those in stores.
- Taking my place along a road that was being used as a firebreak. I had to walk into a wall of smoke with only a bandanna to filter my air and stand there for about a two hour shift, making sure any embers that drifted over the road would quickly be extinguished. I would learn later when I returned to my home park of firefighters in other locations who were being incapacitated because the fires they were fighting had poison oak that was being burned, causing the caustic oils to float in the air and be breathed into their lungs. I am very glad I never experienced that.
- One of the hazardous situations we had to be aware of was the potential for fire-weakened and even lumberjack-cut trees falling on firefighters. We had to keep our eyes going in all directions to look for hazards.
- Another situation that was more immediate — we would be walking through the burned forest — essentially like walking through a fireplace — and we had to be very alert for trees who had roots that were still burning but they were buried beneath ground, ashes or beneath debris. The story I heard, and it drove home a point that I still remember whether it’s true or just a scary story to make me pay attention, was of a firefighter who stepped wrong and their boot went down into a cavity made by burned out roots where the coals were still hot. The firefighter had their foot caught in that hole and couldn’t get their foot out while it was being roasted by coals. I was very careful watching where I put my feet but even so, there were some times where the footing was treacherous and I thought of coals beneath my boots just looking to roast my foot.
- One evening — the Monday that started my second week, we had a break and we were able to watch my favorite team of the time, the Miami Dolphins, play the undefeated Chicago Bears with Mike Ditka as the coach, Jim McMahon as QB and William “The Refrigerator” Perry. The Miami Dolphins won the game and it was the only loss for that Chicago Bears team that would go on to crush the New England Patriots in their first Superbowl. It was surreal being in the student lounge of the community college, watching a football game after having spent more than a week in the forest around there battling wildfire.
- The experience at Umpqua Community College came back to me when a student went there and killed nine others and wounded eight before taking his own life once he was wounded. The fifth anniversary of that is coming up on 10/1.
- The food at the camp was good and basic. We also would get some showers to help clean the grunge off, as well as some laundry for our clothes. I saw people from federal agencies fighting this fire on USFS land, but I also saw local teams of firefighters, a squad of Native Americans and also a couple of squads of convict labor.
- I still have my souvenir T-shirt with the names of the three fires we fought on it — Apple, Jack and Clover.
There are other experiences I can relate — fighting very different fires back in my home NPS unit where people would call 911 and sometimes the city would be first on scene with regular fire trucks instead of our pickups with water tanks on the back, what the different types of fires were — we generally would be fighting grassland fires rather than forest fires, but they also were often out in minutes rather than days, smells from fires, and also what the training involved.
I will be interested to hear other stories, be they from firefighters or from people who have experienced wildland fires directly or indirectly. The floor is yours...