After years of lurking it has occurred to me that I have something interesting to contribute. I graduated from college last year and worked one season on an engine in the Pacific Northwest. This season I will be working for a hotshot crew in the Southwest. Fire at will…
What sort of psychological assessment do you have to undergo before being hired? The papers here are forever full of theories that the pyromaniacs who start the fires are actually members of the fire fighting brigades (particularly the voluntary ones).
We had one of the California wildfires come within half a mile of our property this summer. I love you guys 
The Castle Rock Fire in Idaho could have taken out my town in August '07. Bunches of you guys saved our asses.
Cunctator, our fire was started by lightning. At least I don’t have some asshole pyro to blame for it.
Most are started by lightning here too. But many are intentionally lit, according to the experts.
Yeah, people do seem to talk about that quite a bit, although I haven’t personally heard of it actually happening. Firefighters here are generally hired full-time during fire season, so there is less incentive to start fires for work. I’m not sure whether Australian fire works differently–I’ve heard it’s a mostly volunteer force?
There was the Rattlesnake Fire of 1953 which killed 15 firefighters in California. A firefighter was convicted of starting that fire for work.
But to answer your question, there’s no psychological assessment, per se, as part of the hiring process. I’ve gotten both of my jobs after some email & phone contact and a 15-20 minute phone interview. I believe they’re pretty diligent about checking references also. A good attitude is the most important hiring criterion, but I’m sure a secret pyromaniac could get in pretty easily.
But they say we’re all pyros anyway…
What fire, do you know? I worked on the Caribou fire and the Blue 2 fire in late August. I think those two were both controlled with no structures lost, fortunately.
And thanks
Does anyone hate firemen? I mean really, what’s it like being a part of the worlds most beloved profession?
(The Coral Gables Fire Dept’s weekly frisbee/carwash in little tiny red shorts did a lot of PR for firemen everywhere, that was almost 20 years ago and I still remember it fondly.)
Do ya’ll get involved much in the where and the why? I’ve heard a lot that the recent huge fires are because years of little fires didn’t get to burn. What is your opinion on that, if you have one.
Did ya’ll freak out if a neighbor brought you food? I always want to make food for my local firehouse, but I’m afraid they would call me a freak and toss it. I make really good bread too!
You definitely would not want to see some of my coworkers in tiny red shorts.
I would have been thrilled if someone brought us food and I can’t imagine anyone else reacting otherwise.
In my experience firefighters do tend to feel strongly that prescribed fire is underused and that forests are less healthy as a result. I’m sure this has nothing to do with the fact that prescribed fire is the most fun part of the job and results in overtime… More on this later when I have a little time.
:: waves ::
Volunteer fireman and EMT paying respects to a colleague. I’ve done a few wilderness fires myself, but never a long-term event. They’ve all been resolved within a day’s time.
How you doin’?
Firefighters in little red shorts?
How you doin’?
It was the Martin Fire that started (probably accidentally) in an ecological preserve. Our firefighters had barely finished fighting the Summit Fire when it started and were all exhausted but within 30 minutes CalFire had a dozen engines there and none of our volunteer firefighters up here were injured. By morning there were over 800 firefighters working it and cutting bulldozer lines to contain it. They were amazing - it raged for 3 days and only 2 homes and a bunch of outbuildings were destroyed before they got it contained. Everyone already knows that firefighters risk their lives, but when it’s your home and you see the guys that saved it, it’s a whole other thing. People who weren’t evacuated organized themselves and bombarded the staging area with food, opened up their showers and pools and afterward the roads were lined with “Thank you” and “we love you” signs for weeks.
Damn, that whole thing was so scary. I get an adrenalin rush just thinking about it again. This * is one of my favorite pictures. The building that the flag is hanging from is our volunteer fire department - it got close enough to melt it.
- Photo by Shmuel Thayler, Santa Cruz Sentinel
Stan Schmenge does. He made his feelings known here, here, and here
Eventual Pit thread.
::: gives the secret firefighter handshake to HellsBreezeway :::
I’ve been on some simple brush fires, but never an actual wildland fire. I have great respect for what you guys do.
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I talked to an (urban) EMT a few years ago who, to my surprise, identified with and liked cops much more than firemen. Thought the fire guys just sat around all day, wheras the cops were actually useful in keeping him from being shot at.
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There’s at least some mixed feelings about the Boston FD union right now, thanks to a spate of stories over the last year about firefighters supposedly on full disability competing in bodybuilding competitions, suspiciously large amounts of firefighters going on disability at just the right time to boost their payouts (with injuries supposedly sustained while moving files, stepping off of the curb, etc.), and firefighters who died in fires having their autopsy reveal that they were legally drunk at the time. And the union is still trying to get a better contract by threatening the Mayor with bad publicity.
Cheers! We probably sweat more on a daily basis, but if I ever found myself entering a burning building I’d need to change my drawers when I got finished. Much respect. And if you’ve IA’d a couple wildland incidents you’ve done the fun part anyway.
Final warning, you don’t wanna see that
Love that picture.
Driving through Northern California late this summer I saw a fire burning up in the hills near I-5. I stopped for gas nearby and found out from the woman behind the counter that she had just evacuated her house. She was clearly terrified. It would be awful to go through that.
And yeah, I’ve seen a few of those signs, they’re great to see.
Oh, I don’t know, just having that job automatically bumps somebody up on my sexiness scale. Especially since various colleagues of yours, you know, saved my town.
Seriously, though, that is a hard job. I am impressed with everybody who does it, whether for a season or all the time. raises her glass…well, coffee mug
We had “thank you” signs everywhere for months. I still have one I kept.
I had just moved here a few days before it all happened. Hell of an introduction to the area, but I love it here anyway.
Do you work in shifts? When you need to sleep do you have a camp or do you make your own? When you go into a fire, what do you take with you?
I live in Butte County and we had a zillion wildfires last summer (mostly from dry lightning storms). Yay firefighters!
I’ll confess to a near paralyzing fear of burning to death. I’d rather die any other way. So pretty much anyone out there, who might, on any given occasion, be called upon to save my sorry ass from that fate, will always, always have my utmost respect.
My husband decided to plug in a coke machine we’ve not used in about 7 years. The damn thing started throwing sparks and billowing smoke. Had it started about 1 minute earlier, I would have been on the opposite side of the house and completely oblivious. Made me wish I had gone down and serviced the fire dept
Then I thought how suspicious it would look, virtually everything we own has been moved to a storage unit, our house is probably going to be foreclosed upon and all the vehicles were gone. It would have been a damn handy time to have a fire in retrospect. JUST KIDDING! And this juncture, I’ll take any humor.
I once helped a family recover their belongings from a fire, we spent weeks trying to clean the smoke smut off of everything. I remember distinctly the high chair. I can’t imagine how terrified they must have been, or devastated.
Prescribed fire is a complicated (and polarizing) subject and I’m not an expert. Of course it’s plastered all over the news when a burn escapes and destroys homes or kills a firefighter. It’s harder to judge whether a fire was controlled sooner and with less expense as a result of good forest management. I’ve been through areas that were treated in patches with prescribed fire and the difference was very pronounced. To put it simply, the treated areas looked good and the untreated areas looked like a potential disaster under the right conditions. I don’t know of any comparable way to treat large areas of woods that are reaching a dangerous fuel load.
The key, obviously, is to schedule your burns at the beginning or end of the season, when the temperature and humidity are moderate and you can get a nice underburn instead of a crown fire. The timing and the final decision to burn are a matter of judgement. In my experience, burning is only performed under a detailed plan that includes cutoffs for temperature, humidity and wind speed and also includes a contingency plan for an escape. Right before I showed up for work last year, a burn on a nearby district got too rowdy and required a major response. It wasn’t an official escape because it was contained within the original contingency lines, but it resulted in soul-searching that went on for months. Nobody got hurt and one can only hope that people learned from it.
In any case, I’m convinced that prescribed fire is a necessary risk. It’s a matter of doing it right.
The 3 days that we were evacuated for were some of the longest and worst days of my life. No one had any information about where it was burning, which direction it was moving, and how many houses were lost. Some people just couldn’t grasp that part of the reason is that they’re too busy to do hourly press briefings and the other part is that the last thing they need are devastated residents trying to sneak back in who might need to be saved themselves. People were freaking out at all of the barricades, making everything worse. We had 2 kittens and a dog with us and were staying in a little RV with them and it was just a nightmare. Later when we saw some of the pictures we could see that they had been fighting the fire right up to the porches of some of the houses.
We have controlled burns up here very frequently and people always complain. I doubt they will after this year.