Flashes to ashes: Life on the front lines of forest firefighting
B.C. firefighter’s memoir recalls a mix of adrenalin, boredom, satisfaction and frustration
In Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir, B.C. firefighter Aaron Williams writes the story of a fire season, in this case 2014 in British Columbia. In this section, he’s working as a squad chief fighting the Euchiniko Lake Fire that July, working on the ground and in helicopters.
The evening ops meetings are getting worse. They’re filled with excessive thank you’s and exclamations of what great work everyone is doing. When dealing with bureaucrats, there’s an inverse relationship between the thank you’s and the amount of work that’s been done — the less work you do, the more you’re thanked for it.
They’re changing overhead teams for this fire. The new team is from back east, way back east. These men and women are here from the Maritimes and the differences between the B.C. ground crews and our new overlords are stark.
The outgoing B.C. management team thanks them in advance (as if a well-compensated trip to the fairer half of the country were some kind of burden). Dan, Warren, Rob and I are standing up in the back with wet boots and empty stomachs, making wide eyes at each other when the tangents get particularly obscure.
After the meeting I rush to get dinner and catch Kara and Chris finishing up their meal.
“I frickin’ love you guys,” I say as I sit down at the picnic table with my food. “What do you mean?” asks Chris. “It’s just good to see you.” It is good to see them — something genuine after all the platitudes and lengthy self-justification speeches. Most people who become forest firefighters don’t stick around longer than a few years and don’t climb any higher than crew member status. These meetings are a good warning to stay away from what’s up there. Best to do what Kara and Chris are likely to do: take advantage of the wellpaid seasonal work for a few years, then move on.
We continue flying into a remote part of the fire, building hose trail and hosing. We spend too much time in the grey area between hosing and patrolling. If you don’t get every little hot spot when you’re hosing, it’s hard to cover any ground when patrolling. You end up digging at spots with your Pulaski (an axe-like hand tool) for hours when water would have put everything out in a fraction of the time. On the other hand, hosing a quiet fire can become mostly an exercise in setting up and taking down your econo hose, moving along the fire’s edge trying to find bits of heat. Moving econo from one thief to another along the hose lay often takes about half an hour.
I milk each spot more than I should, searching for pockets of white ash — the stuff that billows up in gritty clouds when you hit it with water, making it look like you’ve actually found heat. By noon the situation is bad; I’m dogging it hard. Not far away the fire catches a break and starts blowing up. Three days of drying and its rest period is over.
Out of boredom, I walk to the edge of the creek to get a better view of the fire. At the water’s edge I see the sun shining on a grey wall of smoke rising from the timber. It’s tough to be chained to this section of the fire when there’s more exciting stuff happening elsewhere. The new overhead team won’t change anything, though; they’re in over their heads and quick to press the panic button.
“The panic button” is not a metaphor. It’s the button for their mic in the heli- copter. They spend a lot of their day monitoring the fire from the air. They have the ability to communicate with us on the ground through the radios strapped to our chest packs. From the air it’s a disaster. Along the creek, it’s quiet. We hose as if watering a vegetable garden.
The flight out tells a different story. There’s fire everywhere. We’re at the far eastern end of the burn. Looking west there’s a nearly steady flame front. It slithers along the forest floor and weaves through the treetops, pulling unburned timber into the orange fray. There’s nothing but fuel ahead, good fuel — open logging blocks littered with cured wood. We’ve missed our chance to get ahold of this beast after it was tranquilized by the rain. Why can’t we kick these things hard enough when they’re down?
On our last day, we drive to main staging. Within its scraped parameters are at least 50 pickup trucks, several port-a-potties, heavy machinery, burnt-up fire gear and tens of millions of dollars’ worth of helicopters.
We park and take in the scene. Wretched contractors smoke cigarettes and cough and spit. Others lounge on truck boxes or joke with their friends. Groups of managers scurry around with maps, trying to get people working on this 15,000hectare-and-growing fire before the booze-free tailgate party gets too big a head of steam.
When these big groups of firefighters have hung around for too long, everything is on the table. There are physical contests of all sorts; often the games involve feats of strength, throwing rocks or jumping over something. A few years ago we were at a staging area set up in a provincial park outside Kelowna. Visiting crews from Ontario and Quebec made a ball out of duct tape and a bat out of a stick and played a game of baseball. Ontario versus Quebec, a friendly match complete with umpires.
Ahelicopter drops us off at the fire, and I help Dan and Brian carry hose to the end of a hose trail. We’re moving away from the creek, closer to the flame front we saw from the helicopter last night.
We’re dragging previously used lengths. I try for eight at once, leaning in and straining everything. No movement. I remove two lengths and the shed weight lets me inch forward. The weight I’m dragging puts me horizontal to the hill. Sweat pours off my face. There’s no target muscle group for this exercise; they’re all involved or the train doesn’t move.
After making it up with one load, I head down for another. This time I carry rolled hose, four skewered on my Pulaski, four hanging from my shoulders. Some can carry six; others can carry as many as 12. At about 45 kilograms total, eight is good enough.
I lift the Pulaski over my head and rest it across my shoulders. The hose couplings sink into my skin, grinding muscle into bone. I sweat worse on this second trip. With each step my legs quiver.
This is the best, cheapest way to fight fire — a person stringing hose through the bush. The tools we use to put out fire are almost as primitive as fire itself. The work has been resistant to change. Sure, we use water bombers and scan for heat from helicopters these days. But it’s the hand tools and hose that still get the best results.
In other industry jobs the tools have changed. Everything is automated now. Until just after I was born, my family was in the logging business. The stories I heard as a kid were all about loggers. Loggers climbing up and down mountainsides, falling trees with chainsaws; mechanics working through the night underneath huge machines. It was all physical stuff. My parents and grandparents talked about the wiry strength of these workers, the amount of food they consumed.
By the time I was born most of the work that required cafeteria trays to be used as dinner plates had dried up or been automated. Over time I’ve realized that’s partly why I’m here. I missed that era, so hauling 45 kilograms of hose up a hillside will have to suffice. Even if it’s only on a handful of days a year.