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Local firefighter home from fighting California forest fires
LOWER SALFORD » Sam and Jean Pfister have each been volunteer firefighters for more than 30 years.
Life members of the Harleysville Fire Company, they also joined the neighboring Towamencin company 11 years ago when they moved.
“All four of our kids were firefighters, at Harleysville and then Towamencin, too,” Jean Pfister said.
But that’s not the only firefighting they do.
Sam, Jean and one of their sons, Nathan, are also members of the Northern Bucks Wildland Fire Crew, which helps fight forest fires throughout Pennsylvania.
Sam and Jean have also each been part of teams of Pennsylvania firefighters dispatched to fight forest fires in the western part of the country.
Jean was in one of the two groups of 20 firefighters each that left Aug. 1 for northern California, returning to Harrisburg Aug. 19 and back home the following day.
“People around here don’t understand what they’re going through out there,” Jean Pfister said.
During the time she was there, her crew helped fight three fires, including
a night where “the whole mountain was on fire,” she said.
“The temperatures are over 100 degrees, and it is so dry out there. Montana right now just had 62 new fires start from lightning strikes within the last couple days, and we don’t hear any of this on the news,” she said in a Sept. 1 interview. Other fires included one in Los Angeles.
Dangers include falling branches, which have killed some firefighters, along with heat-related health problems and broken ankles while hiking rugged terrain, she said.
“You’re watching the fire, but you also gotta watch above you because there’s a lot of those snags that can actually fall on your head and kill you,” Jean Pfister said.
Senior members of the firefighting trip she was part of rated it as one of the three biggest ones they’d been on for the number of fires, she said.
“We understand that forests do need to burn. They have to burn every year, but not to this extent,” Jean Pfister said.
In contrast to the western
part of the country, the wetter than average summer in Pennsylvania has kept the state largely free of forest fires so far this year, she said.
Sam Pfister said one of the things that initially piqued his interest in fighting forest fires was the different challenges it presented.
“Here, if this building would catch on fire, the fire truck pulls up at a hydrant and they got water,” he said.
“Out there, there’s times on the mountains, we didn’t have any water,” Jean Pfister said, “so the way we put
fires out, you’re digging. You’re digging in the dirt, rubbing it on the logs that are burning.”
In other cases, the firefighters had to lay hose all the way down the mountain, then when the fire was extinguished, roll it up and carry it back down the mountain along with the pack and tools also carried, she said.
The pack includes water, food and other items to help make sure the firefighters can survive 12-hour and longer shifts, the Pfisters said.
“Here, when you’re doing structure stuff, you’re doing it for a couple hours and you’re done,” Sam Pfister said.
Fighting forest fires is different, he said.
“It’s just go, go, go until your shift is done and then you get a little rest, like three or four hours of sleep, grab some chow, get cleaned up as best you possibly can — sometimes you don’t have that luxury,” he said.
“And then you’re right back at it,” Jean Pfister said.
The crew Jean Pfister was with slept in tents.
“Where we were the first night, we were forewarned that they found five rattlesnakes, so we were told to keep our tents closed and to be careful at night if you had to get up to use the porta-pots,” she said. “Needless to say, I stayed in my tent the whole night.”
The terrain also added to the difficulties for the firefighters.
“I thought Pennsylvania mountains were steep,”
Jean Pfister said. “Some of the mountains that we were on were straight up.”
The altitude was another issue for the Pennsylvanians, she said. The first fire they fought was more than 6,000 feet above sea level.
“The first night I was out there, I did not expect to feel the way I did when we were climbing the mountain, but after the third day, you get used to it,” she said.
The crews fighting the western fires are expected to be there for at least two weeks at a time, Sam Pfister said. That makes it difficult for some people to get vacation time from their job to join the crews, he said. Jean has summers off from her job at Souderton Area High School, but had to take off from her summer job in Grand View Hospital’s emergency room, she said. Sam works for the Lower Salford Sewer Authority.
When he went last year, Sam said, he was away 17 days, including travel time.
Initially dispatched to western Montana, his crew spent a day and a half there, then was moved to Idaho, where it was the only initial attack fire crew covering a large part of the state, he said. The crew spent much of the time in a parking lot waiting for calls, he said, along with being dispatched to three small fires to assist in the mop up after smokejumper fire crews arrived first.
Although many people assume she and Sam go to the western fires together, that isn’t the case because only one is called at a time, Jean Pfister said.
They could be called to go together to fires in Pennsylvania, she said.
Last year, when there was a large fire in the Poconos, though, son Nathan was the only one of the family members able to help fight it because Sam and Jean had just gone on vacation.
“Pennsylvania, you think that we don’t get fires like they do out west, but here we had one,” Sam Phister said. He and Jean were disappointed they didn’t get to go to that fire, he said.
The Pennsylvania firefighters who help fight the fires in the western states are technically summer help employees for the state of Pennsylvania, Sam Pfister said.
“We have to take a test every year to qualify in order to be put on a list to go out west,” he said.
Along with the physical agility testing, the firefighters have to have taken training courses and continue to take refresher courses, he said.
Training with the Northern Bucks Wildland Fire Crew takes place in September through April, the Pfisters said.