Wildland Firefighters and Covid-19

A New Paradigm

Dear Friends,

I am once again dispatching this newsletter from my (slightly warmer) basement desk. Theres a patch of light from outside making its way in, the curtain opened. I’ve been working hard on my book, HOTSHOT. Yesterday I interviewed Stephen Pyne, a prominent fire historian. It was surreal. I’ve been reading his books for a while, and his knowledge is a deep well. The amount of information I’m soaking in can feel overwhelming but also exciting.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the pandemic, and how we’re asking all seasonal firefighters to trust their supervisors to keep them safe. As a hotshot, I absolutely trusted my supervisors. All three had flaws, but were brilliant when it came to the tactical strategies of fighting fires. They had decades of experience in multiple fuel types. They’d taken hundreds of hours of classes. Their training was on the ground and in the field. Almost all of them were kind and cared deeply about their crews.

Supervisors, though, aren’t trained for a pandemic. No one of our generation is. But they’ve been informed that its their individual choices that will dictate the safety of their personnel. Just this week the Forest Service notified supervisors that the agency won’t be releasing any overarching protocol for its personnel, and that decisions of safety and social distancing would be left up to individual leaders. This move is comparable to that of the federal government as a whole, which declined to take decisive action regarding pandemic policy and safety measures.

When I worked as a firefighter I was paid at a certain level. A GS-5, GS-6. This meant I could tell people what to do, but not too many people. This structure is meant to keep people safe, and asking supervisors to make decisions about how to approach fire season in a pandemic when they aren’t trained to do so is, well, above their pay grade. It’s provides leeway for more gung-ho crews to put their employees in dangerous situations. It puts talented and caring supervisors in very scary situations.

No supervisor would intentionally put their employee in a dangerous situation (I hope), but there are many crews out there who create a toxic, hazing environment where it’s not okay to speak up when you’re sick or injured. Who would want to be the first sick crew member? Would it feel safe to speak up about feeling terrible and thinking you have Covid-19? I’ve been asking myself these questions and thinking of how I would have felt in my twenties, on my hotshot crew. I’m not sure I would have felt safe speaking up. One summer I went nearly an entire season working with a broken ankle because I didn’t want to complain. The stoic attitude of many crews could work against them, and a crew culture can’t change in one summer.

This year could be another disastrous fire season. Already, eighteen firefighters have died in China. Seasonal wildland firefighters are especially vulnerable: they aren’t provided with health insurance. As I wrote about in my last newsletter, they’re not even considered front-line workers by the DOL, and therefore have to prove Covid-19 transmission occurred while on the clock in order to receive care and compensation.

There’s a shortage of sanitation supplies. Firefighters don’t have respiratory protection, and working in heavy smoke makes them more vulnerable to respiratory illness.

My first thoughts are, what can we do at fire camps to keep people safely socially distanced? Hand washing stations? More, please. Chow line? Eliminate it and have individuals deliver food to crews. People standing in line? No, thanks. Create online queues, where personnel can sign up for medical supplies or assistance. Make sure there’s enough testing (which feels impossible when no one has enough testing). Sanitize showers after every use. What about Port-a-Potties? I don’t even know.

My second thought is: now is the time to think about using drones, artificial intelligence, and accelerate the usage of thermal remote sensing. Many people in the fire community are promoting a reimplementation of the 10am policy, which was enacted in 1935, an extreme effort to suppress wildfires. The policy stated that any wildfire had to be suppressed by 10am on the morning following its discovery, and had disastrous consequences for the health of our landscapes, which are still being navigated today. Undergrowth and other fuels accumulated rapidly in the absence of fire, which had been a vital tool used by both Indigenous Americans and settlers to clear land, create fire protection for villages and towns (by burning fuel breaks), encourage new growth of food and basketry materials, discourage pests, and as as spiritual tool.

Removing fire was the wrong choice, and it’s not what we should choose now. Do we need to fight fire this summer? Yes. That’s always a necessity, especially in the Wildland Urban Interface and in culturally and ecologically sensitive areas. But we also need to consider a myriad of strategies, and move with the pandemic, which has its own weather, and will undoubtedly change.

What about managing wildfires? Obviously letting fires burn freely is the wrong choice, as that has sometimes led to massive, uncontrollable fires (good example: the Yellowstone fires of 1988 (although those fires were a part of the natural landscape and fire return)), but what about a strategy, as Stephen Pyne suggests, of box and burn, which safely burns plots of land while also limiting smoke and the possibility of escape?

What about providing encouragement, education, and grants to communities in order to help them create defensible space around their houses and structures? There are many organizations already doing this, and not all of the onus should fall on firefighters in WUI. Homeowners and communities need to be involved, too, and can help keep everyone safe.

What I’m saying is: we need to think about how we’re utilizing our resources. Why aren’t crews out now, burning land that may be more susceptible to conflagrations later in the summer? They could spike out and be a self-supported unit, getting work done that has long been postponed. Why not employ hotshot crews year-round, and have them doing fuels work in the winter, camped out in the wilderness? It sounds crazy, but new solutions can sound crazy sometimes, and we need to be willing to think outside the box.

No matter what we do, we need to be thinking fast, and using all the tools we’ve got. The world we’ve created for fighting fires may not work as well this summer (or in the future). We need to be able to envision an altered world, where employees are valued and protected, supervisors aren’t left scrambling to make decisions without vital guidance, fossil fuels aren’t wasted, and forests and other landscapes are cared for with fire, rather than prevented from burning as they should.

Stay safe out there.

Love,

Anastasia