Tag: Jeanne Pincha-Tulley

Jeanne Pincha-Tulley, Incident Commander of one of the Type 1 Incident Management Teams in California, was featured earlier in a story in The Union in Grass Valley, California.

Here is an excerpt:

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Years of sleeping in the dirt and spending weeks away from her family haven’t extinguished Jeanne Pincha-Tulley’s love of corralling blazes.

The 49-year-old mother of two boys has followed fire all of her adult life, a passion that has led her to become the first and only woman incident commander of a national fire team.

“Does it take a lot of brains to do that? No. It takes a flak jacket and lot of Motrin,” Pincha-Tulley joked from her office as forest fire chief at the Tahoe National Forest headquarters on Nevada City’s Coyote Street.

“You don’t camp out in the dirt for nothing. You want to do something for the common good,” Pincha-Tulley said.

Last summer, Pincha-Tulley led her team in Ketchum, Idaho, during the 48,520-acre Castle Rock Fire, which singed the outskirts of the resort community of Sun Valley. Local celebrities Bruce Willis and Steve Miller threw a concert in honor of the firefighters after the team saved their homes.

Pincha-Tulley’s team arrived in Mississippi four hours after Hurricane Katrina devastated the coastline.

“We had a grand time. There was devastation everywhere. We were literally saving people from trees,” Pincha-Tulley said.

Jeanne Pincha-Tulley has been invited back to the town that was threatened when she, as Incident Commander of California Incident Management Team #3, managed the 48,52-acre Castle Rock fire that some feared would burn the homes in the Wood River Valley near Ketchum, Idaho. An article in the Idaho Mountain Express describes her in glowing terms, including calling her the “darling of the Wood River Valley”. With all of the controversy that surrounds much of the wildland fire world these days, it is refreshing to see some good news about our firefighters.

Here are some excerpts from the article:

“Jeanne Pincha-Tulley, darling of the Wood River Valley who oversaw the successful fire-fighting effort last summer that kept the 48,520-acre Castle Rock Fire from overrunning homes, lives and businesses, is returning to the valley for a visit next week.

On Thursday, Feb. 21, Pincha-Tulley will participate in a public conversation at the Presbyterian Church of the Big Wood in Ketchum.”

and:

During the wild time that was the Castle Rock Fire, Pincha-Tulley’s presence became a calming factor in the local community. During successive public meetings, she gave local homeowners, public officials and others frank assessments about where the fire was headed, and what actions firefighters would take to control the fast-moving blaze.

Time after time, Pincha-Tulley achieved the near impossible. Standing in front of crowds that typically numbered well into the hundreds, she managed to restore calm to local homeowners inching toward panic due to the proximity of the flames and the scarcity of information.

Rumors bandied back and forth through the community were quickly dispelled by her fact-based reports.