Mayson Lisonbee, 21, sawyer on the Salt Lake Unified Fire Authority crew. National Geographic photo by Mark Thiessen used with permission.
Regular readers of Wildfire Today are familiar with some of the work of photographer Mark Thiessen. The fact that he works for National Geographic should tell you a lot about his skill with a camera. Mark recently posted an article that included portraits of wildland firefighters.
Portraits are frequently taken in a studio, or for a couple about to get married, they can be shot outside in nice, clean, pretty places. One reason for that is that the conditions need to be carefully controlled if you want predictable, good quality, well-lit photographs. The environment where wildland firefighters work does not have anything in common with a photographer’s studio or a city park, but Mark did not let that stop him from hauling lighting equipment out to the fireline where he took portraits of members of the Salt Lake Unified Fire Authority crew, a Type 2 Initial Attack Crew, where they were working on the Fork Complex of fires near Hayfork, California.
On the last day [of their 21-day assignment], Cody Werder, a Los Angeles city firefighter said, “We have a new appreciation for how hard these handcrews work. It’s unbelievable how hard they work and are so knowledgeable.” He jokes, “fighting structure fires is like child’s play.”
It has been two years since Brendan McDonough lost his 19-member firefighter family. On June 30, 2013 the Yarnell Hill Fire claimed their lives when a firestorm roared through brush 90 miles northwest of Phoenix, leaving McDonough the only survivor of the 20-man Granite Mountain Hotshot crew.
The day before, he had been sent home sick by Jesse Steed, Captain and second in command of the crew. The next day on the fire near Yarnell, Steed, as the acting Superintendent may have thought that McDonough was not quite 100 percent recovered when he assigned him to serve as a lookout for the crew – staying in one spot observing the fire, taking weather observations, and updating the rest of the crew on the status of the fire and where it was in relation to their location.
As the other 19 firefighters inexplicably left the safety of an already burned area and hiked through unburned brush toward a ranch – previously identified as a safe place – a sudden wind shift turned the fire in their direction. Pushed by strong winds created by a passing thunderstorm, the fire burned over the crew, killing them all, even though they sought protection inside their emergency fire shelters.
McDonough, in a different location, escaped uninjured after getting a ride out of the area in autility task vehicle (UTV) driven by a firefighter from another hotshot crew.
He now lives in Prescott, Arizona with his girlfriend, his four-year-old daughter, and the girlfriend’s three-year-old daughter. He likes Prescott, he says, but acknowledges that it’s tough for him to live there. “Every sticker, every shirt, every corner is a memory,” he says. “But Prescott is such a loving town that I couldn’t leave. I’m really rooted here; I love it here.”
L-R: Brendan’s daughter Michaela, Brendon, Ali, and her daughter Zoe. Photo courtesy of Brendon McDonough.
HIRED ON WITH THE GRANITE MOUNTAIN HOTSHOT CREW
McDonough was not a first-round pick when he was hired on with the crew. “Three guys washed out,” he says, “Eric Marsh told me, ‘If you can keep up, we’ll keep you.’”
“The hotshot crew was the best thing that ever happened to me. It saved my life. I probably would have continued doing drugs, I probably would have ended up in prison or with an overdose – or dead. I was a dad before I got hired. I felt like a failure because I couldn’t support my daughter, because no one wanted to hire a felon. I couldn’t even get a job at McDonald’s flipping burgers. It was a dark period in my life.”
McDonough says he’s thankful for the others on the crew who taught him about being both a dad and a hotshot. “They taught me all they knew, and they also taught me how to be a man, a well-rounded man. Family life. That’s what the brotherhood is really about.”
“That is what I lost that day,” he adds. “Not just a hotshot crew or nineteen fire brothers. I lost my family.”
Superintendent Eric Marsh had been assigned as Division Supervisor that day, in charge of the part of the fire that included the Granite Mountain crew, temporarily supervised by Steed. When the fire shifted and moved toward McDonough, the rate of spread increased dramatically. “Hey, it’s about time for you to get out of there,” said Steed over the radio. McDonough agreed.
He said his evacuation from the area was a close call but not chaotic. Walking out, he met up with a member of the Blue Ridge Hotshots, who gave him a ride out.
Do you know why the crew left the safety of a previously burned “black” area and decided to walk through unburned brush toward the ranch?
Wildfire Smoke Map, morning of August 31, 2015. WeatherUnderground.
Monday morning’s map shows some of the smoke produced by the fires in California and the northwestern states is moving northeast into Montana and Canada. New fires in west Texas north of Pecos are producing copious amounts of smoke spreading northeast all the way to the Great Lakes area.
There are no Red Flag Warnings in effect today in the United States.
To see the most current smoke reports on Wildfire Today, visit the articles tagged “smoke” at https://wildfiretoday.com/tag/smoke/
The Sheep Fire, burning near the BNSF railroad tracks just south of Essex, Montana, has caused the intermittent closure of the tracks to Amtrak and BNSF trains. Since it is in the best interests of the railroad and the firefighters to suppress the fire as quickly as possible, BNSF is cooperating in various ways, including transporting fire personnel in a caboose car and using a crane and flat cars to remove slash from a shaded fuel break being constructed by feller-bunchers.
The Sheep Fire, part of the Thompson-Divide Complex, has burned about 2,100 acres on the Flathead National Forest.
Below is a video showing the feller-bunchers in action, and after that is a slide show of photos taken by Jonathan Moor of the Information organization on the fire. Mr. Moor also shot the video.
“Tactical athletes”, also known as the 1972 version of the El Cariso Hotshots (missing Superintendent Ron Campbell, and Bill Gabbert who was behind the camera). Click to enlarge.
Charles Palmer, who spent 20 years as a firefighter and smokejumper, describes wildland firefighters as “tactical athletes”.
Below is an excerpt from an article in the Seattle Times.
…Physically and mentally, the demands of the profession are such that Charles Palmer, an associate professor at The University of Montana who studies performance psychology of wildland firefighters, considers such workers “tactical athletes.”
“These aren’t people who ride around trucks and squirt water on stuff — this is really demanding from a lot of different angels,” Palmer said. “You travel around, you have to perform, they’re getting very little downtime, they have nutritional challenges … physically you have to perform really well.”
In one study, Palmer screened wildland firefighters for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). He said about 20 percent tested above the established cutoff score.
“It’s very possible a high percentage of folks who work as wildland firefighters have ADHD,” he said. “If you start thinking about a profile, people with ADHD are very comfortable with risk. They like fast-paced environments. They like activity. They like moving around.”
Front-line firefighters burn between 4,000 and 6,500 calories each day and need 7-10 liters of water each day, said Brent Ruby, director of the University of Montana’s work physiology department.
“Perhaps the top 10-15 percent of the average population can do this job based on fitness levels,” said Joe Domitrovich, an exercise physiologist with the National Forest Service.
But the Marshawn Lynch comparisons only go so far.
“They don’t get paid like a professional athlete would,” Palmer said. A 2013 National Parks brochure advertises pay of about $10-17 an hour to firefighters, before overtime or hazard pay, but base pay varies widely. Base pay for entry-level state Department of Natural Resources wildland firefighters starts at $12.50…
The author of On the Burning Edge, a book about the Granite Mountain Hotshot crew that was virtually wiped out fighting the Yarnell Hill fire in 2013, has written a long form article about the August wildfires in the west. A good portion of the piece by Kyle Dickman profiles Tom Harbour, the U.S. Forest Service’s National Director of Fire and Aviation Management. I don’t recall seeing such a personal look at the man who wields power at the top of the USFS firefighting food chain — with the possible exception of when he answered our 12 Questions.
…To contend with California’s regular fires, the Forest Service set up two command centers, with one, in Redding, called North Ops. Redding sits in a bowl in the Sacramento Valley, and as Harbour arrives, the wind is filling that bowl with eye-stinging smoke. On the grounds, a long-haired smokejumper in flip-flops pedals a cruiser bike around the base while air tankers loaded with fire retardant take off from the runway. The mood isn’t festive, but one feels the excitement and gravity of a shared sense of purpose. The command staff hustle about to send firefighters and gear to the front lines. Several stop to shake Harbour’s hand. He joins a briefing headed by Paige Boyer, the assistant director for fire and aviation management for Northern California.
“We really want to get that fire off the map,” Boyer says to a half-dozen of her colleagues gathered before a map. “We want it out of the public eye.” Boyer taps the northeast corner of the map, where red colors the fire where a firefighter died.
Three days earlier, Harbour had flown to Alturas, Calif., to pay his respects to the family of that engine captain, 38-year-old Dave Ruhl. He’d disappeared while scouting a fire near the city limits. His crew didn’t find his body right away, and while CNN and the Associated Press zeroed in on the details of the first fire death of the 2015 season, Harbour arranged to meet his folks, as he’s tried to do for each of the 163 firefighters—both Forest Service and non—lost on duty in the past 10 years…
