A ditch: 8 to 10 feet wide, half a foot deep, hundreds of yards long.
Russell Chinske and Jake Parks, two University of Montana students, have discovered that what Hollywood portrays as the adventure and heroics of fighting forest fires often comes down to digging ditches all day -- by hand, with shovels and special axes called Pulaskis. The ditches serve as barriers between what’s definitely going to burn and what the fire crews hope can be saved.
Mr. Chinske and Mr. Parks are among about 9,000 college students who have spent at least part of the summer as firefighters, working in intense heat and dangerous conditions to stretch such fire breaks across thousands and thousands of acres. The men and women fighting fires here in western Montana see no heroics in the work. It’s slow, grueling, risky labor that leaves them exhausted, filthy, and hacking up ash from their lungs.
But to the residents of Montana and other states facing one of the most devastating forest-fire seasons in years, the firefighters are heroes risking life and limb so that the wilderness, watersheds, and isolated houses in the mountain ranges can be saved.
More than 900,000 acres of forest have been destroyed by fires in Montana this year, and about 6.6 million acres have burned in the country as a whole. The fires leave behind 40-foot-tall blackened trees, leafless and rotting, and ground covered in gray ash, like filthy curbside snow. The students were among roughly 25,000 firefighters who spent their summer learning from, as one veteran fireman put it, “the school of hard knocks.”
Why volunteer for such dirty, dangerous duty?
“Make money,” Mr. Chinske answers, his smile gleaming from a face blackened with ash. Besides, he likes working outdoors, likes escaping from the confinement of an office, likes feeling the adrenaline rush of combating flames and 1,000-degree heat. But making $500 to $700 a week, he says, is the hardest part to resist.
“So much of it is digging and walking,” Mr. Chinske says. “It’s good exercise. We’re getting paid to run around in the woods.”
This is Mr. Chinske’s fourth year as a summer firefighter, and it’s Mr. Parks’s first. “First and last,” he laughs. Although he is enjoying the work, he’s ready to move on. “I’ve done a lot of manual labor,” he says. “I’m ready to start a real job.”
Mr. Parks is a sophomore studying art education. Mr. Chinske is senior majoring in elementary education. Neither major has anything to do with forestry or firefighting, and both students plan to become teachers. But both grew up in western Montana, and both say they appreciate its forests and mountains. They now work for Grayback Forestry Inc., a private company contracted to fight fires.
The students’ help has been so badly needed that several colleges in the West are allowing student firefighters to show up late for fall classes. At the University of Montana, at least 160 students have requested three-week extensions to continue fighting the fires.
For weeks now, the forest fires have been the only important topic in these parts. Here in Missoula, where the nearest fire is 20 miles away, the smell of smoke is constant. Some days the smoke creeps in like a dense fog and blankets the city.
Pick up the local paper, the Missoulian, and every story on the front page has something to do with the fires. Articles describe individual fires and firefighters, the possibility of rain and how much it might -- or might not -- help, and the squabbling between Democrats and Republicans over federal forest-management policies and whether they should be changed.
But to the firefighters, the fires just mean they have a lot of work to do.
The days are long. At a firefighters’ camp crowded with one- and two-man tents, moveable kitchens, and portable showers, Mr. Chinske and Mr. Parks and the rest of their 20-member crew wake up at about 6 a.m. After eating a breakfast of eggs and ham -- cereal and yogurt for late risers -- they grab their equipment and sack lunches and get on a bus. The bus travels about 15 miles up a mountain, and then they get on a smaller bus -- one that can make sharp turns on the narrow dirt roads that hug the cliffs.
Then they hike a mile or so, sometimes straight down the steep side of the mountain. The firefighters are weighed down with roughly 30 pounds of protective gear and tools apiece. Like everyone else, Mr. Chinske and Mr. Parks are wearing helmets, goggles, fire-resistant yellow coats and green pants, and 8-inch-high leather boots. Each is carrying tools and a fire shelter, a kind of tent he could crawl into if the fire got out of control and threatened to consume him. The shelter can withstand temperatures up to about 500 degrees. But the fire had better pass over quickly, because otherwise it will suck up all the oxygen in the vicinity, suffocating him.
When they get as close to the fire as their crew chief thinks is safe, they might be ordered to beginning digging a ditch, known as a “handline.” Or, if the fire has already passed through, they might be told to start “mopping up” -- raking up hot ash and mixing it with cool dirt, then spraying water onto the mixture. After mopping up an area, firefighters watch it carefully for smoke, which marks “hot spots” that need more attention to prevent additional flare- ups.
What makes the fires here so difficult to control is that a single wind-borne ember can float as far as half a mile, landing and igniting another blaze. Low snowfall last winter and near-drought conditions this past spring have created dangerously dry areas, and most of Montana’s rural land has had to be closed off to the public.
While staying clear of intense heat and blowing ash, the firefighters also must watch for hidden hazards. Ash pits are often indistinguishable from the ash-covered ground. The pits usually form where tree trunks have burned all the way down into their root systems. The pit’s top may be cool, but the bottom can still be smoldering. Stepping in such a pit could pull a firefighter down, where his boots might burn through before he can be rescued.
Even more dangerous, perhaps, is a snag -- a burned tree that is still standing, but is so weakened that branches might break off at any moment. Or the whole tree might topple. In some cases, fire that gets into a tree’s roots can burn its insides but not its exterior. It may look sturdy, but then the core could give way, and the tree comes crashing down.
Despite such hazards, the firefighters generally work without incident. Safety is the No. 1 concern among the crews, although Mr. Chinske says he knows of people who have violated the rules to try stupid things -- like standing in the way of 350 gallons of water being dropped from a helicopter onto a hot spot.
“You can get your neck broken,” he says, recalling a friend who tried to take the full brunt of such a deluge. “He got up a little slow,” Mr.Chinske says, but the guy was all right.
One of the highlights of Mr. Chinske’s summer, he says, was the day he got to call in a bucket drop himself, guiding the chopper to a particular hot spot. And even when they’re just digging ditches or mopping up, the firefighters try to have fun with their work. During a break for lunch -- which might consist of a ham-and-cheese sandwich, a can of ravioli, and a Nutter Butter candy bar -- crew members might heat the ravioli can on a pile of hot ashes as they wait, a trick of the trade to bring in a little luxury to their work.
The crew members get along well, although at times they have seen fistfights break out among members of other crews. When people spend all day sweating together, they either learn to love each other or they hate each others’ guts, crew members say. On Mr. Parks and Mr. Chinske’s crew, the word “camaraderie” is mentioned a lot.
When the crew members get back from their 8-to-10-hour workday, their faces and clothes are covered in black soot, their bodies coated with the sweat of a hard day’s work. Waiting in camp are dinner, showers, and cots in tents.
Crews often work 14 to 21 days straight and then get two days off, often right before traveling to a different fire. Having seen blazes in Wyoming, Oregon, Idaho, and New Mexico -- for the Los Alamos fire at the beginning of the summer -- Mr. Parks is quick to volunteer an opinion on the hardest part of the job. “It’s strenuous to be away from home,” he says.
Families and significant others must wait while their loved ones move from fire camp to fire camp, usually far from telephone lines and e-mail connections. “I tell my family that no news is good news,” Mr. Chinske says.
The firefighters understand the importance of their work and the danger involved, but at the end of the day, the job is a job. “If you read what the media says, you can get this fake hero complex,” Mr. Parks says. He and other members of the crew don’t let their heads swell.
And if there is a lesson the students learn out here, it’s to respect fire. “We see the power of the fire,” Mr. Chinske says. “When it gets going, there’s nothing you can do about it.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Students Page: A64