When a wildfire ignites and firefighters are called to put it out, they not only bring the equipment they need to battle the fire. They also bring a whole logistical system to take care of their personal needs. Sometimes on the big fires, that support system becomes quite an operation.
You can get a sense of what that looks like this week at Deer Park High School, north of Spokane. It’s been turned into a mock wildfire camp, a place where nearly 400 wild land firefighters and 100 or so instructors and support people are preparing for the summer wildfire season.
Gayne [GUY-nuh] Sears is the district ranger for the Forest Service offices in Newport and Sullivan Lake. But this week she’s also learning how to work with reporters who cover wildfires. She walks us around the converted fire campus. Ahead of us, on the baseball field, clusters of domed pup tents pop up from the green of the outfield.
“The sleeping area has been identified out here. We have a group called the logistics folks, or facilities, and they set up where the sleeping areas are. Whenever there are inmate crews, there’s a separate sleeping area,” Sears said.
There are port-a-potties and hand-washing areas, an extensive kitchen and a mess tent. You can hear the hum of generators powering machines that help to run that kitchen and even a shower facility.
“There’s about six or seven small stalls in that shower unit. Nobody brings bath towels, right? So we use big, paper, large paper towels that are six by four or something like that. You take a couple of those and you dry off, dry your hair and what not and then it gets thrown away,” she said.
On longer fires, Sears says the agencies sometimes hire a laundry service to wash clothes for firefighters.
Inside the high school, the firefighters neatly stack their helmets and other equipment along the walls next to the classrooms where they spend a good part of their days. In one of the rooms, fabric boxes filled with sand sit on tabletops.
“This is scenario and roleplaying," Sears said. "So you get a crew together and have a lead on the table who’s a very experienced firefighter, usually. So they set up scenarios and there’s various things that are meaningful here. This typically is like a stream. They would have roads. They would have where the vegetation is. And then the trainees would have a crew boss or crew leader and them as crew members and they would use this to role-play that situation.”
More than a dozen agencies have sent their people here for training. Gayne Sears says many are young people on their first rotations who are just learning the basics.
"You have to take these 100 level classes before you can take, just like in college, the 200 level, the 300 level classes," she said. "And those get documented in a way we call a red card. So the red card is that certification of those skills that you are able to do on a fire situation. For instance, there are three levels of chainsaw operators. There’s the very basic level, there’s a medium level, then there’s a very highly-skilled level that can assess a very dangerous type of tree and determine whether or not they have the skills to even drop it.”
One of the skills taught here is how to deploy your shelter when fire gets too close. It’s the nuclear option, the last resort for a wild land firefighter.
“The fire shelter has been required equipment for wild land firefighters since the 1970s," said a voice on a video extolling the virtues of fire shelters. "Since that time, shelters have saved hundreds of lives and prevented hundreds of serious burn injuries. If entrapped in a wildfire, shelters are used to provide some protection from the fire’s heat and smoke.”
After watching a video, groups grab containers the size of small shoe boxes. These boxes hold the tightly-wrapped shelters. The participants, in this case, reporters invited for the day, head outside to practice.
The goal for firefighters is to unwrap the shelters and then cocoon their bodies in them within 30 seconds.
Sears says the training will continue here through the weekend. Firefighters will be taken Saturday day to a controlled burn site for a simulated fire.
“They will be crewed up into 20-person crews and they’ll be given an assignment to learn how to put into practice their line-building skills, their communication skills, their safety knowledge.”
Others will be cycling through the facility for the next several days, some staying only a few hours to learn more specialized skills. When they’re finished, the men and women here will be called to go all over the region — and perhaps to other parts of the country — and spend their summer in fire camps just like this one.
