I met a man who was a paramedic firefighter and he introduced me to a tiny rural fire department called Rio Rico Fire District and it was a turning point for my entire life. Class after class was offered to me, and I discovered that even more exciting than drinking and racing through the Metroplex at top speed, was responding to calls for service as a volunteer firefighter.
My early training was that of a Wildland firefighter and that was where I found my groove. Hiking miles into the Nogales mountains to put out fires on the sides of mountains that were caused by either lightning or border crossers, (who would sometimes set them when they got lost and needed help),was dirty, exhausting, and dangerous. We carried just the tools on our backs;usually just shovels, axes, pulaskis, chainsaws and our fire shelters, euphemistically called our,"Shake and bakes".
It was every firefighters worst fear, to hear a voice crackle across the radio saying,"No route out, deploy shelters NOW!" Often we discussed what we would do, run or deploy? I always knew I would just run. The shelters were terrifying tools that did not guarantee life, in fact, the salty old chief who trained me and my young crew in their use advised us that we might not even want to live if we had to deploy them. We were told that if they had to be used, then we were facing certain injury and burns. As I stood in position with my shelter, waiting to drop to the ground with it over me, he walked the line of us pointing out the members of my team who had shed their gloves,"You will lose all your fingers, maybe your hands too because you took off your gloves. You will cook the top of your head, put your damn helmet back on. You, put your damn pack back on, you want to lose all the skin on your back and ass? Pull up your bandannas over your faces, tuck your chins to your chests, try to bury your faces in the dirt as much as possible to protect them and breathe shallow breathes to keep the super-heated air to a minimum, but if you are in a thickly covered, brushy area, you are fucked! Find dirt and get in it." He had us drop and cover with the bulky, canvas-like shelters and then he walked among us, pulling and tugging on them to simulate the stress that the weather a fire would create would put on them. After a while it got quiet and we lay there, the rocks and ants as well as the sweltering Arizona heat making us miserable as we contemplated the horror of having to use such a device and I knew then, as a survivor of being burned as a child, I would never be able to do it, I would run and just a few short months later on the side of one of those mountains, I did, I ran like hell itself was after me, and I escaped with only losing the hair on the back of my neck, parts off the backs of my ears, and 6 weeks of dispatch duty for disobeying a direct order.
Storm King happened during my service as a firefighter, and standing memorial for those firefighters hurt, and it still does. I remember hearing about it and how it changed how we did things in public safety in the days before all the fancy technology and GPS. I had hopes with all the changes in tech and things available that maybe things had advanced in fire shelter technology so that there was a better chance for those who had to deploy them, that maybe there was some kind better reflective cloth or better cooling system, something, anything that would make the lives of the crews a little less risky, but it appears that there have been no advancements, that the same damn military spec lined canvas shelter that does nothing much more that offer containment for the recovery, and that is sad. We lost 14 on Storm King, now 19 in Arizona, and that's just THIS YEAR, and its the ones that are getting attention because they are in such huge amounts, but Wildland Firefighters/Hotshots, die almost every single season! They put their lives on the line to save property and lives because the Forest Service often doesn't or cant thin the forest the way they need to in order to prevent disasters, so we mourn for a few weeks, then move on to going back to castigating a little old Southern lady for admitting she said a bad word 20 years ago.
Shame on us.
