|
Last Updated:
Apr 21st, 2005 - 21:10:55
Affiliates
Powells.com
Favorite Links
American Friends Service Committee
Friends Committee on National Legislation
National Catholic Reporter
British Broadcasting Company
The Guardian
Christian Science Monitor
LA Times
SF Gate
Oregonian
The Register Guard
Environmental News Network
Sojourners
Orion
Swans Commentary
Federation of American Scientists
Car Free Times
Indy Media
AlterNet.org
Common Dreams
The Nation
Utne Reader
Eugene Weekly
Willamette Week
Portland Tribune
Bitter Lemons.org
The Travels of our First Webmaster
|
|
|
Voices of the Northwest
It's a brand new year and already time for the wildland fire fighters of the Bureau of Land Management's Eugene District to prepare for the upcoming wildfire season. Same old line up of mostly men, average age about 50. The Pepsi Generation is not filling the ranks at Eugene District. We all have other jobs but we step up to the plate when the balloon goes up.
A decade or two past, the District would put out two 20 person hand tool crews all fire season long. This fell off to one. Then we would put together a composite crew with the local Forest Service people. Then half a crew. Then a squad. As far as I know, I was the last individual from Eugene District to fight fire as a grunt when I went to Colorado in 2000 with a crew of teenagers and 20 somethings from the Middle Fork Ranger District. They lacked one body to make up a 20 person crew. I was old enough to be their father.
Most of us have evolved into REMF (Rear Echelon Merry Fellow) jobs in fire camp or become helicopter crew members as we have aged. These are all important jobs and fire fighting couldn't happen without supply johnnies, equipment managers or helicopter managers and manifesters. Last summer I found myself at 10,000 feet in Colorado with a squad of other heliculls above Glenwood Springs mopping up with cold steel but this is exceptional. The pre-season hoops for fire fighters have gotten tougher and tougher as time has progressed. It used to be that you stepped up and down on a box to the beat of a metronome for five minutes and somebody took your pulse and looked up the number of beats per minute on a chart that must have been created by Smokey Bear in the 40s. This was finally scrapped five years ago when somebody noticed that some real athletes couldn't pass this test while some total Baby Hueys could.
Now all front line fire fighters must pack a 45 pound ruck three miles in less than 45 minutes on the local high school track. You don't have to do this to qualify for a REMF job but helicopter people do. You don't have to be Special Forces material to pass this test but you must be in some sort of shape. I had almost 5 minutes to spare last year. As the vast majority of agency (BLM, FS, Nat Park Serv) fire fighters turned forty, extensive physical exams were required. When we started "pack testing" with rucks, a few people died of heart attacks around the country while training for the pack test. We were then required to undergo even more rigorous medical screening to include an EKG on a treadmill.
This year we are to be subjected to the most exhaustive physical exam yet, I am told. I get to do mine the middle of January. The Department of the Interior, of which BLM is a part, attempted to make arbitrary random drug testing a integral part of this, using a 12 year old policy stating that "primary" fire fighters must submit to random drug testing. Primary fire fighter are hired primarily to fight fire and get special early retirement. Eugene District's union tabled the concept that when we "militia" or part time fire fighters, get early retirement, we will gladly submit to random drug testing. Then, too, we resent that only "arduously" carded grunts are expected to submit to RDT while high level fire managers are exempt. At any rate, the random drug testing went away for now.
I am sure that somebody is re-writing the policy as you read this and it will be back next year. I pointed out to the State Office's labor/management relation specialist that I no longer fly commercial air to fires as I am tired of being searched at each and every flight change as we get one way tickets and one way tickets=automatic search. Now I drive to a fire or I don't go. When Big Brother expects me to fill a bottle on demand like a trained monkey, there will be one less 50 year old fire fighter in the system.
The Bush Administration's current pogrom of outsourcing federal jobs is not helping agency fire fighting moral. If successful, I don't know where contract helicopter people are going to come from. I won't be one of them. Assuming we pass the new physical qualifications and the pack test, we then sit through a half day fire refresher where the lessons of Mann Gulch and Storm King are reviewed. Then we are given our new red cards for the year and made available though the Incident Command System. I spent 75 days away from home last summer. It is not dissimilar from the army. I make more money in a day fighting fire than I did in a month as a private, even with jump pay. Uniforms, chain of command, tents, long queues, eating garbage and sleeping in the dirt. Even the helicopters are the same. I wear an army surplus flight helmet.
One pilot in Utah mistook me for some sort of rookie last year and asked me if I had ever ridden in a helicopter before. I had just looked at the little manufacture plate on his ship which stated that it had been built in 1974. I was able to inform the pilot that I was riding in helicopters before his machine was built. Every wildland fire fighter in the US should be able to fit in Autzen Stadium at the same time.
The numbers fluctuate but there are really very few of us when the West explodes with multiple major ragers like last summer. No incident commander wants another Storm King to happen on his watch so we fight fire a lot less aggressively than we used to. This is not entirely a bad thing. I have helped fly out minor casualties before but never charred bodies. I would like to keep it that way. Most helicopter crew members have a decade or two of hand crew experience. I am a late bloomer in the fire scene but I still have more than a hundred incidents, small and large under my belt.
When the old folks like myself have finally been harassed out of fire fighting or just decide to have a life in the summer, the critically short list of Helitack (Helicopter Initial Attack) personnel will be even shorter. Most of our few new agency employees are not interested in eating smoke and being dirty for two week stints. We are hanging in there with our bifocals and knee braces in our early fifties. We turn the volume all the way up in our flight helmets. We are grey and bald and have white stripes in our beards. Somebody is going to have to step up to take our places one of these years.
Norm Maxwell, heliattack, Eugene District.
Copyright ©2003 by Norm Maxwell
Norm Maxwell is a Bureau of Land Management Fire Fighter, on the ground and with a BLM helicopter crew, and an union negotiator. Norm is also a writer who celebrates his unique western perspective. You may contact him through the Fire Road Defense League.
For more WxNW.org articles on Fire Road visit:
Remember Fire Road:Summing UP
The Continuing Battle for Fire Road by Norman Maxwell
The Tentative Truce of Fire Road by Norman Maxwell
Fire Road's "Lake Lorane" by Norman Maxwell
On a more personal note --
A Song of the Open Road
The Fire of South Canyon: Remembering Storm King by Norm Maxwell
Home, Home On Fire Road by Norm Maxwell
© Copyright 2000-2004 by West By Northwest.org
Top of Page
untitled
|
|
|
