An Epic Fire Season Is Coming. These Firefighters Are Ready

Every year, California's smokejumpers parachute into the jaws of massive conflagrations.
A smokejumper floats down into the Shasta Trinity National Forest during a training exercise.
A smokejumper floats down into the Shasta Trinity National Forest during a training exercise.Finlay Mackay for WIRED

It's impossible not to be impressed by America's smokejumpers. Every year, the elite group of firefighters deploys into the heart of burning wilderness, parachuting into the jaws of some massive conflagration in the middle of nowhere. This team is the first on the ground trying to stop the spread of the blaze.

Sharing a building with the smokejumper base at the northern operations center in Redding, about four hours north of San Francisco, Mark Garland is easy to overlook. But he and his team are the unsung heroes of firefighting in this dry, dangerous region.

They operate the cache that supplies wildland firefighters from the Bay Area all the way north to Oregon. As the heart of firefighting in the region, they send everything from flame-retardant clothing and firehoses to cots and sleeping bags when and where they're needed. During the height of fire season, the cache operates 24 hours a day.

The job gets harder year by year. Persistent drought and decades of fire suppression have crusted the west with dry brush waiting to burn. Fires are increasing in size and intensity, and the season is getting longer. "Nowadays fires seem to burn so much bigger and so much hotter," Garland says. "And our warehouse is staying the same size."

The same challenge is met by all the teams that play a role in the western wildfire-fighting complex, a constellation of local, state, and federal agencies, from the state-run CalFire to the National Park Service to the Bureau of Land Management. With temperatures soaring in the summer and years of dried-out fuel littering the landscape, the firefighters are now in the midst of intense preparation. These weeks before the worst of of this year's fire season---itself expected to be one of the worst seasons on record---are literally a matter of life and death. Wildland firefighters are killed or injured each year fighting the flames, including 19 who lost their lives in an Arizona wildfire in 2013.

To fight fires effectively, every team needs to be well-outfitted, well-trained, and well-informed. Garland used to fight fire as a "hotshot"---like smokejumpers without the plane, this class of firefighter works in the backcountry primarily with hand tools. So he knows how important it is for them to get their supplies. "The way I see it, if I have a fire that doesn't get their order that same day, then I feel like I've failed," he says. "That's not an option." A well-stocked cache is the foundation of a safe and successful fire response. The rest is in the execution.

Atop one of the office rooms, a fire cache employee has built an homage to smokejumpers.

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Fighting logistics

In a clearing on Slate Mountain, half an hour north of Shasta Lake, firefighters float down from the sky. These are the members of the smokejumper crew based at the operations center in Redding, alongside Garland.

Despite the parachute, they hit the ground with alarming impact. They're trained to hit the ground with both feet, tuck themselves into a ball and start rolling, to make the landing less jarring.

All the same, bones get broken, especially femurs. Today they're rehearsing what to do in the case of a medical emergency. Cam Mooney is a volunteer who helps medical training and dispatch for the area's smokejumpers and hotshots. With everyone safe on the ground---parachutes detached and Kevlar landing suits unzipped---he walks into the middle of the field and shouts, "Ow! My leg! Someone help me!"

Smokejumpers practice treating a broken leg during a medical training exercise.

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Half a dozen firefighters cluster around and begin asking him questions.

"Did you come in too hard buddy? Where does it hurt?"

"Give me something for the pain!" he demands. "Ooh, I'm done for the season."

"You're going to make it," comes an encouraging voice.

Someone radios for the medical kit. A shaggy pooch named Rusty Bear trots over, looking like he wants to help. As a firefighter checks on Mooney's mock-injured leg, he snaps, "That's not where my pedal pulse is, you knucklehead," referencing the spot on his ankle where they're trained to check for a patient's heartbeat. "Didn't you go to class?"

It's all about making sure the firefighters will be ready if the same thing happens in the field. "All the training is about keeping people alive and well for longer," says Bill Masten, an instructor at Shasta College (and owner of Rusty Bear). He's running the emergency medical responder course.

"That can mean doing things in the backwoods that you would never do in the city. You wouldn't give a patient liquid, for instance, because you don't want them to pee. In the woods, you do want them to pee. You want to see their pee because it gives you a clue about how well their kidneys are functioning."

The plane that carried the jumpers circles around and approaches the clearing again. From an open side door, a crew member drops a medical kit, but it gets caught high in a tree. So the smokejumpers radio for climbing kits, which also get dropped from the plane---actually, they land more like a missile, and we all have to clear the field and pause the exercise when they're on the way down. Michael Stacky, a second-year smokejumper, dons the gear and scales the tree. "This is when you hope you have a fast climber," one of the firefighters says.

Smokejumpers have to be more or less self-sufficient. In real life, the smokejumpers would be deployed by an incident commander, whose job it is to request crews and equipment based on the severity of the blaze and how much property it threatens. Once assigned to a location, they drop with enough food and water to survive on their own for three days, before hiking out to civilization or getting additional support. They have to be pro campers, first aid experts, firefighters (obviously), and improvisatory engineers.

In fact, one of the most important smokejumper skills is ... sewing. All jumpers sew, says Nate Hesse, who oversees equipment at the Redding base, which is stocked with 14 sewing machines---some sew straight lines, some zig zag, some specialized for heavy duty. The smokejumpers make their own Kevlar suits and harnesses, and inspect and repair parachutes. "We like to keep these skill sets in house," Hesse says. "We know the system better than anyone else."

One piece of gear smokejumpers aren't allowed to carry into wilderness areas: power tools. According to the dictates of the 1964 Wilderness Act, which aims to preserve certain parts of the country in their natural condition, they have to rely on their own muscles. Without chainsaws, they turn to crosscut saws to fell timber. "Sharpening these are a real art---like tying flies," Hesse says. He shows me a training blade in a storage room. Sections of the blade have been marked in Sharpie with jumpers' names. That's who trained on that specific segment. Maintaining a crosscut saw requires delicate hammering to keep the teeth at the correct angles and shaping the metal with fine files.

A smokejumper checks a parachute for signs of wear or damage.

Finlay Mackay for WIRED
Success rate

All of these preparations help the Forest Service do what it does best---catching fires before they get so big that they can't be contained. The services' failures are publicized far more than its successes, but of the 200 fires that have broken out on USFS lands this year, all have been extinguished in the "initial attack," within about 12 hours, burning only 2,400 acres. Last year nearly 1,500 fires broke out in the United States, and all but a few were addressed regionally within the first day.

When fires get too big or complex for local crews like Redding's, they call in for reinforcements. These can be regional (dispatched through a Geographic Area Coordination Center, California has two) or, when the fire is more severe, national. In Redding, as with most other firefighting crews, staffing levels are essentially fixed. The base maintains 26 jumpers year round, up to about 45 at the height of the season. Agencies generally hire as many people as their budget allows.

Staff at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho---a sort of command center for firefighting activities in multiple federal agencies---evaluate the ongoing "Type 1" fires (the worst ones) and prioritize where to send personnel and equipment. That's why the first hotshot crew on the ground at the 2013 Rim Fire in Yosemite came all the way from Georgia. That fire burned uncontrolled for weeks, scorching more than 257,000 acres.

The Shasta Lake hotshot crew in front of Whiskeytown Lake near Redding, California.

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Even the Shasta Lake Hotshot crew can get sent to some other state if necessary. They're one of about 100 hotshot crews in the nation (half of which are in California) who "go where others either won't or can't," says Jeff Michels, a superintendent. "They go to the most difficult places under the most extreme conditions."

If smokejumpers are sprinters---reaching forest fires first and getting out quickly---hotshots are marathon runners. They might spend weeks in the backcountry working to contain a blaze. And their responsibilities are expanding. Hotshot crews help in emergency and natural disaster relief and clean up. They've even assisted fighting fires in other countries.

It's a demanding job. Michels says the biggest mistake rookies make is showing up for fire season out of shape. The fitness test to make it in includes a three mile hike in 45 minutes, carrying a 45-pound pack. Each day while training for fire season hotshots climb a 1,400 foot mountain near camp, and then do something like clearing brush for the rest of the day. It's not for everyone. (Most hotshots are men, but it's common for there to be one or two women on a crew, particularly in the Northwest.)

"The first eye opener is when you have to walk up that hill on the first day," Michels says. "The second eye opener is on about the 10th day, when you haven't showered, when you're eating MREs, and have poison oak all over you. This job, you either love it or hate it."

Shasta Lake hotshots march single-file to Whiskeytown Lake after cutting a firebreak into manzanita brush.

Finlay Mackay for WIRED

And sometimes it's both at once, says Donovan Lee, who has spent 17 years as a hotshot. "A lot new guys have a vision of what a hotshot is," he says. "They picture walking into a room and having everyone say, 'Ah! Look at the hotshot.' But they come out here and realize most of the reward is the sense of accomplishment, and the camaraderie when you're on fires. When the job's done we leave."

Fire prediction

Back at the northern operations center, Basil Newmerzhycky fights a different sort of fire---those that haven't happened yet. A regional fire meteorologist, Newmerzhycky monitors humidity, temperature, winds and lightning strikes to predict where fires are likely to form and spread. "We try to give 48 to 72 hours warning when we can," he says.

In 2012, an extremely active fire season, Newmerzhycky and his team were able to forecast fires due to lightning strikes two days in advance. "We were really hitting it hard and got lots of resources there ahead of time," he says. "I think we had over a thousand strikes, but only had one or two large fires."

That's a big improvement since 2008. "That was actually one of our last big misses," Newmerzhycky says. Thunderstorms came off the Pacific with very little warning, peppering Forest Service lands in Northern California with 5,000 lightning strikes. It was the worst fire season in modern California history.

Fire predictor Basil Newmerzhycky stands in front of a large-scale topographical map, which he uses for estimating wind behavior.

Finlay Mackay for WIRED

He was put in charge of figuring out what went wrong. After a little digging around the meteorological press, he found their models did not include specific measurement of the instability of the mid-level atmosphere. That's critical for predicting lightning strikes. Newmerzhycky asked the modelers to include it, and things have been going well ever since.

Controlling the chaos

Downstairs from the fire prediction office, in a tidy storage room, Mark Garland surveys the well-organized cache with satisfaction. It looks like an immaculate Costco. He knows the work days will be exhausting during the height of fire season, but he seems to be looking forward to it.

"I like the chaos---and I like to be able to control it," he says. He's better at that now. The huge fire season of 2008 was a months-long lesson. "I can still remember, it was on a Sunday when we started getting all the lightning. You're seeing the smoke come up, but not registering in your mind that, less than 24 hours from now, you're not going to get a break until November."

It was at that moment, he says, that he should have started bringing in more people. "But we didn't. So then we got behind the curve for about the first week. We were pulling 18, 19 hour days, just to try to keep up."

Now he enters the season knowing he's in it for the long haul, and doesn't hesitate to ask for help sooner. "We also learned how crowded we can get it in here. We had so many vehicles in here at the same time." During busy season, it's always chaos, he says. "But instead of going 60 different directions, you can kind of rope it in a little. That's the challenge. That's what I like about it."

Smokejumper base locker room.

Finlay Mackay for WIRED