The firefighters collapse in driveways and fields to steal a moment’s rest. They sleep in their engines, sprawled across fire hoses or slumped over steering wheels. After days of hacking dead brush and setting defensive fires across flaming mountains, their 24-hour rest breaks are cut short when a new fire rears up.
In this relentless wildfire season, when fire crews and resources are stretched thin from the foothills of the Rockies to Alaska’s wilderness, the latest enemy confronting firefighters is not flame. It is grinding exhaustion.
“Everybody’s beat,” said Paul Fleckenstein, a battalion chief who spent the past two weeks fighting a wildfire that killed four people and destroyed 1,958 homes and other buildings in the parched mountains 145km north of San Francisco. “There’s nothing left to give.”
Illustration: Mountain People
Fleckenstein knew he was getting tired when he climbed into his red-striped truck after a full day defending the pine-shaded neighborhoods where the blaze had erupted on the afternoon of Sept. 12. It was 2am, and he was planning to check on nearby crews, but he ended up kilometers down the road, with no memory of having driven so far.
“My body just failed me,” he said, as he drove past the white ash of homes he had tried to save that night.
Fighting wildfires has always been draining, dangerous work, but firefighters say they now are being flung from one huge blaze to the next, using the same old axes and scrapers to fight a new species of mega-fires born from years of drought, while dealing with rising temperatures and government policies that filled the woods with tinder. Fire seasons that once ran from May to September can now stretch to Christmas.
Even with 29,000 firefighters working across the west, officials had to call up the National Guard and active-duty troops this year to supplement. Residents have pitched in. Fire officials are letting some blazes burn, keeping crews and equipment on fires that threaten lives or homes.
And firefighters say they are working at a furious pace to keep up.
“There are no fresh bodies coming to work because everyone is at work,” said Mike Lopez, president of the union that represents firefighters with California’s state fire agency, commonly known as Cal Fire.
This year, Cal Fire issued a safety bulletin about the dangers of working while tired, and reminded fire leaders to follow guidelines that suggest an hour of rest for every two hours of work.
However, Lopez and other firefighters said the prescribed routines of 24 hours on and 24 hours off had been scrambled by the punishing litany of fires.
They snatch bits of sleep, sometimes digging out foxholes to bed down in the woods.
On rest days spent at fire stations, they said they sometimes answer 911 calls because the regular crews are in the woods fighting wildfires. On the fire lines, even the nighttime’s lower temperatures and lighter winds no longer offer a reliable ebb in a fire’s intensity.
After two or three straight days of trudging through the woods carrying between 23kg and 45kg of gear and water, they keep going by telling inside jokes and through sheer inertia, they said.
Smoke burns their eyes and lungs. Sometimes they stoop over to vomit. Days blend. They eat MRE field rations, Pop Tarts and energy bars.
“Let’s go, bro,’” they say. “If I’m still going, you can, too.”
“You have to keep yourself moving,” said Curtis Tinloy, 23, a seasonal firefighter who has a second job as a high-school water-polo coach. “You have to keep one foot in front of the other. You have to keep going.”
As California plunged into its fourth year of deepening drought, fire crews were braced for a vicious fire season. Mountain snowpack had shrunk to its lowest level in hundreds of years, reservoirs were emptying and hillsides were carpets of dead and drying brush.
Brandon Bertolino, a fire engineer, said he knew this season would be different as he drove to a 0.2 hectare fire near a dam in Lake County and saw ember-driven fires spreading across the front yards of nearby houses. Flames leapt across valleys and spread with ease. Low-intensity ground fires scampered into treetops, slipping past the reach of crews with drip torches and hoses. Houses they could once protect with burn lines were now regularly engulfed.
“Usually we don’t lose homes,” Bertolino said. “Now it’s become like a normal thing.”
About 3.64 million hectares have burned across the country this year, about 50 percent more than the average of the past 10 years, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
Thousands of homes and other buildings have been destroyed across the state.
This summer, a fire captain from a front-line “strike team” east of Sacramento wrote a letter to the firefighting union complaining that, after a full day of firefighting in Napa County, his crew got a midnight reassignment to another fire and started a fresh 24-hour shift with just two hours’ sleep.
A spokesman for Cal Fire said there had not been any increase in fatigue-related episodes this year.
Billy Bauman, 37, a fire captain, said there was a particular demand for the five-engine strike teams that attack the leading edges of fires.
“We’re so short on resources,” he said. “If you have an opportunity to disengage at all, you take a power nap just so you don’t drive the engine off a cliff, but sometimes you just can’t do that.”
David Lindsay, 22, a first-time seasonal firefighter, had been working for days on a Napa County fire when his team members were released to shower, sleep and wash their clothes.
As they were driving away, they saw a thick new column of smoke rising from the hills and heard the call over their radios: “Return, code three.”
The next day, at the station for their “24 off,” the firefighters had lain down for about an hour when the alarm sounded. Back into it.
“We didn’t really think much of it because we were off. Then we looked out the window,” Lindsay said. “Our captain said: ‘Well, wake up, time to go back to work.’”
When the Valley Fire broke out here two weeks ago, firefighters who had been deployed to other corners of the state scrambled to confront the blaze as it grew to 28,328 hectares. Lindsay hopped onto a fire engine, but forgot his “red bag” — a sack with fresh clothes and other personal gear. He spent three days borrowing other firefighters’ socks and turning his underwear inside out.
Bertolino and a small crew had worked through one recent night to cut dead brush from homes and hose away the encroaching fires. They had protected a swath of homes tucked deep into stands of pines and manzanitas, but they were exhausted.
Their battalion chief approached them to say they could drive down from the mountain to rest, but there would be no reinforcements arriving to protect the neighborhood.
The chief who broke the news was Fleckenstein, who is now in his 28th firefighting season, and whose own firefighter father had been permanently injured when a roof caved in on him.
Fleckenstein had seen homes survive and others burn, but he said he choked up that afternoon telling the firefighters to get some rest.
“Having nobody to relieve and walking away from everything we’d accomplished, knowing the strong probability it was going to be lost — it was too much to swallow,” he said.
Later, when the firefighters returned, they saw that those homes — unlike so many others — were still standing.
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