Congrats on making a big jump from wildland to the structure side after so many years.
Not sure where you are at location wise, but how was your probation with having that much life experience behind you?
Is your life like the TV show Rescue Me?
When facing a fire, do you have a momentary pause where you think “I may not make it out of this”? How do you overcome such fear and fight fires with such bravery?
My life is boring in comparison and I can’t imagine how it feels to put yourself in these situations time after time. I’m very grateful that you do.
We are trained to read the conditions, control the conditions and to treat firefighter safety as the number 1 priority. Adrenaline and urgency don’t really give you space to stand around and think up fears. You just follow your training when you need to act. When you don’t need to act it’s all safe and you crack jokes with other firefighters.
There was only really one oh-fuck moment that I remember. It was during a backburn. The dozer had pushed some big trees to the fire side of the trail and when we it it up the fire got really big. I was outside the truck the radiant heat started burning my face. I sort of went into a huddle on my haunches, put my collar up (we have really big collars), my visor down and after a minute or two, hightailed it to the safety of a truck.
How much can you bench press
It’s not quite that simple. We have to be able to drag a 100kg person out of a very hot building while wearing 15kg of equipment which restricts your range of movement while on your hands and knees with zero visibility.
Ideally, a firefighter needs to be strong, but not bulky (though some are). Excess muscle just adds weight so ‘wiry strength’ is more practical. We also have to be flexible to be able to work while crouching, have good cardiovascular fitness, and be able to deal with peak stress conditions. I wear a smart watch and it’s not unusual for me to exceed the theoretical maximum heart rate for my age. I train specifically to push my heart above the cardio range.
Do you have any fires that stand out in your memory? Take this as your open ended question to share any stories you want an excuse to tell.
I’m in Australia and Black Summer (September 2019 to Jan 2020) was horrific. The scale and intensity of the devastation was completely unprecedented.
It was a time of enormous stress for everyone. The entire eastern half of Australia which is roughly equivalent in size to the area from Florida to the Canadian border was blanketed in smoke and whole towns were destroyed. Over 10 million hectares of bush burned. It is estimated that over 3 billion animals were killed or displaced.
The only thing on the news was the fires, and everyone was constantly glued to the apps which told them where the fires were as they watched the fires get bigger and bigger and closer to their homes every day. Carbon monoxide exposure has been linked to depression and I personally believe that part of the reason we have a mental health crisis at the moment is due to that fire season.
Fires were burning through rain-forest gullies that normally are too wet to burn. Once rain-forest burns, it takes hundreds of years for it to return to a rain-forest ecosystem as the plants are not fire adapted. Whole species have been pushed to the verge of extinction by the destruction of their habitat.
Those fires were when I decided I no longer had any time for climate change deniers. Shit’s got real now.