A day on the fireline

By Misko Finlayson

Picture this! You wake up in your tent to the sound of songbirds singing early in the morning. You get dressed, eat a filling breakfast, grab your gear, and walk 300 meters to your worksite…which happens to be on a fire. Welcome to a wonderful day on the fireline!

Our first day begins by scouting the fire from the air on a helicopter and determining that it is safe to do an initial attack (IA). Once we find a safe landing zone close to the rear of the fire, we unload our gear and get to work. Efficiency is crucial when it comes to an IA and with a crew of just four individuals, we rely heavily on one another to do our specific roles and to do them well.

While the crew leader goes ahead to scout the fire on foot, checking for safety hazards and noting priorities, one crew member will setup and get our water pump running. Meanwhile, two other crew members lay hose from the pump site all the way to the fire’s edge. Our goal on the first day of an IA is not to extinguish the fire entirely, but to stop the outward growth of the perimeter. We do this by wrapping it, meaning we lay hose and wet the vegetation around the entire fire in one big loop. This can make for a very, very long day depending on how big the fire is.

By the end of day one, your feet are sore, you’re covered in soot, and you’re so hungry you could eat an elephant, but you’ll find yourself smiling from the good work you and your crew did.

The crew, after doing a final safety check of the fire to make sure it’s contained and won’t spread past the perimeter you just wet down, goes back to shut down the pump and set up camp. Such an active day at work requires a big meal to refuel our bodies. We eat anywhere from 4000 to 6000 calories per day to keep up with the physical needs required of us out on the fireline.

For the next couple of days, all our efforts are put towards mop-up, which means extinguishing the fire in the entire interior. We put water around the edge of the perimeter slowly working our way in by 10, 20, up to 30 feet, until we have sufficiently laid water on everything we can see and there are no more flames or white-hot ash visible. However, before we can remove any of our gear, we must be 100% confident there is no heat left anywhere on the fire. We do a final check called cold-trailing where we coordinate a sweep of the entire fire and stick our hands over and in the dirt to make sure there’s no heat below the surface that might cause trouble in a couple days time.

Once the fire’s completely out, camp is packed, and the gear is bundled up. The fire crew gets back onto the helicopter, a little dirtier than when we first arrived, to go to the next fire.

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