Opinion Fighting Wildfires, Processing Death By MATTHEW DESMOND Published: July 6, 2013 WHY young men from the country become firefighters is hard to explain to people who are not from the country. For most of us, it’s not about the rush, which fades with time, or the paycheck. We could earn more working for the railroad or a car dealership. I figure it’s about the land. It’s what we know best — these woods, dirt roads, small towns — and if given the chance to make a living outside with our backs, under a blue, hot sky, then by God yes we’re going to take it. Over the past decade, Arizona has seen drought and fire. The Rodeo-Chediski fire of 2002 claimed 465 homes. The Wallow fire of 2011 burned an area nearly half the size of Delaware. And now this heartbreak: the Yarnell Hill fire that started nine days ago has taken 19 members of Prescott’s Granite Mountain Hotshots. Seventy-four people died fighting wildfire between 2008 and 2012. That’s about 15 lives lost a year — sometimes in a single, horrific moment. In 1994, Colorado’s South Canyon fire took 14 of us. Montana’s Mann Gulch fire of 1949 took 13. Now 19 are gone just like that. The writer Joan Wickersham has said that tragedies cause us to think two incompatible thoughts: “Why?” and “Of course.” We search for answers while already knowing them. Of course: wildfires can burn so hot they create their own weather systems, melt trucks, and leave the landscape barren and ashen; firefighters call it moon-faced. They can barrel through the crowns of trees, launch embers that spark fires miles away, or burrow underground through root systems and spring up behind you. A fire in a forest is alive with terror and power. Yes, but why? What happened at Yarnell? It is a question that will be pursued by an investigative team determined to discover “lessons that can be learned.” And it is a question, I think, implied in the repeated description of the Granite Mountain Hotshots as “the elite of the elite.” If they were the best, how could this burnover have happened to them? Most watching the smoke column from a distance do not have to dwell long on this question. “Fires take even our best,” they might say, blaming the fickle wind, as some spokespeople have begun to do. But the young men and women working the fire line cannot accept this. For firefighters, there is no “of course.” Those 19, many will think, must have made a mistake. They lacked a proper escape route, some officials now surmise. As one of my crew members told me in 2003 after a Hotshot supervisor died in a nearby forest, “You really have to do something wrong when you’re dealing with fire, to be in a situation where it takes your life.” We were trained to process death this way; told from Day 1 that, as a training handout put it, “fire shelter deployments have always been attributed to violations of The 10 Standard Fire Orders and the 18 Situations that Shout Watch Out,” the core set of rules and guidelines all wildland firefighters know by heart. We were taught that if you are forced to deploy your fire shelter, you have erred. You might have failed to know what your fire was doing at all times (the second fire order) or to keep informed about fire weather (the first). If firefighters didn’t focus on missteps that led to burnovers, fire would appear a dangerous chaos. And it is certainly true that sometimes firefighters break the rules with deadly consequences. But we cannot claim with perfect certainly that entrapments are always a result of violations of “the 10 and 18.” Fire can move faster than our rules, which sometimes have to be bent to battle a blaze effectively. Plus, some of the orders are fuzzy. What does it mean, exactly, to “Fight fire aggressively, having provided for safety first,” the 10th order? There might be a cost, too, to focusing on the faults of the fallen. A human error approach may increase firefighters’ respect for the rules, but it also necessarily makes them more self-reliant. An article circulated in training courses explains that “each of the 10 Standard Orders are prefaced by the silent imperative ‘YOU,’ meaning the on-the-ground firefighters.” The message is clear: if I am competent and follow the rules, I will be safe. One of my crew members liked to say, “I trust one person and that’s myself.” He was trained to think like that. But too much self-reliance among firefighters is dangerous. It can lead to a breakdown in the chain of command and poor teamwork. According to several studies, the source of many fatal entrapments has been firefighters’ “can do” attitude or “a culture emphasizing individual work rather than group work.” The thing is, crews that exhibit a high degree of self-reliance are not the exception but the rule. An unanticipated consequence of the way firefighting agencies like the United States Forest Service explain accidents and deaths to their firefighters — by emphasizing rule violations — is the promotion of the idea that each firefighter is ultimately responsible for his or her own safety. This idea, which pivots upon the importance of the individual, not the group, might make firefighting more dangerous than it has to be. Instead of personal responsibility, agencies could design training exercises (like fake fires) that emphasize leadership and crew cohesion or recast the fire orders to stress teamwork. It might also mean a different reaction to death. Sometimes, we really can’t know what happened on that blackened hillside. Sometimes, nature is bigger. Matthew Desmond is an assistant professor of sociology and social studies at Harvard who served four seasons as a wildland firefighter in Arizona. He is the author of “On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters.”
Posted on: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 04:14:36 +0000
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