Fire Read Online Free PDF Page A

They failed.) The Croman, Casey yelled, carries a bucket that is too big to fit in the retardant tank back at Barber Flats, so it has to use water. It will go back and forth all day between the stream and the fire, directed by ’shot crews with radios. The pilots are so accurate that they can hit individual trees.
    We pounded in low along a ridge and then rose and banked and circled and came in again. I could see yellow-shirted hotshots below us, shrouded in smoke. The fire was down in the valley. Several crews were downslope, strung out along the creeping line of black, and several more crews had just landed at the helispot on the ridge and were waiting for orders to proceed. The helicopter made one more approach and then settled down uneasily onto a ridge that plunged steeply away on both sides. The ’shot crews crouched down against the rotor wash, and the helispot attendant, dressed in a green flight suit and hard hat and goggles, flattened himself behind a boulder as if someone were shooting at him. When the aircraft had set itself down but with the rotors still thumping, the attendant scurried forward in a crouch and opened my door and took me out by the arm. Then he returned to get Casey. Occasionally people back up into the tail rotor or walk uphill into the main one, so there is always someone at the helipad to act as an escort. I dragged my pack over behind some bushes and knelt with my head turned away. The helicopter clattered up over our heads and then continued on to shuttle more overhead around the fire.
    Already the sun was hot, and it was going to be a long day of mop-up. Hotshots consider themselves elite, and a day spent cold-trailing—going through a burned area and putting out every ember—is not their idea of fun. It probably isn’t anybody’s idea of fun, but the type two crews get stuck doing it because by then the ’shot crews have usually been flown to some new emergency.
    Today, however, the fire was not cooperating, as Casey said. Unless the wind picked up, everyone would be cold-trailing. The hotshots untaped the axes and shovels and Pulaskis that had been protected for the helicopter flight, and fueled up the chain saws—big Stihl 44s and 56s that the sawyers carried over their shoulders with a pad strapped to their suspenders—and took last swigs of water. It was hot on the ridgetop, but it was going to be ovenlike at the bottom of the valley, where the fire was burning and the wind couldn’t reach. Crew by crew, they reluctantly filed off downhill: the Helena Hotshots in their bright pink hard hats; the Flathead Hotshots; the Chief Mountain Hotshots from northern Montana, Blackfeet to a man. Casey motioned to me, and we started off down the slope, following a fire line that the type two crews had put in the day before.
    A fire line doesn’t look like much: just a strip of ground scraped down to mineral soil that snakes around the perimeter of a wildfire. There are different kinds of fire line; the one we were on was called direct line, or hot line. It was several feet wide and cut right along the edge of the fire—“one foot in the black,” as they say. When the fire front is really flaming, the crews cut indirect line anywhere from a few feet to several hundred yards away. Often the area in between is then burned out with torches, called fusees. A burnout uses up the fuels between the line and the fire front, effectively creating a fire line up to several hundred yards wide. A burnout is different from a backfire, which is set deliberately to eliminate huge swaths of fuel in the path of an advancing fire. Often that is the only way to stop a crown fire that is throwing embers miles ahead of it; often, of course, a backfire becomes a disaster of its own. A burnout can be ordered by a crew boss; a backfire can be decided on only by the incident command team.
    All handline—as distinguished from catline, which is cut by bulldozers—is