"Unskilled Labor" A Season with the Hotshots | Wildland Fire Documentary Hotshot Firefighter Crew

not good last year i worked as a wildland firefighter with the sawtooth hot shots and i was in charge of the crew video in addition to all the normal duties and so i have all of this footage that i haven't known what to do with but recently it's come in the news about how federal agencies are having a really hard time retaining wildland firefighters especially specialized crews like hot shots because the pay and the benefits are just so low and i think it's important for people to get a really intimate view of what this work is like because i don't think there's anything out there like this from a crew's perspective you know from a member of the crew just showing you the day-to-day life and what it takes to even be able to make it onto a hot shot crew and then from there what it takes to be able to do the work day in and day out and the kind of dangers that are facing the stressors and the time spent away from home and all of that and what really motivated me and lit a fire under my butt to get this video cut together and out there is because us representative tom mcclintock out of california recently said wildfire firefighting is hot miserable work but it is not skilled labor my name is jack jones and this is unskilled labor a season with the hot shots and first a quick disclaimer the views and opinions that i share in this video are solely my own as a private citizen they do not represent any entity of the federal government state or local governments they certainly don't represent any views of the sawtooth hotshots or my crew members or leadership or anyone i interacted with last season it is solely my own personal views and my own personal video here big hole right there hot shot crews are federal hand crews and they specialize in fighting wildfire in really rugged inhospitable environments and because of the specialization hotshot crews require their leadership to have more qualifications and more experience than other hand crews and they require their crews and crew members to have a higher level of fitness because the work is just extremely demanding in the terrain in which we're working is so inhospitable that not having the requisite level of fitness really puts your life and other people's lives in danger sawtooth has really high physical training standards and you're expected to come in day one being really really fit they want you to run a six minute mile and to be able to hike three miles with a 50 pound pack of a thousand feet in elevation in under 50 minutes so you have to meet these standards to even start on the crew if you fail assessment day you won't be able to stay on the crew you'll be put on an engine or somewhere else and people have failed in the past and for seasonal employees that's all time that's on your own training you're not getting paid for that training you're having to work your butt off in the off season so you can come in running a six minute mile to even have a shot at this job for a hot shot crew once the fire season gets going you're generally just on all across the country and that's what happened to us we started fighting fire in new mexico in june and then just never stopped from there after a week on the tadpole fire we were pulled onto the bush fire which had exploded across arizona just north of phoenix and i believe the fire had grown 80 000 acres in one day and it was threatening some small communities north of phoenix and also threatening phoenix's power supply and on the bush fire we did a lot of indirect burning and this is a pretty common tactic within wildland fire where you burn out all the fuels ahead of the main fire so that when the main fire reaches that spot it has nothing to burn and that way rather than trying to stop a raging wildfire head-on you're kind of removing all of the fuel so that it just will peter out and it doesn't have the fuel and the intensity to jump the roads and the other natural obstacles that we use to stop the fire what i remember from this role is one just how hot it was working out there in the arizona heat with 100 degrees 110 degrees with your full pack and just everything on with the fire next to you is just so incredibly hot and there's just absolutely no shade in the desert so that was kind of terrible and the other thing was how late we stayed up burning just every night it seemed like it was up until midnight 1 2 a.m and then you're back up the next morning working again i believe we spent 15 or 16 days out in new mexico and arizona including our travel days and then we had two days off and then it was right back out again firefighters will work very closely with aircraft and what will happen is the guys on the ground will help direct the helicopters and the aircraft dropping [ __ ] and you're not trying to put out the fire with the water what you're doing is using those bucket drops to cool off the edge of the fire so that then firefighters can get in there and cut in line and cutting in line is what really stops that fire you're removing the fuel and so that there's nothing for the fire to burn when you get up there but if the fire is too hot you just can't get close enough to be able to do that and that's why bucket drops is so helpful and the retardant is used in a similar way it'll be dropped in front of the fire and depending on the conditions once the fire reaches that retardant line it will stop burning but if it's too hot or too dry it can just sometimes rip right through the retardant line so it really depends on conditions the golden fire was our first real timber fire of the season and these kind of fires are really where hot shots excel because the terrain is just so difficult to get in on just an average day you might hike two to four miles in you might gain one to three thousand feet of elevation and it's not easy hiking along trails and roads it's right straight up the mountain and again this is really kind of the specialization of hot shot crews because you just can't get other types of equipment in there you can't get bulldozers in there you can't get hinges in there the only way to stop that fire is to get a hot shot crew in there and cut line and just dig line all day cutting line means literally cutting a line through the forest so depending on the type of fuel and the intensity of the fire a fire line can be anywhere from 20 to 40 feet wide and that means all the fuel in that area is removed so all the trees all the brush anything that can burn is removed by the chainsaws and then the dig follows behind them and just digs a line in the dirt just removing everything all the organic material down to bare dirt anywhere from 12 to 24 inches wide and so the idea is when the fire reaches this break that we've created it will drop in intensity and then when it hits that bare dirt line it won't be able to cross that and if cutting a big clear path like that through the forest sounds like a lot of work well it really really is because the saw teams not only have to cut down all the brush and all the trees but once it's cut down it has to be picked up and thrown out of that area and then the dig has to come behind and just really dig into the ground and it's just really non-stop you just dig and dig and dig and dig you have to break through um brush you have to break through grass and roots and just everything like that and if just imagine taking a hoe out into the forest and just trying to dig down and just remove every piece of organic material remove all the roots to remove all the grass and how hard that would be like that's what you're having to do just all day long and that's why the fitness standards are so high because this is really an extreme endurance event and you simply can't keep up with the workload unless you are at an extreme level of physical fitness and if you're not you won't be able to keep up with the work and you'll probably get injured and you'll go down as a heat casualty or some other sort of injury and it's just really dangerous for everyone involved um this is a high risk and very dangerous jobs you're working with chainsaws and sharp tools you're working around hazard and fire weakened trees you're inhaling a tremendous amount of smoke over the course of a season and there's always the risks that fire weather conditions could change in an instant and you could get entrapped very quickly and here's an example of how quickly things can shift we were cutting in this indirect line and the wind changed and it just started blowing hot embers into all these trees on the other side into the green into the unburned area and it was just within a matter of minutes that this fire that we were able to go direct on just blew up and we had to all back away and really think about okay if this comes at me where am i gonna go where's the safe place where do i run to well this is the most danger i felt in this year so far [Laughter] no radio there's uh i think cutler and somebody's up there so people are aware which which way probably yep this move we were able to get it under control eventually with the help of some air assets but it just completely wiped out that whole day's worth of work and we had to spend the next several days chasing little spots from all the embers that had thrown run away it is a really difficult job that comes with a lot of discomfort and a lot of misery but you also do get to see some really interesting things wildfire has this brutal beauty to it and just being able to be out there in the middle of the mountains and put fire on the ground and see it take off through the forest it's really a unique experience and one that i'm really glad to experience [ __ ] yeah you got it max sometimes we'll have access to water in the form of a stream or a lake or a pond and when that's the case we'll have hoses and pumps flown in by helicopters and then set up a hose lay in wildland fire water isn't used to put out the fire we just don't have enough volume or enough pressure or just enough water period to put out the fire once we have the fire contained in a fire line cut around the fire then we'll use the water to go in and help us mop up the goal of mop up is to remove any chance for the fire to spread across the line and that's where we've cut and dug the line and that's where the fire has stopped and so now when that fire has been stuck we go back through and remove any potential for the fire to spread back across the line and it's really really tedious work and nobody likes it if we have water we'll wet everything down and stir it around until things aren't hot anymore and if we don't have water we'll still use our tools to break things apart and to open up the ground and to open up all the fire so that the heat can escape more quickly and everything can burn down more quickly in order to find the heat that needs to be worked on we have to literally go through and just touch everything because you can't rely on looking for smoke or other signals there's lots of heat that's just hidden around and so you have to just go through and just touch everything and that's why nobody likes pop-up because it is just tedious in the [Music] extreme the best part about being on a crew is the camaraderie you spend the whole summer suffering together and that builds some incredibly strong and lasting friendships and just like with the army the thing that i'll take away from this season are all the experiences that i got to share with these people and the friendships and the good times that we had in the middle of these really shitty situations at the end of the day there's a lot of satisfaction to be had because you can look back and just see how much work that you and the whole team were able to accomplish and just be able to do these things that just seem impossible to be able to cut through miles and miles of forest and dig you know miles of line and to put in all this hose laying to tackle these giant forest fires and to be able to be able to do that as part of the team is really inspiring and it's really really rewarding [Music] getting a little bit sketchy fires coming down the canyon right at us the badger was the last fire of the season and we were trying to put in some line to cut it off at the road when the wind switched and started blowing the fire down canyon at us we bailed off where we were because that was coming right at us like 100 yards from where we are the bigger trees in the green area down by the road that's actually a riparian area and there's a creek that flows through there that we still had running water flowing through there and the expectation was that that area would pull and not burn because there was so much water and moisture in there but as you can see that that was not the case oh yeah that's getting hot and as of yet there's no fire on the other side of the road but as these trees start to torch they start growing hot inverse just right across the road oh spot that was less than 30 seconds jesus [Applause] we need to get the [ __ ] out of here where the trucks at once that fire crossed the road we were in a really bad position because now there's fire on both sides of the road and the wind is blowing down canyon right at us yeah these fields are too close to us on this road and you can see just how quickly that fire spreads and there is just that road is not wide enough to be safe we stayed on that road we would get burnt up luckily some of the other crew were able to move through the black and get to our trucks and drive them down the road that's crazy one spot and then a whole hillside and apparently they had to just drive through a wall of flame which i'm kind of mad that they didn't get any video of that but i always think back to this day and think how close things could have been because without those trucks picking us up we would have had to run for our lives down that highway as the flames roared on towards us [Music] that was crazy after pulling everyone out to safety we regrouped and came up with a new plan which was to put some fire on the ground and just burn out around all of these structures which are now threatened by the fire coming out of the rock creek canyon as night fell we continue to put in line and continue to put fire on the ground and we just progress like this painstakingly feet by feet on late nights like this there's no set time to eat dinner you just grab some mres whenever you have a chance and that's dinner when we burn like this will be split up into burners and holders generally there might be anywhere from three to six burners they use drip torches which use a mix of gasoline and diesel and it just drips fire onto the ground and the holders job is to follow along behind the burners and make sure nothing crosses the line all it takes is one ember to get into the green and then you could lose that fire coffee after we stopped the fires advanced toward the population center we started cold trailing all the way up into the mountains so the fire had stopped burning and we were just going along the edge of the burned area to make sure that there was nothing hot there that could spark up and spread the fire some more so we had climbed up and over a ridge for a couple of thousand feet of gain and now we're going back down into that valley just following the fire's edge and climbing back up and over the top of that again and i think that day we did like eight or ten miles of cold trailing this is a few days later now we had spent about two days prepping a piece of line to do some more indirect burning you can see we're putting fire on the ground here and there's an element of smoke jumpers below us that are also putting fire on the ground and the reason i started filming is because as soon as we started putting fire on the ground the wind started to shift and it was starting to blow that fire right at our lines [Music] it was within five minutes of the wind shift that trees started torching and we started getting hot embers all across our line pulling out right now it's got two intents part of our training is to be constantly vigilant and always evaluating what could go wrong where are the safety areas and how do we escape into those because you can see how quickly things go wrong and now visibility sucks we're breathing in a ton of smoke we're having to move up hill up to steep terrain with all of our gear on [Music] so that tree torching is in the green across our line standing in the black we'll probably live through this one all of that was green 30 minutes ago okay yeah oh by the end of our season we had worked over a thousand hours of overtime and we had been away from home for four and a half months the rolls were relentless and continuous we would be on a fire for 14 days and then we would have two days off and then be gone on another fire for 14 days and it was like that for the entire summer what you'll notice at the end of a season is just how everyone has this hacking cough and when you're going to bed at night you'll just hear people wheezing and coughing and so i hope this documentary can illuminate a little bit on what life is like for wildland firefighters out there and i hope you can see how absurd it is that the federal government is asking people to do this type of work for under 15 an hour base pay wildland firefighters should be compensated for the high levels of risk that they incur every day on this job they should be compensated for the damage done to their bodies from this job and really the federal government is exploiting this idea of a seasonal employee in order to not pay people and not give people the benefits that they deserve so really is it a surprise that they're having trouble retaining firefighters after seeing this video would you go out and risk your life and do this hot grueling work the shifts are 16 hours a day every day we're on fires for 14 days at a time we get two days off and we're right back out again you're just gone the whole summer you're gone away from your family you have no weekends you have no time on your own you're just constantly working and now think about all that and think about the fact that the base pay is less than 15 an hour would you do that job so if you think that's ridiculous then i urge you to contact your congress people contact your senators and let them know you can donate to the grassroots wildland firefighters foundation who are really pushing for better pay and better benefits for firefighters thank you for watching this video i really hope it was illuminating and if it fired you up i ask that you share this so people really understand what we're asking of our wildland firefighters and again you can get involved with the grassroots wildland firefighters organization you can reach out to your congress people and to your senators and to really affect some change because wildfire is only going to become more of a problem and the dangers and the stressors are only going to increase for our firefighters thanks again and stay safe everybody [Music] you

Channel: The Healthy Gamer

Views: 880,042

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Id: a6CP5SKQjzg

Length: 25min 35sec (1535 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 19 2021