A friend came over for dinner last night who we hadn't seen for a long time. He had come from the Dixie Fire where he had been working as a firefighter over the summer. He was part of a crew from the Russian River area where he has a house and is part of the local volunteer firefighter group. He sort of held court about what goes on with those fires and answered our questions throughout. I thought I'd write down some of what he said as best I can remember it.
He first talked about the differences in scheduling between CalFire, which was leading things for the first bit, and the federal government, which took over midway through his stint up there. The main distinction here was the CalFire had people working on 24-hours-on, 24-hours-off shifts while the federal goverment had them doing 12, 12. In both cases these actually amounted to very little free time once you factor in sleep, driving to and from camp, and eating/showering/etc.
He described the sleeping conditions. With CalFire, he was given a room in a rented cabin when he was on his 24-hours-off shift and would sleep 8 hours in out in the woods when on shift. With the federal government he would bunk with 41 other guys in these sort of semi-truck shipping containers, bunks stacked three-high, that people called the coffins or something like that. There'd be 6-8 of these trucks alongside shower trucks and mess halls with generators running 24/7. It was 90% men, he said, so there'd be a long line with guys in flipflops for the shower truck for guys while the few women would just walk right in to their shower truck. Other people stayed in Reno and drive 1.5 hours each way each day
The meals were cooked and served by prisoners in orange jumpsuits. He said they were older guys doing that, and basically the only non-white people there aside from the young guys from the California Conservation Corps. He himself is black and was one of the only non-white firefighters. The whole operation amounted to about 4000 people he said.
The Dixie fire was the largest in California history (though I guess this is recent recorded history, because from what I've read there used to be way bigger, regular fires before white settlement and fire prevention measures became the norm over the last century) and he said it had actually been contained a few times throughout the summer, but that the containment fires they built to hem it in would escape their control and lead to the whole thing being out of control again.
This kind of shocked me, but he said this wasn't a major concern for the people up there. An engine crew would make $2000 a day just from having their engine up there and their salaries were paid on top of that. So the more time up there, the more lucrative it would be, for volunteers like them, and also for anyone else up there, including the more-or-less recently formed private firefighting squads. The whole institution, from food and lodging to water and electricity and of course the firefighters themselves really depend on the fires for their money. If the fire got sufficiently contained, they would need to drive across the state to some other fire. There are some real incentives to have these fires burning.
The actual firefighting is not so much spraying and dumping water on the fire, but rather bulldozing the forest in lines to corral the fire. This involves just tearing scars across the forest and removing combustable material from this sort of no-trees-zone. Individual firefighters would follow along with shovels to clear away what remains. This is real work but the better paying and easier job is hauling water around. Private companies would drive with tanker trucks wherever they're ordered to go with water before returning to the industrial agriculture pumps along canals to wait in line to refill. All these trucks getting very few miles to the gallon would also constantly be refueling.
Our friend told us that a lot of the guys up there didn't want this to end, they liked following orders, not having to live their mundane lives and such, which I guess makes sense from what I've read about totalizing situations. He ended up outline a plan for next summer, setting up some legal entity, pooling money to buy an $80k engine and manning shifts with friends to make some money.