Young Firefighters Man the Lines

The four-wheel-drive fire engine bucked up the mountainside with the grace of a pile driver, slamming firefighters’ helmets into the cab and jarring seat-belted guts until they ached.

A couple of feet to the right, land dropped off for several hundred feet. To the left, the side mirror was brushing a wall of rock that rose out of sight.

The siren no longer wailed: Nobody was around to hear it. The truck’s engine screamed in its place. Sheets of dust choked breathing. Eyes watered in the grit.

The state Department of Forestry pumper, bearing mostly 18- or 19-year-olds who had been going to college, washing cars, bagging groceries just months before, finally roared over the crest.

Talk died. Eyes got wide. Somebody finally joked, “OK. Let’s go home now.”

Ahead in the Ventana Wilderness, the pearl of Los Padres National Forest, raged a wall of flames more than 100 feet high, stretching to the end of sight. Before it stood a carpet of pines. Behind it lay a black, smoldering desert.

It was a scene from the second day of a three-week war against one of the largest wildfires in California’s recent history, the 178,000-acre Marble-Cone in August, 1977. Nearly half the state firefighting force would be made up of the CDF’s summer “seasonals,” like those on the pumper.

This summer, fire officials fear conditions like those that sparked the Marble-Cone, and just as it was 10 years ago, fully 1,400, or 39%, of the 4,400-member front-line state firefighting force will be composed of adventurous young men and women, said Dick Ernest, CDF deputy director.

Average Age Is 19

Their average age is 19 and they earn up to about $1,300 monthly, CDF officials said.

What might they face? In the Marble-Cone, 6,000 firefighters battled flames that swept an area seven times larger than San Francisco at a cost of about $13 million.

One died, another broke his back, and 865 others required some sort of medical treatment. The pumper crew that entered the second day was pulled out after two weeks suffering from flu, a cold, poison oak, and insect bites.

State officials started the seasonal firefighter program in the early 1940s because it was too costly to maintain a permanent force of the size they began to see was needed, Ernest said.

One of the reasons blazes were getting away from firefighters was that “we’d have multiple fires going and we’d just plain run out of initial attack crews at stations and were unable to respond in the fashion we normally would,” he said.

“The hiring of seasonals started in order to bring crews on during the summer months, train them, so they knew what . . . they were doing, and spread them around the state so they could attack fires as quickly and effectively as possible,” said Ernest, who started his CDF career as a seasonal in 1951.

The U.S. Forest Service also relies heavily on seasonals, “but they tend generally to be a little older than those in CDF,” spokesman Eric Holst said. “We have a lot of returnees and a lot of college folks.”

Roeschelle Bunn, a 25-year-old Sacramento teacher’s aide, has started her first month as a state seasonal assigned to Sutter Hill station in the Amador County Ranger Unit.

“My mother called me about seeing (CDF) recruiters, and I asked: ‘What do you want? To send me out in a fire and kill me?’ ” she said. “But after seeing another rather petite lady who said she liked it, I decided to try it. I’m looking forward to being on fire lines. . . . I’m a pretty determined person and push myself in difficult situations.”

Gary Crider, 23, of Jackson has left auto body work for a fourth season in the ranger unit.

“I love it. . . . You’ve got to be fit and you get self-satisfaction out of helping people,” he said.

“But it also takes a lot of your personal life. You don’t get to go home every night because you’re working four days on and three days off. And when there’s no fires, it gets kind of boring,” Crider said.

The state begins bringing on its seasonal crew May 15, achieving full staffing by July.

Applicants who are accepted by the 22 individual ranger units in the state must complete 40 hours training before joining a pumper crew, then continue schooling throughout the season. They are supervised by permanent employees, who drive the fire engines.

The CDF is trying to recruit more minorities but already has the largest number of female firefighters of any department in the nation, Ernest said. One of every four seasonals is female, CDF spokesman Karen Terrill said.

Despite seasonals’ enthusiasm, they also say they know its dangerous. And a wall outside the CDF’s statewide emergency command center in Sacramento is testimony to that danger.

There, small brass plaques bear the names of the 65 CDF firefighters who have lost their lives since 1931.