It Really Is Boiling Hot for Crews on the Fire Line

The health advisories talk about avoiding exertion and direct exposure to the sun and here are 38-year-old Gregory Alexander and friends, dripping wet in long, heavy pants and long-sleeved jackets and using chain saws to mow down 30-foot-high brush in the advance of a moving wall of orange flames.

It’s so hot out here that the nine pounds of water they carry in their backpacks could probably brew coffee. But it’s keeping them alive.

They look all around, not just for hot spots capriciously turning against them in sudden windstorms, or spot fires erupting behind them. They are on the lookout for buddies who are sweating profusely, then getting clammy, and then not sweating at all because there is nothing left of their wilted bodies to drip out. They are on the brink of collapsing from heat exhaustion.

“If you feel like your brain’s starting to boil, that’s real bad,” said Anthony Lacy.

Alexander and Lacy are among the thousands of Southern California firefighters who since Saturday have been going out into the same 100-degree-plus heat the rest of us have been trying to avoid like the plague.

They shrug off the heat because, they say, there just is no way to beat it. You knuckle under, you carry the 50 pounds of hoses on your back, or wield the chain saws in chaparral thick with bees, or pound away at the dirt with rakes and shovels to cut a trail five feet wide, and the heat is just one more nemesis.

And so it went Monday at a 1,500-acre wildfire near Anza in southern Riverside County, where the temperatures exceeded the century mark for the third straight day and firefighters sang the praises of being properly prepared.

Before heading out onto the fire line--an unmerciful landscape of chaparral-carpeted hillsides--they “pre-water” by downing as much cool liquid as they can handle.

They soak bandannas in water and drape them over their heads and across their faces.

They wear cotton shirts beneath their fire-retardant jackets and pants to absorb the sweat. Polyester-blend shirts melt in the heat and stick to the skin.

They wear heavy denim pants to help ward off the heat of flames.

They wear two pairs of cotton socks inside their work boots, to better protect their feet when walking across hot ash and burning embers a foot or two deep. “Your feet get the hottest and there’s no way to escape that,” said California Department of Forestry firefighter Mike Bratton. And even when the rest of you cools off, your feet stay hot.

And they drink water every chance they get. As much as they can, as an antidote to dehydration.

“You can get dehydrated before you realize it,” warned Riverside County firefighter James Flores. “You carry as much water as you can with you, and when it’s gone, you go back to your engine for more.”

“You’re sweating everywhere,” he said. “You sweat in your shoes.”

Even back in the base camp, where half of the 600 firefighters rested while the others worked a 12-hour shift, cooling off was difficult. Men and women collapsed in the shade of weeping willows and tamarack bushes, lay atop sleeping bags and draped their faces with bandannas, to try to steal some sleep.

“It’s not easy to sleep in the middle of the day when it’s as hot as this, but they’re so exhausted, they do,” said Department of Forestry Capt. Tom Ramsey.

Large white tents peppered the camp, portable air conditioners trying valiantly to cool the air inside--and with fans posted over the air-conditioning units to keep them cool.

In one corner of the camp, large tubs of ice water held prizes: V-8 juice and Gatorade, Hansen’s soda and bottles of just plain old water, which disappeared the quickest.

Nearby, kitchen crews prepared to barbecue 500 12-ounce T-bones. Laid out on the lawn were eight large grills, charcoal ready for lighting.

“It’s so hot, you could probably just put the steaks on the aluminum foil inside the grills to cook ‘em,” said Ron Mayer of the kitchen team.

Some foods were meant to be cooling: the Bing cherries, grapes and peaches on ice. But firefighters like their food hot, too; on a pallet of canned food off to the side, ready for supper, were gallons of pepperoni and chili peppers.