Flame of Wisdom

Bobby Becker was young, and tougher than a knot of wood. Back then, before he knew that flames can climb a hill faster than a man, his job was about being the good guy in the yellow fire suit. All his life, Becker wanted to be a hero, and he fought fires until he was.

Now he’s 57, on the edge of another fire season in the foothills of Silverado Canyon, scrubbed dry by wind and ready to burn, and he still is fighting them--”chasing the devil,” he says--past the usual retirement age of 50.

Becker is staying in part because few know more about fire than he, and as dozens of Orange County firefighters retire in the next few years, somebody must teach the young men and women who will replace them. “When you get to be my age, nobody wants credit anymore,” Becker says. “It’s about more than being a hero. Took me 15 years to learn that.”

Across Southern California and particularly in Orange County, where many started their careers during the booming 1960s, Becker is part of an old guard of firefighters who are growing gray. It’s expected that over the next few years, hundreds will retire. Many fire officials are so worried about a mass exodus that they’ve created “transition teams,” an attempt to use veterans like Becker to teach firefighting to younger ones who have gone to college and studied the science of flame but know little about the spirit of it.

The Orange County Fire Authority employs just over 700 firefighters, with an unusually high average age of 45. The brass is expecting retirement rates to increase from roughly 10 firefighters a year to about five times that number, and maybe more.

“I worry about what’s going to happen when all these people retire. . . . How do you replace that? A great deal of organizational memory will be lost,” said Richard Bridges, former chief of the Santa Monica department and now director of fire technology at Santa Ana College, home to one of the nation’s largest firefighting schools. “Can you teach anybody a sixth sense? No. . . . But you try.”

Fire officials indeed are trying. It may be unusual in a society that tends to look at older people as liabilities, but firefighters revere their hard-seasoned brethren.

“We’re still figuring out how to teach experience. . . . We don’t know exactly how, yet, but we’re starting,” says Capt. Scott Brown, a spokesman for the Orange County Fire Authority who recently was promoted to battalion chief.

Earlier this year, the Orange County authority developed a transition team to devise fast ways of doing what some say can come only from careful and long mentorship: passing on stories and tales, and the invisible ingredients of camaraderie that, department officials say, can make the difference between a capable department and a formidable one.

The only project launched so far has been an internal leadership training school, a yearlong program, the first session of which recently graduated 20 young firefighters. The subjects discussed--meteorology, management, medical aid and the like--were familiar. But the classes were led by veterans whose stories matter more than book learning.

The Silverado Canyon fire station, a buff-colored house with four blue velour recliners facing a television, is nestled among Orange County hills that seem 1,000 miles away from urban living, and where the squirrels still act like the land is theirs. The firemen stationed there figure a whole lot of it must look like it did when the world was made, and they are glad to spend their working lives living there, even though they swear the devil--as fire--lives there too.

They are not “hotshots,” young and elite and glamorous and reared on the latest equipment and techniques. But two of the firemen, Becker and Mike Overton, have built a reputation as some of the most experienced wildfire fighters in Southern California. They call themselves “relics,” who learned their craft by “just squirting the wet stuff on the red stuff.”

The firemen, near or past the usual age of retirement, are vivid symbols of “the massive brain drain our department faces,” spokesman Brown says. They are the sort department officials hope can teach the young ones. The two, along with their partner Dan Young, were honored two years ago for rescuing and driving a family through walls of flame.

Becker and Overton have been in Silverado Canyon for a dozen years but have decades of experience between them, and like most firefighters, have stories about their first brush fire, the first time emotion overwhelmed them, the first little girl they rescued who reminded them of their daughters.

Becker is solid, like a sandbag in a blue uniform, but gentle like a good father. And Overton, in shirt-sleeves, drawing pictures to make his point about a brush fire, is a boy who got to be what he wanted to be when he grew up. They do some of the hardest work in America: In Silverado Canyon, they say, fire turns nighttime into day, and it can burn so hot it will make a man cry at 50 paces.

“Fire here is not like it is in buildings, where it’s contained to the structure,” says Overton, who has fought fires for 30 of his 48 years. “Out here, it just burns and burns and burns. It makes you think. . . . You have to hope God will help. We’re just tools.”

Since their arrival in the canyon a dozen years ago, their jobs have become far more personal than when they were young and anxious: Becker and Overton, and other firefighters who work in the canyon, say wildfires taught them more than any fire training class could. “You learn what’s important out here,” Overton says.

Among the lessons: how to know when flame might leap from nowhere, when a roof wants to fall and how fire can create weather all its own.

Once, about three years ago, Becker and a rookie firefighter escaped death only because he sensed an invisible wall of fire about to cross a dark, dusty road and stopped their truck in time. “The guy’s eyes got about this big and his hands were in the dash,” Becker says. “I didn’t know how I knew that was going to happen. I still don’t know, I guess. I was probably just lucky. That kid’ll get lucky someday, too. . . . You hope so.”

Departments are placing their hopes on youngsters like Andrew Louch, who is 23 and, two months out of firefighting training school with the Orange County authority, is the youngest full-time firefighter in the department.

Unlike his older colleagues, he looks forward to the overnight shifts during which he always is on the cusp of saving somebody. Louch has learned in the classroom many things his older colleagues learned on the job, and was trained as if firefighting were a profession and not simply work, with breathing apparatus, fireproof clothing, communications systems and theories about watching weather and fighting fire. He likely will never develop “leather lungs,” as firefighter lungs often are called after too many years of soot that proper equipment can now eliminate.

“I just want to run in there and save people,” Louch says. “That’s all I want to do.” Louch says he spends much of his shift, and also his free time, poring over firefighting books and manuals, hoping that it somehow will keep him from standing shivering and hollow-eyed before a burning building someday.

But even he worries a little about young firefighters like himself, that if the department loses too many who can teach past book-learning, it might be too young for its own good. “When I work with one of the experienced firefighters, I just listen,” he says. “I try to absorb. I have to.”

As it stands, it is unclear just how, beyond Orange County’s leadership training program, fire departments plan to execute their succession plans, or if they can even develop practical ones; officials say they still are figuring it out. “It’s a work in progress,” Brown says.

Indeed, some firefighting officials are skeptical if intangibles such as gut feeling can be taught in a classroom at all. Jerry Hunter, 65, a division chief for the Orange County authority, never went to college to study firefighting. He sits in his office and looks at the wall a lot, studying photos of fire and flame that, he swears, contain the image of the devil himself. “If you don’t study him--you’ve got to study him--he’ll get you good,” he said.

“The kids have all the sophistication and all the sophisticated equipment, things we didn’t have when we started,” said Hunter, who has been in the fire service for 42 years. But “I’m concerned that all that stuff will give them a false sense of security. If you’re a young guy, that equipment will not tell you the second floor is coming down. You have to just kind of look at it and feel if something is wrong.”

Hunter says he is not criticizing young firefighters; always, he says, they are brash and want to be heroes, and for fire departments, that’s part of living. “We all come from the same mold,” he said. Hunter says he simply fears what will happen when experience no longer tempers youth.

Hunter, regarded as one of the wisest firefighters in his department, says he’ll retire by winter, because he can’t “wait for the kids.” He says he’s too old to hear the fire bells, or cheat the devil anymore.