It’s a Showdown in the Wildfire West

Ken Brown, hot and tired and run ragged, took a breather at the base camp where nearly 3,000 people had gathered to battle the big, lumbering forest fire in the Siskiyou Mountains.

He reflected on the effect of the blaze, ignited a week earlier by a lightning bolt and now grown to about 5,870 acres.

“I’ve made about as much money in a week as I do in three months,” he said, betraying a slight, embarrassed smile.

Brown and his wife own two restaurants nearby, and on average they serve 300 meals a day. But for years they’ve been contracted by the government to prepare sack lunches for firefighters, and the job here was about as big as he’s ever encountered.

On Friday, he and his wife--and 20 people they’ve hired this week--delivered 2,000 paper sacks filled with sandwiches, cookies, chips, fruit and drinks. “I’ve made over $100,000 in six days,” he said. “And we’ve just about wiped out Costco.”

Throughout the West, as firefighters struggle to surround big blazes, there are base camps like this one: elaborate troop encampments where the soldiers eat and rest and the battle commanders plot and strategize. The camps are instant, overnight towns bustling with commerce--witness the telephone lines, computers, photocopiers, fax machines, a medical care tent and police protection against thievery, fights and the use of drugs and booze by firefighters who grow tired and cranky.

The camp here was established at a bucolic county park, normally a place of solitude with hills shaded by ponderosa pines and Douglas fir, with the Applegate River slowly plying through it.

When the fire began Aug. 10, the Oregon Department of Forestry swiftly ordained the park as a base of operations from which they would dispatch the crews into the forest to construct firebreaks.

Fire commanders coveted an open area with a covered pavilion and picnic tables to serve as their operations center--but couldn’t move into it until after a wedding Saturday and a baptism Sunday.

Since then, this base camp has grown to be the largest in the West, where 33 fires continued to burn out of control Friday. Firefighting coordinators in Boise, Idaho, said they were braced for growing problems this weekend as they anticipated wind and lightning moving across the Northwest before a drop in temperature gives them a hoped-for break Monday.

The worst fires are in Washington and Oregon, but despite the weariness of the task, officials sounded upbeat. “We remain cautiously optimistic,” said Rob Kopack, a spokesman for the National Interagency Coordination Center in Boise. “Safety comes first, and we’ve had no major injuries and no communities have burned. We’re just firefighters who just keep fighting the fires.”

The number of firefighters on the various fires increased Friday to 22,650, and 1,000 more, from the ranks of the military, are expected to join the battles in about a week.

Here, several hundred members of the National Guard showed up Friday to lend assistance.

The 88-acre park was saturated Friday with 2,300 people, their dome tents carpeting the ground like a bumper crop of spring wildflowers. By today, that number will reach 2,800, said fire spokesman Malcolm Hiatt, because of the daunting task of constructing firebreaks across the undulating Rogue River National Forest, not far from the California border.

About 75% of the personnel are actual firefighters. The rest are support crews--from helicopter technicians to cooks to a small legion of office workers keeping track of the paperwork.

Deena Smith is the finance chief for this fire, and she and her accountants and bookkeepers are keeping tabs on a $1-million-a-day business from atop the windblown picnic tables. Such is the nature of the fire business.

She looked at some of the day’s bills, which her staff dutifully records and files for payment. The 16 privately owned bulldozers, with drivers, cost about $24,000 a day. The nine privately owned water-dropping helicopters collectively cost about $240,000 a day. Fire retardant, $33,000. Food, $112,000.

The biggest cost: $470,000 in daily wages, from $10 to $20 an hour, to the private firefighters hired by the government. While many are seasonal government employees of the U.S. Forest Service, the Oregon Department of Forestry, the federal Bureau of Land Management and other public agencies, the bulk of the firefighters here--more than 1,000--work for private companies.

But paperwork is only part of the scene at the base camp, where other issues seemed more pressing. “We’ve got about 60 portable toilets, but, based on the equation of four portables for every 100 people, we need more than twice that many,” Hiatt said. A supplier was building new ones as fast as he could.

Cooks were needed too, so the call went out to Blue Coyote, a catering company in Portland that specializes in base camp operations. The company dispatched 30 cooks, and their supervisor, Richard Loose, said he was managing just fine even though the number of firefighters was growing daily and wreaking havoc on his plans.

“We had halibut steaks last night,” he said, “but we had more guys here than we had expected.” The firefighters last in line got spaghetti.

In the medical tent, about 150 firefighters are treated daily, usually for poison oak, heat exhaustion and blistered feet. “We’ve been going through a lot of moleskin,” said Dave Cooper, managing the tent. “These guys are trudging up and down steep hills in hot boots for 12 hours a day.”

Two people had been sent to the nearest hospital--a firefighter for heat stroke and a kitchen worker who scalded herself with hot water.

Law enforcement is on the scene too. Oregon State Police Lt. Randy Scorby said he and his partner are investigating the thefts of two chain saws from private contractors, and they have heard complaints from firefighters about the theft of clothes from their tents while they were on the fire lines. “There haven’t been any fights yet, but that could still come later.”

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