Smokejumper

by Jason A. Ramos

  Firefighters have used signal mirrors forever, but they only work during the day. A laser flare works anytime.

  Halfway between a laser pointer and a light saber, these babies are visible for up to thirty miles at night in optimum conditions, and one to five miles during the day.

  The one I use, made by Greatland Laser, was designed by an Alaskan air tanker pilot. It has been used successfully as an SOS device and is highly regarded by search-and-rescue pros.

  Never trust a piece of gear until it performs in real-world conditions. I’ve used my laser flare to guide jumpers back to camp when their GPS units weren’t receiving.

  On one fire I was on, air attack wanted to know our location but the IC was having no luck signaling them with a mirror, even in broad daylight, despite several attempts.

  I double-timed it up to the same ridge he was on and aimed my laser flare at the plane.

  “We got your green ping,” the pilot said on the radio. I could see the IC looking at his mirror, puzzled.

  “What the hell do you have, Ramos?” the IC said when I joined him. I showed him the flare and from then on we used it many times without fail.

  The whole concept of air support has recently taken on a new dimension in the form of drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

  I’ve flown remote-controlled aircraft for years and have become a big believer in their potential as a firefighting tool. They aren’t the answer to every fire, but they can be an incredibly powerful tool in the right situation.

  UAVs can see through smoke and detect the smallest fires using regular and infrared cameras. Compared to manned aircraft, some of which can cost thousands of dollars per day plus personnel, UAVs are huge money savers. Most important, they don’t risk lives.

  Plane-sized military-style drones have been used on fires as far back as 2007, when NASA loaned its Ikhana aircraft, a modified Predator, to Cal Fire and the Forest Service during the Esperanza Fire near Palm Springs. Fire managers used the drone’s infrared sensors to map the fire’s perimeter from forty-three thousand feet, to track its progress, and to send resources where they were most needed.

  I’m more excited about the smaller models that are now within the price range of even casual hobbyists—especially the multi-rotor copters you see everywhere nowadays outfitted with cameras and GoPros. These are perfect for scouting: Are there any homes over that ridge? Are there people up there? A minute or two later and you have your answer.

  UAVs can also be a huge benefit in tracking fires at night when other air support is grounded. They’ve started experimenting with this in Spain already.

  With their internal gyros and GPS locators, multi-rotor copters can hold a position or even return to where they were launched when they lose the control signal. Planes and powered gliders are more stable in high winds but the copters are rapidly catching up. In the last few years there’s been a huge influx of companies offering different kinds of UAVs that can take off, fly, and land on their own, controlled by software on a laptop.

  The technology is there. The challenge is educating fire staff and the powers that be that UAVs are a tool that will increase safety and save money.

  The FAA is still trying to figure out how to manage unmanned aircraft safely. During wildfires, they typically declare airspace restrictions to keep helos and retardant aircraft safe from collisions.

  So far the answer to flying UAVs is usually no, but sometimes the FAA makes exceptions. In the summer of 2014, for example, the Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR) got approval to use them on the Carlton Complex Fire, the largest in state history, which was burning right in our backyard at NCSB.

  CHAPTER 17

  IT WAS A DRY spring and a hot summer in 2014. At the beginning of July, we had ten straight days of temperatures above 93˚F at the base. On Monday, July 14, a dry lightning storm set off small fires across north-central Washington, concentrated in Okanogan and Chelan Counties.

  Four fires in the Methow Valley, east and south of Winthrop, were immediately reported by residents. They waited for fire crews to come put them out, but even though NCSB was within shouting distance, the powers above had different plans.

  Residents kept calling in smoke reports as the fires flickered and smoldered in the sagebrush and grass for the next two days. They started to grow.

  Then they blew up, converged, and made history.

  On Wednesday, one of the fires jumped the Methow River twenty miles south of Winthrop, burned the “Carlton Castle” to the ground in minutes, and roared up the Libby Creek drainage. (This was exactly the same route that the Libby South Fire had taken thirteen years earlier, just before the Thirtymile Fire.) The entire watershed was evacuated in less than an hour.

  On Thursday, the winds picked up from the northwest, following the canyon of the Methow River downstream to the Columbia. Gusts over 30 mph sent the fire, now two large burns, into overdrive. Between 3 P.M. and midnight it spread across two hundred square miles, burning an acre every four seconds. The speed and intensity of the run took almost everyone by surprise.

  The tiny town of Pateros, where the Methow River meets the Columbia, was directly in its path. Police officers ran from door to door shouting for people to get out as fireballs rolled down the hills toward the houses. One witness described it as something out of the movie The Mummy, like a giant evil face of flames.

  The power went out all the way to Winthrop, forty miles up the canyon. The scene was apocalyptic, especially after dark, when the air was thick with smoke and the only light came from the flames all around.

  The fires merged the next day, becoming what’s called a complex. Over the next two weeks close to three thousand people fought to get it under control. They threw everything at the blaze: seven National Guard Black Hawks, a DC-10 air tanker, more than a hundred fire engines, thirteen bulldozers.

  By Friday evening, the town of Twisp was under Level II evacuation as well. Residents were warned that they might have to evacuate immediately and were told that if it went to Level III (i.e., get out now), there probably wouldn’t be time for authorities to notify them in advance. Power, phone, and fiber optic lines were burned through for miles.

  People were cleaning out the two supermarkets in the valley and driving the twisting road three hours across the North Cascades to buy generators. Many residents had no electricity, phone service, or Internet. Only Verizon drove in backup generators to keep their cell towers going, earning themselves plenty of loyal customers for life.

  Those who could still get online via Verizon were confused by conflicting information on the news and a temporary breakdown in official communications. Facebook became the only source of up-to-date information for most people in the Methow, even though not all posts were accurate.

  We launched missions out of the NCSB base, driving to different locations and fighting the fire next to the road or hiking in. We call those missions “pounders.” It’s the same kind of work, minus the plane and parachute ride.

  One day we overheard a radio call about a smoke report down in the valley that was being called inaccessible. We looked at our forest map and couldn’t figure out why.

  Two of us drove to where we could see the smoke rising from the side of a mountain and parked.

  Inaccessible? Is this a joke? I took a compass bearing, marked our location, and geared up for the hike. A small out-of-state fire crew pulled up just as we were getting ready to head out.

  “You guys are hiking in?” one said. “Our crew’s not able to do it.”

  “Cool, no worries,” I said, “We’ll take care of it.”

  “You guys jumpers?”

  “Yep.”

  We reached the fire in about an hour, put it out, and were back to the base before midnight: a perfect example of what two jumpers can do when others won’t.

  President Obama declared a state of emergency on July 23, by which time the fire had covered 390 square miles. Rain came the next day, but we were still seeing
green alfalfa fields burn into August.

  Over three hundred homes were destroyed. Luckily there was only one death, a man who had a heart attack trying to save his house.

  The aftermath looked like something out of World War II: blackened hillsides laced with exposed game trails, bombed-out cars, chimneys rising from charred house foundations.

  At the time of this printing, 196 families are suing the state Department of Natural Resources for letting the fire grow out of control. Many witnesses say their homes burned as DNR crews stood by. People would beg them for help and the crews would say they didn’t have permission.

  Both state and federal fire agencies, by their response times and actions, seemed to have had their hands tied by politics, at who knows what level. What emerged in the aftermath of the Carlton Complex appeared to me to paint a picture of jurisdictional hangups and issues regarding who owned what land, that prevented those agencies from taking timely and effective action. This kind of thing has been happening for years; they’ve just been lucky up to now. I’ve seen fire response times stretch from minutes to hours to days.

  Our “inaccessible” fire was just one example. Leaders need to lead, not play politics. You need to put every available resource on fires that are in high-threat areas ASAP, like they do in some other states in the West. We should stop having so many jurisdictional disagreements and move toward more mutual aid and working together. Better to have the resources and not need them. It’s crazy that high-threat forests like the Okanogan don’t seem to have the same kind of protocols. Maybe there’s some other strategy at play up top that we aren’t privy to.

  Could jumpers have kept this firestorm from happening, right here in our own backyard, by snuffing those four starts when they were still small?

  It is the whole reason smokejumping was started back in 1939.

  What I can say is that in my career we’ve only had to call for help a handful of times. Otherwise we’ve put out every fire we jumped. This shows the level of professionalism and success that exists across the entire jump program.

  IT’S A LONG ROAD, developing and testing new tools and showing people what they can do.

  I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that there could be a better tool, a better textile, a better way to do things. My dad always told me to buy the best—it won’t fall apart on you like the cheap crap will. Even at the very beginning of my career, my captain at Riverside noticed my obsession with tinkering to improve things. I ended up being the equipment manager at the fire station before I turned twenty-one.

  Over the years, guys would always joke that if you needed some tool or piece of gear and couldn’t find it, Ramos probably had already been testing it for months. So it seemed only natural to finally get a business license and start my own company, Product Research Gear, LLC (PRg).

  I call it a solutions company: we try our hardest to fix the problem, finding innovative answers to solve existing scenarios. We’ve vetted, evaluated, designed, and collaborated. We’ve taken things apart, burned them, pushed them past the failure point, and put them back together again. We’ve worked with some of the biggest companies on the planet in fields like tech, textiles and clothing, advanced medical products for field professionals, and helmets and footwear for wildland firefighters.

  People ask me all the time why I have devoted so much of my life to this. I spend countless hours working on projects that I never make a dime on. But my answer is always the same: if I use something on a mission, or any other situation, I want something that actually works, all the time and under every condition, or at least as close as you can get.

  Sometimes this is a matter of life or death. And that’s what PRg is all about: finding the best of the best, and when it doesn’t exist, working with the best companies to make it happen.

  Jumpers tend to be old-school about their equipment. Pulaskis are tried and true, they get the job done. People have invented a few different machines over the years to try to make the job easier. Years ago, Francis Lufkin himself created a line-cutting machine, with the help of a machine company called Hofco. It looked like a weedeater with chains instead of string attached. He invented a line digger too. But neither really caught on, probably because of the limitations of terrain and the sheer weight of the machines. The pulaski is still the tool of choice for wildland firefighters throughout the United States.

  There are two parachute systems used by today’s smokejumpers, the ram air or square used by the BLM and selected USFS bases, and the round parachute used by most USFS jumpers. Each system has its pros and cons. The bottom line is to deliver the jumper safely to the ground.

  The system that works for us at NCSB is the FS-14. It’s simple, even archaic—and has recorded exactly zero fatalities from not opening since day one.

  That hasn’t stopped the Forest Service from looking into switching every base over to the square, ram-air canopies that BLM jumpers use.

  Parachutes can be a very touchy subject among jumpers. It’s natural that anything you literally depend on for your life will evoke intense feelings and fierce loyalty. Some jumpers on both sides will tell you their system is the best, no question, because it’s what they know.

  Personally, I’m a round parachute fan. I’ve been a jumper since 1999 and it’s the only chute I’ve used. So take all this with a grain of salt.

  The ram-air is a great tool for certain conditions. It can handle higher winds than the FS-14. It offers more precise steering and in some cases softer landings. It’s well suited to open places like Alaska and the Great Basin, which is part of the reason the BLM started using that system in 1983.

  But in my opinion, I’m not sure switching every jump base over to square chutes is the solution. In my years of experience, I’ve seen plenty of valid arguments for both sides. It’s not a cut-and-dried situation.

  The ram-air canopy is basically an inflatable wing, so it needs a certain minimum forward airspeed to function. If you go too slow, the canopy can stall out and collapse. Round chutes don’t do this.

  Ram-air landings are softer, if everything goes right. If not, the canopy has a higher forward speed which could raise the odds of a rougher landing and maybe even an injury.

  Before I started jumping, rumors had it that round parachutes always had the hardest landings. But after joining the program, I’ve seen a bunch of jumpers who routinely, seemingly always, land nearly as softly as their chutes do.

  Mid-air collisons are a hazard no matter what chute you’re on. When jumpers with round canopies collide they tend to bounce off each other, while ram-air chutes would more likely get tangled like a kite. But rounds can tangle too, and a collison a few years back ended up with a leg injury that later led to an amputation.

  Ram-air systems do tend to have higher malfunction rates at both high and low speeds, most of which require reserve deployment. Injuries tend to be more severe with the faster canopies, broken femurs versus sprained ankles.

  Three jumpers have died using the ram-air system since 1991, when a Missoula squad leader was killed when his main didn’t deploy and he was too low to pull his reserve. No one has ever died from an FS-14 not opening.

  Both chute systems have their own pluses and minuses. Instead of one solution for everyone, we should look at terrain and other jump factors and choose the right tool for the right job. Proponents say using ram-air chutes would let Forest Service jumpers land closer to some fires and get them out sooner. But in the Pacific Northwest, it seems pretty clear that our round chutes will allows us get us way closer to the fires here in the heavily forested, rugged terrain we need to land in to get close to the fires, finding small openings between trees that the round parachute can land in. I use a simple analogy: think of a plane compared to a helicopter. Which would you rather use to hit a tiny clearing surrounded by old growth?

  The government loves to standardize things, for cost savings or sheer simplicity. But then there’s the fact that the switch would cost somewhere in the neighborhood
of $12 million.

  And maybe the most far-fetched, I’ve even heard people worry that if the parachute switch does happen, and it results in more accidents, it could become one more excuse to shut down the whole jump program. The future of American smokejumping is far from certain.

  I’ve mentioned the antijumper attitudes that linger in certain corners of the firefighting world.

  To some, we’re a colorful anachronism, like cavalry on a battlefield. Others assume we’re too expensive, that we get hurt too often. Some assume that a situation might be too dangerous for us to jump, because they don’t know how well-trained we are, how experienced, and how valuable the service we provide is. They seem to forget that we are absolute professionals on rough terrain jumping since 1939, and have helped train other Tier-1 entities in the U.S. and internationally on this specialty. We do know what we’re doing.

  In the matter of expenses, the average cost for an eight-person load of jumpers in a Casa jump ship, including two hours of flight time and a sixteen-hour workday—with hazard pay—is $6,500. Compare that to the millions of dollars it costs to fight huge conflagrations.

  The average injury rate for Forest Service jumpers is 7 per 1,000 jumps—and only 3 of those are serious.

  The bias can get almost comical. When Disney was making the movie Planes: Fire and Rescue, some of the artists visited the Redding base so they could get the details right—the details of the cartoon smokejumper planes.

  When the movie came out, other firefighters started commenting on social media, saying things like, “Why all the attention on jumpers as usual?”

  Seriously?

  I know, what’s the problem? But it is a problem if it affects whether or not jumpers are put to use.