We began to hike along the edge of the burn scar, the charred area that a fire leaves behind. Our job was to cold trail—to scour the boundary where the fire had stopped, looking for hot spots that could reignite. Walking side by side, we marched into drainage ditches, scaled chain-link fences, crossed culs-de-sac, and passed through back yards that sloped steeply upward, toward the mountains. Each of us was responsible for scanning the ground for anything that might hold heat. At one end of the line, a crew member shouted, “Feel all white ashes! Don’t pass the person on your left!” Each firefighter repeated the message, one person to the next, as though it were an echo.
Another day, she helps create a containment line:
From our position, more than a mile above sea level, we could see that the Eaton Fire was alive below us, wafting smoke from the low points between the mountains and creating an ethereal haze. Those steep canyons were too treacherous to hike into—a broken ankle would require an air evacuation—so the crew’s assignment was to create a mile-long containment line in the peaks west of Mount Wilson Observatory. We would remove a forty-foot swath of vegetation to insure that, even if winds energized the fire and it made another run, “we don’t get anything in Canada,” as a member of the incident command had put it. (Canada wasn’t in danger, but there were hundreds of miles of dry forest to our north.) There was also the risk that Santa Anas would blow the fire into another densely populated part of Los Angeles. The crew spread out, and sawyers began to cut the chaparral with their saws. Their partners, known as swampers, grabbed at underbrush and dragged it away.
She describes the diversity of the crew she’s with:
Some of its members had learned wildland firefighting in prison. One had heard about it from a cousin; another had seen a recruitment flyer. A rookie firefighter had just finished a year as a conscript in the Finnish military. The crew’s lead E.M.T. was a member of the Hopi Tribe. A man who’d worked for a hot-shot crew—essentially the special forces of firefighting—had been the first Black firefighter to be named its Rookie of the Year. Unusually, one of the sawyer teams was all-female.
She describes the roar of the chainsaws; the yellow shirts made of Nomex that the crew members wear (“fire-resistant up to seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit”); the thump of a Chinook helicopter’s rotors as it dumps water on the trees; the backpacks that she and the crew carry, containing “silver, cocoonlike fire shelters that we could deploy if we were overtaken by flames”; burned suburbs (“these areas appear bombed out”); the relentless Santa Ana winds that drive the fire (“A sudden gust hit us and we all hunched our shoulders, bracing ourselves”).
"Line of Fire" takes us inside the reality that wildland firefighters inhabit. It’s a remarkable piece.
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