Crews from Southeast pitch in to battle Nevada wildland blazes

Jace Radke

Tuesday, Aug. 15, 2000 | 11:13 a.m.

After spending four nights and five days battling an 878-acre fire along the ridges of Trout Canyon last week, the firefighters of North Carolina Hand Crew 35 trudged out of the Spring Mountains Saturday night.

For their efforts, the 20 men got a shower, a change of clothes, a meal and a night's sleep before making a 400-mile trip north to Battle Mountain, where the 1,280-acre Whiskey Fire promised more back-breaking work.

"It's all about endurance and being able to put in long days and sometimes nights," firefighter Greg Philipp said as he walked down Trout Canyon toward a portable shower stall Saturday night. "There's really nothing that can compare to how tired you get doing this. It's kind of like a camping trip where it's fun on the first day out, but then you're ready to go home." Philipp is one of about 25,000 firefighters who won't be home much this summer as they try to stop the 85 wildfires burning through 964,000 acres in the West.

Being away from family and friends is a sacrifice that wildland firefighters make every summer, but this year's fires have burned more than 4.8 million acres, stretching resources to the breaking point and forcing longer tours of duty, National Forest Service fire management team spokesman Steve Parsons said.

"This season is much worse than 1988 when Yellowstone burned, and it's the busiest I've seen in my 30 years of doing this," Parsons said. "It's a big sacrifice, and a lot of 14-, 15- and 16-hour days followed by nights of sleeping on the ground. We try to work crews for 14 days and then give them some time off, but now we're working 21-day shifts."

Parsons and his 40-member team are all from the Southeast and finished a 21-day shift at the Trout Canyon fire on Sunday. The team members were released to their homes in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida and, in Parsons' case, Virginia.

"We'll be hoping for a week, but we might only get a few days with how busy it has been," Parsons said. "It's tough on people to be away from their families, but it's something you try to get used to. The people who do this wouldn't if they didn't understand the sacrifices.

"When we stop a fire from destroying people's homes like here in Trout Canyon, it's something we feel good about and can take with us."

Parsons and his team, which works out logistics during fire incidents, started their 21-day shift at the 15,872-acre Coyote Fire in Lincoln County before heading south to the Trout Canyon blaze. Earlier in the year the team was working a fire in Florida and was called to Kentucky.

"Usually crews will be dispatched locally, and then if a fire gets bigger, resources are drawn from the surrounding regions and states," Parsons said. "When we get to a situation like we have now, resources are called in from across the nation and even from other countries."

More than 500 firefighters from Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Mexico are helping to put out fires in the Western United States.

Given the firefighters' distance from home, phone calls become a highly prized luxury as they try to keep in touch with their families while making their way from fire to fire.

"Phones are the big one when people are coming off a fire," Philipp said. "Everyone wants to use one. After that we're looking for a shower, food and clean clothes."

Firefighter Donald Strickland Jr. got a call out to his father, Donald Strickland Sr., in Rocky Mountain, N.C., on Saturday to say he was OK before he headed to Battle Mountain.

"He's my only son, so we miss him a lot," Strickland Sr. said from his North Carolina home. "We see the fires on the news, and sometimes we go for a while without a call from him. But I always taught him to call home, and he does it when he makes it to a phone."

Strickland Sr. probably wouldn't recognize his son, or his son's buddy, Craig Burgess, when the two finish up at a fire. Both men were covered in black soot Saturday, some of which mixed with the five-day-old stubble on Burgess' face to make him look like a camouflaged soldier as he peeled off once-white socks that were black with smoke.

"My dogs are barking," Burgess said as he pulled off the socks. "I was lucky though, I twisted my ankle and got to hike down in the middle of the week for some treatment. I got the chance to get a shower and a change of drawers before heading back up."

When the firefighters are in the back country, they lose contact with not only their families, but also with what's going on in the world. How many games the Atlanta Braves are up in the National League East and what's happening in the presidential race are among the questions that curious crew members asked as they made it back to the Trout Canyon base camp Saturday.

Veteran firefighters like Strickland and Burgess say they are used to the rigors of their job, even during the worst fire season of the last half century. Rookies like 20-year-old Steve Hurley of Fayetteville, N.C., are having a harder time adjusting to bouncing from blaze to blaze.

"I guess I'll get used to it like the other guys," Hurley said. "I'm just worried about keeping up with everybody, but I guess I'm doing OK so far. I think this will be a good experience for me before I go back to college, and I've always wanted to see this part of the country because I'm a big John Denver fan."

For some firefighters and Forest Service personnel, a monster fire season with lots of traveling has its good side.

"These fires are kind of like a reunion for me," Parsons said. "I've been doing this for so long that when I go to different parts of the country, I always run into someone whom I worked with on another fire."