Fire Read Free Page A

are injured on the jump, however, and don’t make it to the fire, the hazard pay does not kick in. From fifteen hundred feet it takes about a minute and a half to reach the ground with a parachute. At $8.50 an hour, that’s about 21 cents.
    â€œIn a good year you can make almost thirty thousand dollars,” said Franz. (As with all fire fighters, a “good” year is a year with a lot of fires; a “good” fire is a fire that isn’t brought under control too quickly.) “Under twenty thousand is more typical. That’s for six months. The rest of the year we sew.”
    They sew everything: harnesses, fire line packs, jump bags, even little duffels with the BIFC flame logo on the side. They do it to save the government money, they do it because they’re better sewers than most manufacturers, and they do it to keep themselves employed. The only thing they don’t sew are the parachutes. Some jumpers are certified to make repairs, but the chutes themselves are bought from a manufacturer. The parachutes the BLM uses cost a thousand dollars apiece and are expected, with upkeep, to last at least ten years. They were of a design invented by a French kite maker in the early 1900s. They are called Quantum Q5 Ram Air parachutes.
    â€œRam air means there are cells that fill with air,” said Franz. “They make the canopy so rigid you could walk across it. You could also put a line on it and fly it like a kite; in Alaska, jumpers fly their chutes like kites. You steer with toggles and have a forward speed of twenty miles an hour. It’s a very high tech delivery system for a very low tech job; once we hit the ground we’re just fire fighters. Afterward we have to pack ten miles or more, to the nearest helispot. Our gear weighs over one hundred pounds, and usually we’re not even on trails; it’s harder work than fighting fires. It keeps you honest.”
    Honest means capable of enduring a training regimen that used to weed out 30 percent of the preselected men at the training camp (overwhelmingly men, but not entirely). Rookies are considered the fittest and most perfectly trained because they have endured boot camp most recently: three hours of workouts a day, a jump simulator called the Mutilator, an array of courses and tests that virtually guarantee you’ll pull your ripcord after jumping out of the plane. Overwhelmingly, it works, though not always. In 1991 a jumper in Montana was killed because he didn’t reach for his ripcord until “ground rush,” when it was too late. The entire thing was caught on video because it was a training jump. The consensus was he froze.
    â€œThe biggest hazard is probably the fire itself,” Franz told me. “Felling burning snags, logs rolling down hillsides. Jumping is usually a relief. It’s hot in the airplane, and sometimes you feel sick; then suddenly you’re totally focused on what you’re doing. It’s a little dreamlike.”
    After our talk Franz took me for a quick tour of the jump loft. He showed me the rigging room where the chutes are packed, and the sewing room, and the weight room. Afterward we returned to the conference table, and he popped a short tape into the VCR. It was quick and unprofessional but highly dramatic. It showed a jump crew working a fire at night, right on the line. At one point a sawyer was cutting down a huge ponderosa, and his saw was halfway through the trunk when flames started pouring out like liquid. The tree was hollowed out by fire, it turned out, and was drawing like a chimney. The sawyer kept cutting; the flames kept spurting; eventually the tree fell.
    As I left, I asked Franz—against all hope—if there were any fires around for me to see. He told me I’d just missed a good one. An older couple from Pennsylvania had been towing a car behind their RV, and the car got a flat tire; sparks started a fire front two miles wide. Six thousand