Latest news with #KellyRamsey
Los Angeles Times
3 days ago
- General
- Los Angeles Times
She became a ‘hotshot' wilderness firefighter to write about being on the front lines
This week, we are jumping into the fire with Kelly Ramsey. Her new book, 'Wildfire Days: A Woman, A Hotshot Crew, and The Burning American West,' chronicles her time fighting some of the state's most dangerous conflagrations alongside an all-male crew of Hotshots. The elite wildland firefighters are tasked with applying their tactical knowledge to tamp down the biggest fires in the state. We also look at recent releases reviewed by Times critics. And a local bookseller tells us what our next great read should be. In 2017, Ramsey found herself in a holding pattern. Living in Austin, with an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh under her belt, she didn't know what or where she wanted to be. So she took a nanny job. 'I was spending all my time outdoors with these kids,' she told me. 'I thought, is there a job that would allow me to be outside all the time?' Ramsey landed a volunteer summer gig working on a fire trail crew in Happy Camp, Northern California, on the Klamath River. While Ramsey was learning the delicate art of building firebreaks, a large fire broke out just outside the town. 'My introduction to California that summer was filled with smoke,' says the author. 'This is when I got the bug, when I started to become interested in fighting fires.' Ramsey became a qualified firefighter in 2019, joining an entirely male crew of fellow Hotshots. Ramsey's book 'Wildfire Days' is the story of that fraught and exciting time. We talked to Ramsey about the 'bro culture' of fire crews, the adrenaline surge of danger and the economic hardships endured by these frontline heroes. Below, read our interview with Ramsey, who you can see at Vroman's on June 23. This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. (Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to whose fees support independent bookstores.) What was it like when you confronted a big fire for the first time? It was the Bush fire in Arizona. I was so incredulous, just marveling at what was happening. 'Look at that smoke,' and 'that helicopter is making a water drop.' It was kind of a rookie move, because all the other crew members had seen it thousands of times. To see a helicopter up close making a drop, it looks like this gorgeous waterfall. I had to get acclimated to the epic nature of fires. And that wasn't even a big fire, really. In the book, you talk about entering into a pretty macho culture. How difficult was it for you to gain acceptance into this cloistered male world of the fire crew? It was definitely shocking at first, to be in an entirely male space. The Forest Service had some sexual harassment scandals in 2017, so everyone was on their best behavior at first. It took me some time before I was accepted into the group. I had to perform over-the-top, irrefutably great, just to prove to them that I was OK. It's an unfair standard, but that's the way it was. I wanted to shift the way they saw women, or have better conversations about gender and fire. You write about the pride and stoicism of the fire crew members, the ethos of actions rather than words. No one brags or whines, you just get on with it. Why? When my editor was going through the book, he insisted that I mention the 75 pounds of gear I was always carrying on my back, and I resisted, because you don't complain about that kind of thing when you're out there. But I realized that readers would want to know these details, so I put them in. I was inclined to leave them out. You also write about the difficulties of re-entering civilian life. I don't know of any firefighters who don't struggle with the idea of living a normal, quiet life. It's just a massive letdown after the adrenaline rush of the fire season. What was shocking to me reading 'Wildfire Days' is that fire crews are essentially paid minimum wage to work one of the most dangerous jobs in the state. It was $16.33 an hour when I was in the crew. And most firefighters that I worked with didn't have other jobs. They would take unemployment until the next fire season rolled around. You would just scrape by. During the first month of the season, everyone would be flat broke, eating cans of tuna. The joke is that you get paid in sunsets. But we all love being out there. The camaraderie is so intense and so beautiful. Hamilton Cain reviews National Book Award winner Susan Choi's new novel, 'Flashlight,' a mystery wrapped inside a fraught family drama. 'With Franzen-esque fastidiousness,' Cain writes, 'Choi unpacks each character's backstory, exposing vanities and delusions in a cool, caustic voice, a 21st century Emile Zola.' Jessica Ferri chats with Melissa Febos about her new memoir, 'The Dry Season,' about the year she went celibate and discovered herself anew. Febos wonders aloud why more women aren't more upfront with their partners about opting out of sex: 'This radical honesty not only benefits you but it also benefits your partner. To me, that's love: enthusiastic consent.' Carole V. Bell reviews Maria Reva's 'startling metafictional' novel, 'Endling,' calling it 'a forceful mashup of storytelling modes that call attention to its interplay of reality and fiction — a Ukrainian tragicomedy of errors colliding with social commentary about the Russian invasion.' Nick Owchar interviews Nathan Marsak about the reissue (from local publisher Angel City Press) of 'Los Angeles Before The Freeways: Images of an Era, 1850-1950,' a book of vintage photos snapped by Swedish émigré Arnold Hylen and curated by Marsak. Owchar calls the book 'an engrossing collection of black-and-white images of a city in which old adobe structures sit between Italianate office buildings or peek out from behind old signs, elegant homes teeter on the edge of steep hillsides, and routes long used by locals would soon be demolished to make room for freeways.' And sad news for book lovers everywhere, as groundbreaking gay author Edmund White died this week at 85. This week, we paid a visit to the Westside's great indie bookstore Diesel, which has been a locus for the community in the wake of January's Palisades fire. The store's manager, Kelsey Bomba, tells us what's flying off the store's shelves. What books are popular right now: Right now, Ocean Vuong's 'The Emperor of Gladness' is selling a ton, as [well as] Miranda July's 'All Fours' and Barry Diller's memoir, 'Who Knew.' What future releases are you excited about: Because I loved V.E. Schwab's 'The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue,' I'm excited to read her new book, 'Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil.' 'The Great Mann,' by Kyra Davis Lurie — we are doing an event with her on June 11. What are the hardy perennials, the books that you sell almost all the time: 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' by Gabriel García Márquez, Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series and the Elena Ferrante books, especially 'My Brilliant Friend.' Diesel, A Bookstore is located at 225 26th St., Suite 33, Santa Monica CA 90402.
DW
23-05-2025
- General
- DW
Wildfires through the eyes of the toughest firefighters – DW – 05/23/2025
When Kelly Ramsey joined an elite unit of wildland firefighters called the "hotshots" in Northern California, she thought she knew what she was signing up for. But climate change has flipped a switch, transforming wildfires from a natural occurrence into an unstoppable force. We'll hear her story and check in with firefighters in Canada and Australia about what it now takes put out the flames. Interviewees: Kelly Ramsey, author of "Wildfire Days: A woman, a hotshot crew and the burning American West" Hugh Murdoch, incident commander, British Columbia Wildfire Service Rick McRae, fire behavior specialist and visiting fellow at University of New South Wales Canberra TRANSCRIPT Kelly Ramsey: I knew it was coming. We all knew it was coming. Almost every crew in California was getting called to this fire at some point. It's 2020 – Kelly Ramsey's first fire season in Northern California. She joined a hotshot crew, which is kind of like joining the Navy Seals of wildfires. And for their last assignment, they get sent to a massive fire that's been burning for nearly two months. Kelly: It was something like 37 fire starts that was eventually more than 1,000,000 acres. By this point, the wildfire's consumed an area five times bigger than New York City. Kelly: So, I'm sitting in the back with, you know, these seven men, and we swing onto the highway. You know, I've been to big fires already at that point, I'd been to 100,000- and 200,000 acre-fires. But a fire that big, you might take an hour to get from one side of it to another. This was 5 or 6 hours just going from the eastern part of the fire to the northern part. So already it's this feeling of like, "Oh my God." They pass through a charred moonscape filled with thick yellow smoke. When do they do see fire, even experienced crew members go … Kelly: Whoa, and kind of everybody in the back of the buggy turns and is like, look at that fire behavior or look at that column or whatever. Often you don't say anything at all. Everybody's just like, oh, [BLEEP] . So, one of their assignments is to cut off a wildfire before it reaches the highway. The goal is create a dead zone so the wildfire has nothing left to consume. Right now, the wind is working in their favor. They grab their torches and start dripping fire. Kelly: So that night we've been burning for, I don't know, 12 hours or something. I sort of lose track of time. And I'm on the road with my buddy and we've just dragged two strips of fire with our drip torches down the edge of this road, and the fire is romping. It is torching trees en masse which is like, torching is when the tree kind of goes up like a Roman candle. Just like all at once WHOOSH! it just like lights from the bottom to the top. And so these trees had been torching just like 10 at a time and it sounds like a jet engine roar, you know? It, it feels scary, but for the entire day, the wind has been pushing in to, let's say, my right or to the East, it's been pushing in toward the main fire. So, it's drawing all those flames in toward the main fire, and it's also drawing the smoke all over toward the main fire. So that's what we want to see. Perfect. But, at this moment, I'm on the road with my buddy and all of a sudden the wind shifts. You see this like wall of smoke in the sky just kind of shift and fall over. And you can see all these bright orange sparks just wafting into the air and then landing. This massive ember wash is just raining over the road. They want to keep the biggest fire in California's history from becoming even bigger. Kelly: Obviously this is really not what you want. In this episode, we're going to hear more from Kelly about what life's like on the frontlines of wildfires. We're also going to hear from Canadian and Australian firefighters who've watched climate change turn wildfires into unstoppable events. They say there's a very real threat that wildfires will start hitting places across the globe that used to be safe. This is Living Planet. I'm Kathleen Schuster. Kelly: So we spread out about 10, 20 feet in a line. We're looking for these embers that are falling out of the sky all over us, like falling stars. And they're tiny. Often they will be, you know, a piece of a burning leaf that is, let's say the size of quarter or even like a dime. Something that small can start an entirely new wildfire. So, when it catches, and it, you know, lands in some duff or some dry leaves or some dry pine needles, and it starts to form a fire you're walking through the forest and the darkness and what you're looking for is essentially a tiny glow. It's like the flicker of a little candle. Within a matter of minutes, they see an ember land in a dry, rotten tree stump. Kelly: So, by the time we get there, this thing is already a 10 by 10 foot blaze. For non-US listeners, that's 3 by 3 meters. Kelly: Like the entire stump is just engulfed in flame and smoldering, and then it started to creep into the ground cover and you know little plants and grasses around the stump, and it's already starting to establish itself as a fire. So, we immediately got 5 or 6 people just, you know, digging a little hand line around it. And then we called for an engine to bring water. And it wasn't hard to catch it, but you know, imagine if we didn't. This is just the first of many spot fires Kelly and her crew will have to pounce on before the night is over. And as they race to prevent this million-acre fire from gaining even more ground, Kelly feels the whole summer of extreme wildfires in her muscles and in her mind. We're going to come back to Kelly, and also find out why none of should kid ourselves into thinking we could survive hotshot training, trust me we wouldn't… But before we do that let's stick with this image of uncontrollable embers a few moments longer. Wildland firefighters are trained to deal with normal wildfire behavior – including what to do about embers, of course. What's changing though is that, as one expert put it, climate change hasn't just turned up the dial. It's flipped a switch. Meaning, it's not just amplifying fire behavior. It's changing the predictability of wildfires altogether. Hugh Murdoch: When you're flying you can still be feeling that heat. Hugh Murdoch is one of five incident commanders for British Columbia's Wildfire Service. He's been fighting wildfires in Canada for over 30 years… Hugh: But it's remarkable to me that I've been on fires now where you fly at a good speed and you just keep going and going and going. And the fire is just there, outside your, your right-hand window and it's just percolating away and the trees look so small in comparison to the flames. And then if you fly down closer to the ground level and you get a better appreciation for how big those trees really are, and they're not small. Seeing fires growing not just by a methodical march of the perimeter or the fire's edge, but by throwing embers well in advance of itself. If we imagine for a second, a wildfire capable of throwing an ember a mile or roughly 2 kilometers ahead of itself, then it's not that hard to picture how fast these fires can move through a forest that's too dry. Or even being capable of blowing clear acro ss lakes and rivers, Hugh says. Hugh: Fires are certainly getting much, much bigger. The difference is really very significant. So, picture an area about the size of Manhattan, maybe just slightly smaller. That's about how big Hugh says a "good-sized" wildfire used to be. It would grow by about 10% a day. Now these huge wildfires are able to grow by the size of a Manhattan, if you will, in one single day. Hugh: And the intensity that it's burning is just really growing at an alarming rate. This trend is being seen in other regions, too. Take for example a study released last year by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder. The researchers looked at satellite data from the last two decades. They found that wildfires in the American West grew about 250% faster over a 24-hour period compared to wildfires in 2001. And in that same period, it was exactly those fast-moving fires that caused the most destruction. They also cost about $19 billion to suppress. Hugh: You know that the helicopters will only want to get so close to those large fires because there's so much heat coming off of the forest like the typical "hot air rises." Well, that's awfully hot air. So, it's rising very, very quickly. And it's sucking the air in to fill that void. So inevitably these large fires can make their own weather and their own winds. Before we get into how exactly fire can create it owns wind and weather, it's worth considering what it takes – both physically and mentally -- for someone to even become a wildland firefighter. Let's take Kelly and the hotshot crew she was on as an example. First off, why are they called hotshots? Kelly: It doesn't just mean like, oh, because we're the coolest, like "Oh, you're such a hotshot." (laughs) I think it's probably about like the heat of the work that we do. And that heat starts with building muscle and stamina during basic training… Kelly: So you are definitely hiking. And when I say hiking, I don't mean a hiking trail. I mean, like you look at an incredibly steep vertical mountain where your face is, is at, like, looking at the slope when you're standing on it. The slope is like in your face you know? And you have to maintain a certain crew pace and you have to carry at least 45 lbs. But most people carry 60 plus pounds up that hill. Forty-five pounds is about 20 kilos… or the equivalent of carrying a child on your back… Kelly: You have to be able to meet a bunch of specific qualifications, like running a mile and 1/2 in 10 1/2 minutes. You have to do a certain number of sit-ups, push-ups, pull-ups. They do calisthenics like wall-sits and leg lifts. Kelly: I worked with several guys who have been marines and they said that being a hotshot was harder than being a marine. And I got that from another guy who'd been an army ranger. And just like any other elite team, they have a specific look. Yellow shirts, green pants, and here, the importance of their boots cannot be emphasized enough. Kelly: (laughs) Yeah… (laughs) The boots are a big deal. And there's really differing boot styles and opinions on boots, even from hot shot crew to hot shot crew. So, the crew that I was on was really big on super tall boots. Boots that came up pretty much to the knee, or at least mid-shin down like 16-inch boots. They're leather. And most hotshots that I know prefer a boot with a little bit of a stacked heel. It's easier to just stand on a super steep slope if you have a bit of a heel to the boot. All fire-resistant, of course. Hotshots are among the first in and the last out. Their main tasks are digging line – literally digging shallow trenches to form a physical border that can break the forward march of a wildfire. And preventative burning as needed. The point is to get rid of any potential fuel well in advance … or even down to the wire… Kelly: You are literally right next to the flames or within you know 10- 20 feet of the flames. And in that case you're digging line fast. So yeah, I've had situations where I was digging line and they're, you know, two or three-foot flames that are just a few feet away from me. And in that case, you really move. When the fire's finally out, the hotshots get to "mop up," turning over and testing every last inch of sometimes miles of where the fire was to make sure it's really out. After long days of this for at last two weeks at a time, everything hurts. Kelly: I had, like, sort of knots in my forearms. My hands started to go numb. And they didn't stop being numb until a couple months after the season ended. You also will get like a chafe in your armpits from the pack rubbing against your flesh, so the skin will like become raw and open, and you have to kind of like bandage it up or tape it up in order to keep working. So, this is more or the less the condition the crew is in the night they have to catch every last ember. Kelly: And it ended up taking until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. You know, at this time, we've, we've been on since 6:00 the previous morning. But we and, you know, not just our crew, but other crews and a couple of engines that have been sent to help us. And we're able to know that at least along that road, our burn has held, it's going to be OK and we've you know, hopefully been able to contain the main fire. They're all keyed up. They climb back into their buggy and head for the camp site… Kelly: And everyone's throwing Gatorades to everybody else. You know, you strip off your yellow shirt because we only wear those when we're on the line. We don't wear them to, like, hang out. We definitely don't sleep in them. So, you strip off that shirt and change into a dry cotton shirt and then sit down in the buggy and there's this amazing feeling of peace as the buggy just rumbles through the darkness back to where we're going to camp. This feeling of like we did it, and now we get to sleep for a while and we'll see what happens tomorrow. So there's, like, the first relief is you unlace the boots and pull them off. And it's like your feet are released from this straight jacket and then you pull off the sweaty socks and your feet are completely free and then you take off these salt and ash and sweat crusted pants and you put on long underwear. None of the clothing is clean at this point, but the semi-clean clothing against your body is just like an intense relief and just so comforting. And then you snuggle into your sleeping bag. And I think that night I didn't even need a melatonin or a Benadryl or anything, I just was gratified and tired, and looked up at the sky and just fell asleep. We'll be right back. PROMO BREAK Kathleen: You know I have to say, what's super striking about this interview is you're like are so happy telling me all of this. Kelly: (big laugh) I'm grinning, it's so true! Kathleen: (slight laugh) And I, I fully appreciate that. But I'm just like there's a bit of a disconnect for me. I'm like, wait, hold on… Kelly: It's so fun! It's so fun. It's the most fun job I've ever and probably will ever do. Kelly says it's crazy… and it really is, considering how tough her first fire season was. Not only did she get deployed to California's largest wildfire in history, the August Complex, but she says, that summer, her team racked up over 1,000 hours of overtime in less than five months. And it's very likely that a good number of the US's 100 or so hotshot crews had similar experiences that year. In 2020, the US came within just a few thousand acres of matching its worst fire season on record, which was 2015. Both times, over 10 million acres – or 4 million hectares – of land went up in flames. One thing stands out, though … The number of fires in 2020 was actually lower… going back to what experts are saying. These fast-moving fires are much more destructive. So, Kelly goes on to do a second, grueling year. She loves it, but she knows not everyone feels that way. Hugh Murdoch, up in British Columbia, mentions a big shift he's noticed. The fires are getting worse … and fire responders are caught between the pressure from the job and the pressure from the public to stop the unstoppable. Hugh says in his community about four hours east of Vancouver, the tension is "real and mounting." Hugh: You know, I would not wear a shirt that identified myself as employee of the British Columbia Wildfire Service. In certain communities … for certain. Kathleen: Really? Hugh: 100% and that's not uncommon. And yet, literally five years ago you'd wear it with pride, and now it's just like I don't want to get dumped on at the grocery store. […] And to be clear, there's not a lot of people that support what you're doing. But it's just not worth the attention at all. Kathleen: I mean, if you don't mind my asking, have you had somebody approach you before and chew you out or…? Hugh: Oh, 100%, yeah. We've got a cabin at a lake just east of here. It's an area where tourism is important and the forest industry is important. And we had a horrific fire there in 2023. When he does go to his cabin, he keeps a low profile. But some of his coworkers don't have that luxury, because the fallout can be felt within their own four walls. Hugh: You know that their families are irate with them. It's like made Thanksgiving dinners and Christmases and whatnot awkward for people. That year, nearly 2300 fires burned across British Columbia – causing more than $720 million in damages between August and September alone. 2023 was Canada's worst fire season ever recorded. Between mid-April and late October, there were times when fires were burning from coast-to-coast, destroying an area bigger than England. You might also remember those fires from images of the smoke that drifted down into the US and blanketed New York City. The smoke caused New York's temperature to drop by 3 degrees Celsius that June. Things got so bad that other countries sent in personnel to help. Hugh: We got an awful lot of assistance from the United States. Strange, like very, very strange that in Canada's busiest year, the United States is having one of their quietest years on record ever. That year, the US was able to send nearly 2500 people to help out. Which might not have happened if it had had as busy a fire season as Canada. To be clear, Canada relied on long-standing agreements with its other partners, too -- Mexico, Costa Rica, and crucially, three partners in the Southern Hemisphere – South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. But even that wasn't enough. When all was said and done 12 countries had to send help. If they hadn't, Hugh says… Hugh: I'm absolutely convinced the landscape would look very different today than it does. What comes up again and again with different fire experts from the US, Canada and Australia is that climate change is making wildfires more extreme. And this is pushing fire response to its limits, because, and they all agree on this, there is no technology in the world that can replace manpower. And manpower, of course, has its limits. Hugh: It's a daunting task, but you know we, we don't get asked to stop hurricanes or tornadoes or tsunamis. It would be naive to think that we can stop all forest fires, and that's partly how we got into this mess too, right? We've been very good at putting out fires when they're small for a very long period of time. But every year there's a buildup of more and more dead material on the ground, and there's a buildup of more and more resources that are vulnerable to fire, whether it's homes or cell towers or fence lines or recreational properties or businesses, so that there's more in front of these fires as well. But when a lightning system comes through and starts 100 fires in a very small area in one day … we just have to be realistic about the fact that we're not going to get all these fires put out in their infancy. Especially because, as Hugh mentioned before, extreme wildfires are creating their own weather and their own wind. Rick McRae has been watching this trend in Australia for decades... Rick: So when I left work just a few hours before New Year's Eve, our car park was very close to the airport control tower. I could barely see the airport control tower, which is never a good thing for an international airport. And it turned out at that point we had the worst air quality in the world. We're going to skip back in time for a moment to the days leading into 2020. Right smack dab in the middle of an Australian fire season that's gone down in history as "The Black Summer." That evening when Rick walks out to his car, Australia is in the middle of an outbreak of fire thunderstorms known as pyro-CBs (pronounces as pyro-sibs) What's a pyro-CB, you ask? Rick: Well first I've got to correct you, it's pyro C.B. My mistake …pyro Cb. The C.B. stands for cumulonimbus, the meteorological term for "thunderclouds." And pyro, for "fire," of course. Rick says meteorologists complain that pyro C.B. isn't actually the right term. Rick: They say, well, actually it's a yeah, "cumulonimbus flammagenitus." And strangely, that one that term never took off… That really would be a mouthful. So pyro Cb it is… Rick has decades of experience in bushfire response and now researches these types of phenomena alongside the fire research unit at the University of New South Wales in Canberra. What Rick's talking about is when the large smoke column from a wildfire goes extreme and becomes something more on par with a volcanic plume. A pyro CB can be seen from far off, but not so well up close… Rick: So most people's direct experience is that eerie blackened sky at in the early afternoon and the red glows and the embers starting to brew up. Rick says the land is becoming "fully flammable" and that's creating the conditions for infernos that generate fire thunderstorms. That year, Australia had just experienced two years in a row of dry conditions, and was in the grips of one of its hottest and driest years on record. All of that fuel created hot air powerful enough to punch right through the atmosphere and into the stratosphere. Rick: So, you can end up at the top of the cloud, 15,16 kilometers above sea level, which is really extraordinary stuff. And the base of this thing might be 20 square kilometers, and because it's expanding as it goes, it's the size of a very large thunderstorm. Now the temperature at the top of the cloud can get to say - 60 Celsius. And once it passes - 40 -, 40 Celsius as it rises, it can create lightning pyrogenic lightning, and this even has the ability to start new fires downwind. Over the span of about a week, Australia's bushfires spawn 18 of these massive firestorms. The air quality index in Canberra hits 5400– 23 times levels considered safe. By the time Australia's unprecedented fire season comes to an end, nearly 50 million acres have burned. 33 people have died. And billions of plants and animals have been lost to the flames. We'll be right back. PROMO BREAK Kelly's second year is intense and just as eventful as the first… maybe even more so. She watches firsthand as more than one crew member nearly gets killed by a falling tree. And her body starts to rebel. Kelly: So I decided to step away for what I thought was one summer because I had some health problems that I wanted to address. She develops an autoimmune disorder and can't help but wonder – was it the stress? The overexertion? The smoke? There's very little data on how many wildland firefighters have left, but Kelly seems to be just one of many. US media reports point to a growing attrition rate of around 45% and application rates dropping by half in the past few years. The Canadian media has reported similar problems. As for Australia – AFAC, the country's fire and emergency management council, says its robust firefighting network of professionals and volunteers is pretty stable in urban areas. But numbers are starting to decline slightly in rural areas – due in part to an aging population and the pressure of cost of living. Hugh and Rick can attest to how much harder these jobs are getting. And a big part of that is because of anthropogenic climate change. An international study by the World Weather Attribution found, for example, that climate change made Canada's wildfires in 2023 inferno twice as likely. And if conditions stay as they are, that type of event will become seven times more likely in the future. Add to this even more tragic examples, like Los Angeles – where an unstoppable fire swept a mile and a half across the urban edge. A new record, Rick says. Or a sudden, increased risk of extreme fires in areas that didn't use to make headlines – like South Korea. The good news is there are solutions, and one of them is bolstering personnel with firefighters from different countries. Like what Hugh described a few minutes ago. Hugh: And I would say that you know that difference, whether it's 50 people or 500 wherever those people are, they're making a difference. So, if it's 50 people onto one fire or 10 groups of 50 onto 10 different fires. It's pretty fantastic to have to help. It's one way to share the load, the equipment… and also knowledge. Hugh himself spent time in Australia during the Black Summer. He also went down to Los Angeles during those fires in January. He says there's always something new to learn. And especially when it comes to the Santa Ana winds that drove LA's fires, Rick says, sharing that knowledge internationally will be vital for places like Australia where there's been an uptick in these wind patterns, too. Kelly ultimately takes an indefinite hiatus from the hotshot crew. With good reason, too -- she became a mom. Kelly: I'm no longer a hotshot. I'm a washed up former hotshot but I do miss the job all the time. I, like, would love to go back to the in some capacity and it just is hard to see a way that that would be compatible with having a family. And I know a lot of people, including men who struggle with this and you know, there's a crisis of attrition in the profession. There's always a staffing shortage with federal wildland firefighters and I think a huge part of that is how hard it is on families and on people who want to be parents. So long-winded way of saying when I left (big laugh). There was one other thing Kelly did when she left the hotshot crew – she wrote book, so if you want to know more about her story and what it takes to fight wildfires, you can check that out. It's called "Wildfire Days: A woman, a hotshot crew and the burning American West." If after hearing this episode you're wondering about to prepare for a wildfire, we've dropped a few links in the show notes to help get you started. What did you think of this episode? We want to know! You can send us an email at or drop us a comment on Apple podcasts. This episode was written, produced, and soundscaped by me, Kathleen Schuster. It was edited by Neil King. Our sound engineer was Jürgen Kuhn. Living Planet is produced by DW in Bonn, Germany.
