Latest news with #KellyRamsey
Washington Post
18-06-2025
- General
- Washington Post
A terrifying look at wildfires from the hotshots who fight them
According to the National Interagency Fire Center, there were 64,897 wildfires that charred nearly 9 million acres of the United States in 2024. Those numbers are well above the five- and 10-year averages. These figures may not be surprising given the changes in weather patterns across the country, including higher temperatures and unusually dry conditions in some areas, but they project a sobering message: We are living in an age of unprecedented, unpredictable wildfires — and we need a solution fast. Two passionately told, impeccably researched and important new books by veteran hotshot firefighters weigh in on the matter: Jordan Thomas's 'When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World' and Kelly Ramsey's 'Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West.' Full of vivid (and terrifying) descriptions of what it feels like to be on the front lines battling blazes, both books drop readers into the furnace, inviting us not only to witness how much intense training, sheer willpower and brute strength it takes to hack away at these infernos day after day but also to realize how stuck in the mud we are if we don't admit the severity of the situation and address the problem. 'When It All Burns' touches down in the summer of 2020, when covid-19 shutdowns were in full swing. A self-described 'overeducated, unemployed millennial living in an overpriced garage,' Thomas had just decided to press pause on his anthropology PhD program to interview for the Los Padres Hotshots, one of 100 elite outfits in the United States he describes as the 'Navy SEALs of wildland firefighters.' After he joined the squad in 2021, his six-month tour of duty began. To say it was ruthless, harrowing and exhausting is an understatement. His 20-person company was deployed at a moment's notice wherever they were most needed, from a desert wildfire in Nevada to a lightning-strike blaze in Arizona to a towering redwood grove aflame in Big Sur, California. During his tenure, Thomas's progression from a naive and mistake-prone 'kook' who 'wore safety glasses to sharpen his saw' to a skilled and dependable member of the team feels excruciating but hard-won. By the end of the book, when the tobacco-chewing, foulmouthed and hypermasculine crew finally accepts him, we're relieved — and impressed. But while Thomas's detailed descriptions of grueling brush-hacking sessions and near-constant life-threatening scenarios are riveting, the book's power comes from its methodical, clear-eyed and convincing explanation of how we wound up here in the first place — in a world where megafires inevitably rage out of control, annihilating every town and ecosystem in their path. In fascinating sections scattered throughout the book, Thomas traces the progression of American forest management practices throughout history, from thousands of years before European settlement — when Indigenous peoples used controlled burns as a method to protect the environment, foster healthy regeneration and enhance biodiversity — to today's age of mass logging and fire suppression. 'On average, landscapes created by corporate forestry hold approximately seven times the density of those managed with fire,' Thomas writes. 'Each of these factors — the homogeneity of the trees' age, the standardization of tree species, and their density — has combined with climate change to transform forests into tinderboxes.' Thomas's proposed solutions involve finding common ground between diametrically opposed parties who disagree on the best path forward — perhaps a partnership between local Indigenous tribes and government agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service, in tandem with statewide initiatives that bolster the honorable work of combating fires (including paying hotshots a well-deserved living wage and health-care benefits, which they are ineligible for now). He also recommends more sustainable forest management practices such as reintroducing prescribed burns to increase forests' resilience to climate change. While Thomas's 'When It All Burns' aims mostly at the head, Ramsey's 'Wildfire Days' targets the heart. It chronicles Ramsey's two-year tenure in 2020 and 2021, first as a wilderness ranger for the U.S. Forest Service in Northern California, then as a member of the region's Rowdy River Hotshots. Though she and Thomas cover similar territory, albeit in slightly different geographical terrain, Ramsey's recollections of digging fire lines and lighting controlled burns, scaling mountain faces and working 16-hour days on her feet stand apart because, at 38, she was one of the oldest members of her crew. Though she was the first woman to make the Rowdy River Hotshots ranks in 10 years, the fact that she was the only woman put her at a double disadvantage, she writes: 'female, or small, and old.' That played out in some ways you might expect. There are amusing references to hiding tampons everywhere she might need one, and stories about trying to find a suitable place outside to pee amid a sea of men. A large portion of the book is also devoted to her thorny relationships with others: her alcoholic and eventually homeless father; Eddie, a fellow hotshot whom she (obviously) had a crush on; and her fiancé, Josh (also a firefighter, though not a hotshot), who increasingly resented the close friendships she developed with her new Rowdy River family. But the true spine of this inspiring memoir is Ramsey's progression from the 'careful, compliant girl I had been for most of my life, half-starved to stay thin,' to a full-throttle warrior who could hold her own alongside some of the most fearless firefighters in the nation. 'I'd fallen in love with the person I became, fighting fire. I loved her physical strength, her dirty skin and two-week-old clothes that had hardened to a crust,' she writes of her transformation. 'I was a mess. I was a machine. I had the thighs of a champion racehorse. I'd never been more proud.' Fighting fires is relentless and epically dangerous; the constant threat of death or injury and the stress on personal relationships are just two of the job's many downsides. But as Thomas and Ramsey prove in their books, the work is both necessary and rewarding, especially now. 'We need to ratchet down the burning of fossil fuels, ratchet up the intentional burning of our landscapes, and support people like the hotshots who work to contain the unfolding disasters of our society's creation,' Thomas writes. 'If megafires can remind us of anything, it is of the precarity of our relationship with our environments and the work required to care for those places that matter to us.' Alexis Burling is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune, among other publications. Fighting Fires in a Transformed World By Jordan Thomas. Riverhead. 368 pp. $30 A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West By Kelly Ramsey. Scribner. 352 pp. $29
Los Angeles Times
13-06-2025
- General
- Los Angeles Times
Female Hotshot firefighter brings California mega blazes to life in moving memoir
Fire changes whatever it encounters. Burns it, melts it, sometimes makes it stronger. Once fire tears through a place, nothing is left the same. Kelly Ramsey wasn't thinking of this when she joined the U.S. Forest Service firefighting crew known as the Rowdy River Hotshots — she just thought fighting fires would be a great job. But fire changed her too. In her memoir, 'Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West,' Ramsey takes us through two years of fighting wilderness fires in the mountains of Northern California. She wrote the book before January's deadly Altadena and Pacific Palisades fires, and what she encountered in the summers of 2020 and 2021 was mostly forests burning, not city neighborhoods. But at the time, the fires she and her fellow crewmen fought (and they were all men that first year) were the hottest, fastest, biggest fires California had ever experienced. 'My first real year in fire had been a doozy, not just for me but my beloved California: 4.2 million acres burned,' she writes, in the 'worst season the state had endured in over a hundred years.' That included the state's first gigafire — more than 1 million acres burned in Northern California. The job proved to be the hardest thing she'd ever done, but something about fire compelled her. 'At the sight of a smoke column, most people feel a healthy hitch in their breath and want to run the other way,' she writes. 'But all I wanted to do was run toward the fire.' Ramsey's memoir covers a lot of ground, skillfully. She learns that being in good shape isn't enough — she has to be in incredible shape. She learns how to work with a group of men who are younger, stronger and more experienced than she is, and she figures out how to find that line between never complaining and standing up for herself in the face of inappropriate behavior. She also writes about the changes in her own life during that time: coming to terms with her alcoholic, homeless father; pondering her lousy record for romantic relationships; searching for an independence and peace she had never known. 'It wasn't fire that was hard; it was ordinary life,' she concludes. Sometimes her struggles with ordinary life threaten to take over the narrative, but while they humanize her, they are not the most interesting part of this book. What resonates instead is fire and all that it entails — the burning forest and the hard, mind-numbing work of the Hotshots. They work 14 days on, two days off, all summer and fall, sometimes 24-hour shifts when things are bad. They sleep rough, dig ditches, build firebreaks, set controlled burns, take down dead trees and, in between, experience moments of terrifying danger. Readers of John Vaillant's harrowing 2023 book 'Fire Weather' — an account of the destruction of the Canadian forest town of Fort McMurray — might consider Ramsey's book a companion to the earlier book. 'Wildfire Days' is not as sweeping or scientific; it's more personal and entertaining. It's the other side of the story, the story of the people who fight the blaze. Ramsey's gender is an important part of this book; as a woman, she faces obstacles men do not. It's harder to find a discreet place to relieve herself; she must deal with monthly periods; and, at first, she is the weakest and slowest of the Hotshots. 'Thought you trained this winter,' one of the guys tells her after an arduous training hike leaves her gasping for breath. 'I did,' she said. 'Thinking you shoulda trained a little harder, huh,' he said. But over time she grows stronger, more capable, and more accepted. In the second year, when another woman joins the crew, Ramsey is torn between finally being 'one of the guys' and supporting, in solidarity, a woman — but a woman whose work is substandard and whose attitude is whiny. 'Was I only interested in 'diversity' on the crew if it looked like me?' she asks herself. 'Had I clawed out a place for myself, only to pull up the ladder behind me?' But competence is crucial in this dangerous job, and substandard work can mean deadly accidents. For centuries, natural wildfires burned dead trees and undergrowth in California, keeping huge fires in check. White settlers threw things out of whack. 'The Indigenous people of California were (and still are) expert fire keepers,' Ramsey writes. 'Native burning mimicked and augmented natural fire, keeping the land park like and open.' But in the 20th century, humans suppressed fires and forests became overgrown. 'Cut to today,' she writes. 'Dense forests are primed to burn hotter and faster than ever before.' Ramsey's descriptions of the work and the fires are the strongest parts of the book. 'We could hear the howl — like the roar of a thousand lions, like a fleet of jet engines passing overhead — the sound of fire devouring everything,' Ramsey writes. Later, she drives through a part of the forest that burned the year before to see 'mile upon mile of carbonized trees and denuded earth, a now-familiar scene of extinguished life.' But she also notes that the burned areas are already beginning to green up. 'New life tended to spring from bitterest ash,' she writes. 'The forest wouldn't grow back the same, but it wouldn't stop growing,' she observes earlier. There is a metaphor here. Ramsey's memoir is a moving, sometimes funny story about destruction, change and rebirth, told by a woman tempered by fire. Hertzel's second memoir, 'Ghosts of Fourth Street,' will be published in 2026. She teaches in the MFA in Narrative Nonfiction program at the University of Georgia and lives in Minnesota.
Newsweek
11-06-2025
- General
- Newsweek
As Fires Get Fiercer, This Firefighter Warns: 'Every Season Feels More Dangerous'
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Over the last year, wildfires ravaged the state of California—burning tens of thousands of acres and leaving many residents homeless in the aftermath. To combat high-priority blazes, firefighters from the National Interagency Hotshot Crews are rapidly dispatched to put out the flames. In this Q&A, wildland firefighter and author of Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West (Scribner) Kelly Ramsey details why she wanted to become a firefighter, the challenges of being on a hotshot crew and her concerns about where the next major wildfires might be. Author Kelly Ramsey and book cover for Wildfire Days Author Kelly Ramsey and book cover for Wildfire Days Lindsey Shea Newsweek: What made you want to be a firefighter? Kellly Ramsey: I was working for the forest service as a wilderness ranger and all my roommates were female firefighters on various crews. They seemed just sort of like they came to life in this job. So I started to get curious, and when I went on my first tiny, tiny fire, I was like, "Oh, I get it. I want to try this." Did you come alive like they did? Absolutely. The job was so empowering and so exciting. It was really cool to see this natural occurrence of combustion happening. And to learn how to manipulate and use fire to fight fire. Fire beat me down in many ways, but also brought me to life. What do you like about it most? The intersection between brutal manual labor and the sense you have that you're doing something meaningful. That and the camaraderie. What's different about being on a hotshot crew? All wildland firefighters have an extremely challenging, grueling job, where you're out in the woods and the wilderness for 14 days at a time, doing very hard manual labor in heavy smoke, and sometimes right up against flames. But hotshot crews are assigned to the toughest parts of a fireline, and sometimes have to hike the farthest, or do the most grueling labor, tackle kind of the most dangerous assignment. What were some of the toughest challenges? Physically? Just the hiking. You hike up [gesturing] like a 45-or-more-degree the slope is right in your face. Hiking up something that steep, carrying anywhere from 45 to 70 pounds. I'm an average-sized woman, I would say, and I am not especially athletic, I'm just very stubborn. How did your male teammates respond to having a woman on the crew, and were there surprises? My problem at first was that I think they were afraid to do or say the wrong thing, so they kind of avoided me. I haven't felt that way since I was in 7th grade or something. You know, where you're just like, "Hey guys, I'm here too!" They didn't know quite how to navigate my presence there. How did you overcome it? Being really positive. Maybe almost excessively positive. I would just sort of volunteer to carry whatever was heavy, anything they asked. And just trying to engage them. Sometimes in a culture that's mostly men, there's a lot of, like, jokes and talking trash. But I would sort of be like, "So, what's your family like? Do you like to read?" But then I also [tried to] tell the jokes and talk the trash, and that took me a little while, because that's not a way that women are usually conditioned. One really positive surprise was that a number of the men on my crew were really good advocates. They would give me assignments and mentor me. And there were a number of times that something a little bit—like, harassment or exclusion or something just incredibly awkward—would happen with one guy, and my supervisor would say, "Hey, that's not cool." To have him, as somebody really respected, to draw that set the example for the other guys, and that changed the tenor of the entire experience. Sometime around September 1, 2020 on the W-5 Cold Springs Fire outside Eagleville, CA. And that's just half the crew, i.e., my buggy (B-mod, or Bravo). Sometime around September 1, 2020 on the W-5 Cold Springs Fire outside Eagleville, CA. And that's just half the crew, i.e., my buggy (B-mod, or Bravo). Christopher Cameron How has fire changed? What are its main drivers? Fire behavior is wilder, as everybody saw with what happened in Los Angeles this winter. Fires can now enter urban areas pretty easily, areas we wouldn't think would burn in a so-called wildfire. It's really like anything could happen at any time. I think there's quite a few drivers of that. Climate change is obviously one of the big ones. But there's also a history of mismanagement of our forests. We started suppressing wildfires about 100 years ago and putting out every fire that started. How can we fix that? One of the best ways to try to prevent catastrophic wildfire is with prescribed fire and Indigenous cultural burning. Essentially, you reduce the amount of vegetation so that when a wildfire does start, it won't burn as hot or as quickly. Do you think that's one of the reasons for the L.A. fire? Honestly, it's hard to pin down any one factor, but I would say the 100-mph winds are probably the factor. And what's so scary and disheartening is that you can't do anything about that. What is it like fighting a fire in those conditions? When you have a historic wind event, fighting fire becomes very different. Normally we would put ourselves out in front of the flames. But when you have really high winds, you don't have time. So you cannot get in front of the flames. You would literally just be throwing away your life. A lot of times, you have to just sort of back off from it, find a new perimeter and burn off that new perimeter as sort of a protective catcher's mitt for when the fire does come. Looking ahead, is there a particular region you're especially concerned about for the next major wildfire? I'm always concerned about California. But I lived in Texas for a long time, and I am concerned about central Texas, the Austin area. It's been identified in some recent study as the most likely urban area to be affected by wildfire after the cities in California. That really scares me. A fire hitting a place like Austin, which I love so much, we could see the same kind of devastation that we saw in Los Angeles, because this isn't a place that's really prepared for that kind of fire behavior. Now that you're no longer fighting fires, do you miss it? All the time. I never knew how much I would love that just brutal, grueling work. I miss that. And then I miss the guys.
Los Angeles Times
07-06-2025
- 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.
