First Published 11/25/03

An Interview with Douglas Gantenbein

Author of the article and a book entitled A Season of Fire

 

On Friday, October 31, 2003, Doug Gantenbein’s article Stop Calling Firefighters Heroes appeared in the “Smoke and Mirrors” section of Slate.com.

On Saturday, November 1, 2003, the article found its way to the Firehouse.com Forums, where discussion came very quickly.

I contacted Doug via email and told him of the Pandora’s box that he had opened, gave him my opinion of the piece and told him to be prepared for the fallout. I even suggested to him that he go to the website to see for himself. We continued to exchange emails and he told me at its peak, he was receiving 200 – 300 emails a day from mostly firefighters-angry firefighters!

In the end, he sent me his book A Season of Fire, which I read and I must say that I found the book very interesting. It was a very quick read at 283 pages. It kept my attention, as my wild land firefighting knowledge is very limited. I learned quite a bit about wild land tactics and about the fragile eco-system that exists between fire and forest.

After reading the book, I suggested to Doug that I would like to interview him for our website and he agreed.

I want to point out that this is an interview and not a debate. I purposely allowed him to have the last word on some points, so that you, the IACOJ members, might discuss these points and if felt so inclined, you could email him with your thoughts.

I would also like to point out that this is his first interview since publishing both the article and his book; an “exclusive” if you will.

AND it is also the first interview to appear on our website!

I hope you enjoy it and as always, I welcome your comments.

 

VR: Doug. First of all, thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Could you give us some of your background?

 

DG: Journalism – for 25 years. I’m the Seattle correspondent for The Economist, and also contribute to magazines such as Scientific American, Outside and Travel & Leisure. I cover a pretty wide range of stuff – environmental issues, politics, technology, aviation and more.

 

VR: Before we get to your book A Season of Fire, I have to ask you about “the article”; Smoke and Mirrors: Stop Calling Firefighters ‘Heroes’ that was posted at Slate.com.

What was the defining moment for you that spurred you to write this piece?

 

DG: Hmmm. Hard to say. The themes I talked about in Slate are notions I’d been kicking around off and on for several years. I’d actually written something that was similar for The Economist, back in 1997 or so (pre-Internet days, so didn’t have near the “traction” of the Slate piece). The immediate impetus for the Slate article was twofold: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “hero” remarks about the California firefighters (and yes, those folks worked extremely hard!) and an article in the Washington Post, also about the California firefighters, which talked about the firefighters elbowing each other out of the way to get to the next hot spot. I read that, rolled my eyes, and the rest is, well, history.

 

VR: Why did you choose the firefighting profession as an example of where the label “hero” is over-used? Why not, oh say, war veterans instead?

 

DG: Very fair question. Of course, lots of words get over-used in our society. I think the “hero” status accorded Jessica Lynch, for instance, is shameful – particularly when so many of our troops really did act heroically (and still are doing so). The hoo-hah over the “greatest generation,” the WWII vets, also has gone over the top in recent years. As for the Slate piece, news events sort of drove the topic; I really wasn’t thinking in terms of a shopping list of groups to criticize, with firefighters first in line that particular day. Plus, I honestly think one thing separates combat from firefighting: Very few soldiers care to see combat after their first taste of it. Firefighters, while of course experiencing fear and seeing some awful things, genuinely enjoy what they do. So I think the term “hero” is best used when somebody acts that way – and really doesn’t want to. Firefighters, as I thought I noted in the Slate piece, can meet that test fairly readily.

 

VR: We train for many disasters, including fire. Though we know that there may be human tragedy as a result, we don’t “train” for it, but we try to minimize the effects of it with de-briefing and other support systems. Would you believe me if I said that we don’t care to see human tragedy after our first taste of it?

 

DG: Sure, I’d believe that. I did mountain rescue work for many years and helped bag plenty of dead bodies. It ain’t fun. I would never even suggest that firefighters enjoyed finding badly injured people – or worse – on a call. And I understand the gratification that can come from genuinely helping people.

 

VR: The response to your comments came very swiftly. Did you expect such an outpouring?

 

DG: Ironically, I thought that the article’s appearance on Slate on a Friday afternoon would pretty much doom it to sub-standard exposure. Boy, was I wrong about that! Beyond that, I fully expected a sharp reaction. But I was astonished by the scope and velocity of it.

 

VR: Can you share some of the more “thoughtful” responses that you received?

 

DG: I received many. Most pointed out that at their particular station they work very hard, see some dreadful things, eschew the word “hero” and may have to work a second job simply to make ends meet. Several folks first contacted me with rather harsh language, but after a few exchanges our “reptilian brain stem” reactions lapsed, and we had interesting conversations.

 

VR: You understand that firefighters have very tightly-wound emotions and sometimes must use unconventional vocabulary to articulate their feelings?

 

DG: I was indeed struck by the depth of emotional attachment many firefighters have to their jobs. I’m not sure this always is a healthy thing. Firefighting, of course, is a closed culture – only other firefighters really understand the work, just like only other cops or soldiers can understand those occupations. However, I think the police and military have tried to come to grips with the darker sides of that sort of life. I’m not sure firefighters have. I almost think that firefighters should be required to take a sabbatical every five years, go do something else, see how other people live and work. Firefighters need to understand that lots of folks work hard, risk injury on the job, don’t get paid enough. I’m not sure they all do.

 

VR: After you wrote the article, did it occur to you that you might have revealed a side of the firefighters that might have people questioning their motives for their job? I’ll give you an example: Everyone was in a complete lather to get to the next hot spot. ‘It’s almost a slugfest in there’, one told Waxman. This urge to reach the fire is not entirely altruistic. It sure beats washing that damned fire truck again, for one thing. Plus a big fire is thrilling, plain and simple.

 

DG: You mean, that fighting a fire can be fun?? Well, I suppose that’s a dark secret. But, I’ve been around big fires and understand completely the allure. Fire is inherently fascinating-its combination of terror, destruction and beauty; its ephemeral nature; its refusal to allow us a clear view of it, with the flames waving and flickering. So, I suppose I wanted to make that point—that fire can be deadly, but in many cases it’s very hard to find anything quite so thrilling to be around.

 

VR: I’ll give fascinating and thrilling to a point. But fun? There are aspects of it that are, but as an occupation or as the reason for signing up, “fun” is at the bottom of the list.

 

DG: Well, maybe that was the wrong word. Exciting, certainly. Tell me, have you ever felt quite so alive as when you were in or around a big fire, planning your next move, keeping an eye on the fire and your partner, wondering what would happen next? Probably not.

 

VR: Do you honestly believe that all firefighters do it for the adrenaline rush?

 

DG: No, no more than I write for the thrill of a byline. Adrenaline only lasts so long, anyway. But I certainly believe it’s a factor, especially when people consider firefighting as a career. People don’t join up to lead school tours and run fire inspections, that’s for sure.

 

VR: Why a strong communicative term, such as “propaganda” to describe a firefighter’s funeral and in the same paragraph used adjectives such as “tasteless, honor, absurd and quasi-military”?

 

DG: I used the word propaganda very deliberately. I’m not sure firefighters understand the kind of impression they create when they stage a funeral and 5,000 firefighters show up. Were it a military funeral, people would fear a coup from such a show of force. I understand that the intent is to honor their dead, which I think is altogether fitting and proper. However, sometimes I think these events almost do the opposite. Certainly, in the specific case I cited, the ceremony for the four dead wild land firefighters – three of whom were teens making a few bucks for college – almost seemed to mock the dead. I thought it was tasteless and absurd.

 

VR: You got to see first hand the efforts of wild land firefighting during the summer of 2001 and yet, you called firefighting a “cushy job”. Why?

 

DG: Well, the Slate piece generalized, so in hindsight it was a bit fuzzy differentiating between wild land and urban work. The wild land folks work really, truly hard, 16-18 hours a day, 14 days straight, with two days off, then they start the cycle over again. Very few urban firefighters work a schedule close to that. I will concede, however, that during a big urban fire, urban firefighters expend a huge amount of energy very quickly. The wild land folks are able to pace themselves. Fighting a structure fire is a sprint; a forest fire is a marathon.

 

VR: You mentioned in our conversations that you regretted not mentioning the volunteer firefighters in your article. Would you like to comment now?

 

DG: Oh, just that it was a severe oversight on my part to not have mentioned volunteers in some way. But maybe that was a good thing. I live near a volunteer department that is the most comically dysfunctional outfit you can imagine. They spend three-fourths of their time bickering.

 

VR: You mentioned that firefighting isn’t that dangerous and even went so far as to say that pizza delivery drivers are in more danger, “statistically speaking”. So, you were saying that a pizza delivery guy is risking his life every day to deliver pizzas?

 

DG: Nah, I was just making a rhetorical point that there are lots of dangerous jobs in the U.S. As for pizza delivery people, I don’t think they ponder the mortal implications of their job. Fishers, loggers and the like? They do – they KNOW what they do is dangerous; they all have friends who have died in the work.

I did make it clear that plenty of firefighters die each year – on average, about 100. However, even that figure does indeed put the work a bit down the “most dangerous” list. Some firefighters correctly pointed out that is a GOOD thing.

 

VR: And to finish up on the article, you refer to firefighters as “just another special interest group”. In fairness to firefighters, aren’t there lobbyists for the “unheralded heroes” as well? The last time that I looked; doctors, teachers and miners all have very strong lobbyists working around the clock in Washington, DC for their “special interests”.

 

DG: Of course. Firefighters, however, are uniformly viewed by the public as working selflessly and in the public interest. While that often is the case, sometimes it is not. Firefighters have their own turf, and will fight to protect it. Fair enough, but people need to know that will happen, and that when it does, the public good might take a back seat. I think the reaction to my Slate piece proved that point – some firefighters would rather beat the crap out of someone than hear any criticism.

 

VR: Firefighters get upset when someone questions their heart. Sometimes the public forgets that firefighters pay taxes, pay bills, raise a family and works towards retirement. Bureaucracy gets in the way of that sometimes. Comments?

 

DG: I understand that there is firefighter “leadership,” and firefighter rank-and-file, and that they may not be the same thing. I think people appreciate the fact that firefighters do all the things you say. But, for good or ill, it’s also tax money that finances firefighters’ salaries, vehicles and stations. So that has to be factored in.

 

VR: Doug. You have the last word before we discuss your book.

 

DG: Hey, I asked for the fuss! Of all the things I’ve done in journalism, few have stirred this sort of reaction. I stand by the piece, but I also understand that a better choice of a few words would have saved me a lot of grief. That said, there’s nothing I’ve ever written that wouldn’t benefit from a good re-write six months after it appears. Any writer will tell you the same thing.

 

VR: Let’s switch gears and talk about your book A Season of Fire. What got you interested in doing a book about the wild land fires of 2001?

 

DG: I’d written articles about fire and its growing presence in the West going back eight or 10 years, mainly for The Economist. I was doing so again in the summer of 2000, a really severe fire season. While talking to a researcher in Arizona, we got to chatting about the possible market for a book that tried to tell a good story AND explained the ecological issues of fire. That was when it really started to crystallize. 

 

VR: You did an excellent job of weaving Mann Gulch, Storm King and lessons learned from them into your book. But were you saying that we haven’t learned?

 

DG: Apparently not. As one long-time fire manager said to me a few months ago: “We haven’t learned a single new thing about how to kill a firefighter in 50 years. We also haven’t learned what to do about it.” It seems that every 5, 10 or 15 years there’s some terrible tragedy with a big cluster of dead firefighters, and it turns out the same mistakes are being made: Poor communication, poor decision-making, underestimation of the fire and so on.

 

VR: I sensed almost a bitterness in your description of the Thirtymile Fire and the deaths of four firefighters-three who were very young. You were critical of the tactics employed. Please expand on that.

 

DG: It was simply a complete waste of human life, so in that sense I was bitter about it. Just about every safety guideline developed over the years to try to prevent this sort of thing was violated. Plus the leadership people on the scene failed to show a lick of common sense. There were a dozen times during the day when somebody should have said, “Enough, let’s get out of here.” But there was this constant sense that just a little more work would lasso the fire, and nobody bothered to look at the big picture. When they did, it was too late.

 

VR: It was in your discussion of the Thirtymile Fire that I found your disdain for the use of the term “hero”. It was at the funeral of Tom Craven, Jessica Johnson, Karen FitzPatrick and Devin Weaver. After reading it, I at least have a better understanding of why you said what you said. But I am reminded of a saying that says, “Funerals are for the living”. Your thoughts, please.

 

DG: Sure, I understand that funerals are for the living. I tried to factor that in to how I viewed the ceremony for the four firefighters (all of whom had, by that time, been buried). But in this case, I really didn’t see how the living were served, either. Certainly not the families. The parade, the entry to the arena, the ceremony – it lasted four or five hours. I think a 45-minute service and the words of a few of the speakers (the best of whom, I will say, was a firefighter) would have honored the dead and salved the hurt of the living. Remember, Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg for all of, what, three minutes?

 

VR: If I understand the Storm King Fire, weather information of an impending cold front that would increase wind velocity was ignored, costing fourteen firefighters their lives. Could you discuss communications?

 

DG: Poor communications were at work on two levels that summer day in 1994. At the upper levels, fire managers weren’t paying attention to weather forecasts and their implications. On the ground, the firefighters weren’t doing a good job of talking to one another and keeping track of one another’s movements. Nor were they keeping an eye on terrain, as many of them were working ABOVE the fire, the wild land equivalent of working in a building with a burning basement. Of course, John MacLean’s book “Fire on the Mountain” is the definitive account of that disaster.

 

VR: In urban firefighting, incident command/shared command is an absolute necessity and is a structured chain of command that ultimately comes back to the incident commander. How tight is the command structure in wild land firefighting?

 

DG: It’s as tight as is practical. Each fire has an incident commander, with two or three sector chiefs, then more line bosses closer to the action. But on a big forest fire, 400-500 firefighters may be strung along a perimeter dozens of miles long, with most drop-off points reached only by difficult drives over mountain roads. In some cases, crews are “spiked out” to remote camps and literally left on their own for four or five days. So it can be difficult to keep close tabs on everyone. They do their best.

 

VR: Smokejumpers. Still a vital resource for fighting forest fires or has technology caused the Forest Service to re-think their role?

 

DG: I’m not popular with smokejumpers either, you should know. I simply think they’re obsolete. When smokejumpers first were deployed, just after WWII, huge tracts of Western forests were roadless, and nearly all the trees there were seen as a huge economic asset. Today, there are tens of thousands of miles of road, enabling firefighters to drive to most fires. In the most remote areas, where smokejumpers would make sense, land managers are doing their best to let fires burn naturally. So I don’t think they have a real role today.

That said, the work is glamorous as hell. If I ever took up firefighting as a career, I’d want to be a smokejumper.

 

VR: You mentioned the role of private contractors in the firefighting effort. Can you elaborate on a typical budget and whether privatizing services are cost effective?

 

DG: A big fire – 50,000 acres or more – may run a tab of $1 million a day once the effort to halt it really gets going. Of that, only a tenth or so goes to the federal firefighters who do most of the line work (in most cases, the so-called Hotshot crews). The rest goes to private contractors, who do everything from trucking in bottled water to cutting firebreaks with bulldozers to flying aerial retardant tankers. I think there is a tremendous amount of waste. But does it make sense to NOT use private contractors? I don’t have a good answer for that. All I can say is that the cost-per-acre to fight a fire keeps going up even as we privatize the effort more and more.

 

VR: Logging has been essentially forbidden for the past several years in the national forests. Has this led to over growth and more destructive and costly fires?

 

DG: The lack of logging hasn’t made a bit of difference, in my view. The culprits have been drought and our own too-good firefighting efforts. Fire is a natural process that in many forests helps reduce the buildup of brush and young trees. In its absence, fires burn bigger and hotter when they get rolling.

I do see comparisons between federal forests and private ones, and sure, the private ones burn less. They have fewer trees in the first place, and many more big “firebreaks” formed by clear-cuts. But a tree farm is not a natural forest.

 

VR: You sounded as if you had little sympathy for those building houses in and around such a heavy fuel load for fire. Please talk about that.

 

DG: Imagine responding to a city fire in which the home’s occupant was smoking in bed, the gas stove was on, but not lighted, and oily rags lay piled in the corner. You’d probably think they had it coming. Similarly, many people build cabins in the woods with trees crowding the siding, overgrown brush right up to the foundation, and a ton of dry kindling on the roof (cedar shakes). To top it off, maybe access is via a one-lane gravel road with poor turnaround access. Yet these folks want the Forest Service to save their home when a fire breaks out. No, I am not sympathetic.

 

VR: “Had it coming”? We try not to judge the idiots. But Rule #1 for many years in the Forest Service was to save the houses at any cost. It also makes for good TV. Could this also be the reason for the cost-per-acre more than doubling in the past twenty years?

 

DG: Policy changes dating back to the early 1990s supposedly have put “protecting property” (i.e., homes) on par with protecting resources – the trees themselves. That isn’t always the case; I saw plenty of instances where a fire that threatened homes led to a frenzy of suppression efforts. Still, overall I don’t think we can blame homes in the woods for growing costs.  To some extent, I think people have seen that money can be made with fires. They come up with some way to offer a service, and the firefighting agencies buy it. In an odd way, the fire economy has replaced the timber economy that used to dominate much of the West.

 

VR: Do you favor thinning forests by the natural effects of a forest fire or by mechanical means? Or do you have other thoughts?

 

DG: I think we need to use a mix. Mechanical thinning is effective and appropriate in some cases. So too is “prescribed” fire – deliberately set fires designed to reduce the risk of severe fires. And sometimes we just need to let nature do its thing.

 

VR: It appeared to me that some in the U.S. Forest Service disagreed or at the very least were at odds with national forest policy. Is that an accurate assumption?

 

DG: The Forest Service is a big organization, with thousands of people involved directly or indirectly with fire. So opinions on how best to handle fire can vary widely. Within the agency, I think it’s fair to say that lots of people have lobbied, sometimes with success, for a different way of doing things. But the Forest Service also is a very conservative, tradition-bound outfit, and its chief aim is ensuring federal dollars come its way. So it has a stake in “big iron” firefighting, and change can be slow to come.

 

VR: Is it safe to say that you believe that too much money is at stake and the lobbyists too strong to change where the money and effort should go?

 

DG: I don’t know about money or lobbyists. In my experience, the winter months see lots of very sane talk about how to handle wildfire. Then a big one breaks out in August, and all good sense goes out the window. It’s the nature of the beasts, both the fires themselves and the organizations charged with dealing with them. When the smoke blows, the money flows.

 

VR: Is it because local control/local interest is at odds with a national forest service policy or vice versa?

 

DG: It’s a mix of things. A big fire generates its own political and media firestorm, which sometimes forces land managers to do things they might not otherwise do. From a policy standpoint, one problem is that the Forest Service has created the impression that we can “do something” about a big fire – i.e., put it out. The fact is, a big fire will do its own thing, no matter how many resources are thrown at it. But people have this expectation that if they’re threatened, someone will save their homes. That isn’t always possible, so frictions emerge. Also, we still see fires as bad things, when in reality they aren’t. Until that changes we won’t be able to really come to grips with wild land fire in a realistic way.

 

VR: Based on current Forest Service policies, have we seen our worst forest fires or are the worst yet to come?

 

DG: Well, if you look at the trends, you’d say the worst is yet to come. And I’m inclined to agree, particularly if climate change really kicks in. On the other hand, there’s the very real possibility that fires take out so much of the West, future fires have a tough time getting any traction.

 

VR: Are you still in touch with people (Don Latham, Kevin Ryan, Bob Tobin, Neal Hitchcock, Jack Kirkendall) interviewed and quoted for your book?

 

DG: Sure, some of them. The book has been out for only two months or so, and I’m still trying to take care of my list of folks who helped and who get one.

 

VR: If you had the authority over the U.S. Forest Service, what would you change, keep the same and what would it cost?

 

DG: Wow, tough question. How’s this: I’d scrap the smokejumpers, can Smokey the Bear, put fire managers on a per-day budget and throw lots of resources into prescribed fires and efforts to make communities fire-safe. I’d also put more money into efforts to use computer models and terrain mapping to forecast where severe fires are apt to break out.

 

VR: Are you planning any more books on fire service topics?

 

DG: Nope. Two current book projects, in proposal stage, involve aviation and health care.

 

VR: I will thank you for your thoughts and give you the last word.

 

DG: I appreciate the chance to talk to your readers. I hope they find my remarks interesting. I’d be more than happy to send anyone a signed copy of the book – it can be ordered at the book’s web site, www.aseasonoffire.com.

 

Beyond that, all I have to say is: Stay safe!