but to be fair to the Forest Service Fire person, the Incident command structure of a sector fire is modeled after military protocols,.....you don't just dispatch yourself to Afghanistan and start shooting the place up, ....and you dont send crews into hopeless fire skirmishes to get burned up
And I'm pretty tired of the fire-fighter/warfighter analogy. Fires suck and are difficult. But they don't shoot back with YOU as the as personal target.
/johnny
I don’t know of the credentials of those who volunteered but wildland fire fighting is very dangerous work and not for the untrained. Any incident commander who allowed unsolicited amateurs on a fire would be taking great risks with the lives of the volunteers, the public and the trained professional crews.
Fighting a fire is not analogous to war. There may be people in government who treat it that way, but the situation is vastly different, particularly in rural areas where local knowledge can be very powerful in dealing with a conflagration.
The unionized "firefighters" in this area have never seen my property. I've managed the vegetation around my home, but the terrain is VERY steep, so there simply is no possibility of denuding the slopes. Thus, no matter what anybody does, a fire coming in would from below would burn the house unless the situation is managed correctly.
With a chainsaw and about thirty minutes, I can have all the residual fuel within 100 feet on the ground. With a drip torch and about ten minutes, that fuel would be gone, safely, as a fire is easily managed from the top down (there is no understory fuel below the slope. I have a fire suit and hoses. I could do it ALL myself, and have a cup of coffee in the process.
Our unionized bureaucrat "firefighters" have NO interest in developing an advance plan for managing fire on this property, the same kind of advanced plan they have for every factory in the valley below (it's called a "run sheet"). Why not? They don't want to be responsible for managing a fire. It's easier to call it an "act of God" and let the claims adjusters deal with it. Then the insurers get to raise the rate base statewide. So, our "wild-land firefighters" (many of them women) get to sit and drink coffee, while collecting overtime. The prisoners from the State prison get to do the hard dirty work of mopping it up.
Thank you.