(No. 24, a ±05 minute read)
Still more than made it into print.
This is more that did not make it into print from my reporting for the Places Journal story, Paradise Redux. I was thrilled to find out over the weekend that Longreads has selected the piece as an editors’ pick. I am glad to have as many eyes as possible on the complexity, precedent, and response Paradise, CA offers us, as global warming-influenced disasters continue with increasing regularity.
Paradise, California would not be a place you’d have heard of were it not for the incident on November 8, 2018. Probably that is a true statement. But a wildfire that burns eighteen days, killing 85 people, and destroys more than 18,000 structures, that gets folks’ attention.
You’ve heard of Paradise.
The Camp Fire certainly kept my attention and that’s why I was back five years after I covered its myriad consequences, back reporting on the lessons learned from what, at the time, was the deadliest wildfire in the U.S. in a 147 years.1 In 2023 the fire that raged through Lāhainā on the island of Maui captured Paradise's grim title. All over the world wildfire is burning like never (and where never) before.
One of the people I most wanted to talk with while visiting Paradise was Cal Fire’s Division Chief of North Operations, Patrick Purvis. And while much of what we talked about made it into my story in Places Journal editorial cuts were made. As they must be.
I also elided much about the state of wildland fire services in general. First, the obvious; it is one of the hardest, most dangerous, and least well-paid jobs a person can sign on to. Fire, incredible temperatures, smoke, falling limbs (and trees), impossible terrain, ashen grime, heavy loads of equipment and supplies are the gig’s part and parcel. Water, whether you drink it on the fire line or haul it to put out spotting embers, weighs eight and a third pounds a gallon. It doesn’t happen often, but imagine walking around with five gallons of water sloshing in a bag with a hand pump on your back, chasing embers in a smokey landscape. And then there’s the Pulaski2, the wildland fire service’s iconic tool, three and three-quarters of a pound of steel on a hickory handle. It’s not swinging a sledgehammer cutting firebreaks, but it ain’t cake either.
If you are with a USDA Forest Service wildland hand crew you saw a raise from $13.00/hour to $15.00/hour in 2021. A “gift” from the Biden administration facing perilously low staffing numbers in the Forest Service’s wildfire ranks.3 That’s a base pay of $15/hour to perform a job that is a known human carcinogenic. Wildland firefighting is seasonal (traditionally, but that is changing as our climate heats), relies on overtime and hazard pay to knit together a living wage (“living,” depending where you live), regularly causes substantial mental health fallout (in a profession that previously understood “mental health” to be stoicism), and makes it hard to keep a relationship (divorce rates are high).
Cal Fire, the world’s pre-eminent wildland fire service, as far as experience and capabilities go, is better than most with regards to pay — base pay on a hand crew is higher than with the USDA, ranging from $23–$43/hour.4 But Cal Fire has not until recently kept pace with California’s pop reputation as a place chock full of people in touch with their feelings. In 2022 Cal Matters ran an unflattering series probing mental health troubles in the ranks at Cal Fire. This certainly helped put the situation on the radar and Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill No. 623 last year expanding worker’s comp coverage for firefighters facing PTSD. Cal Fire’s director described the agency facing a “mental health crisis” in Cal Matters’ reporting. Facing incidents like the Camp Fire and an essentially year-round fire season, it’s no wonder.
When asked about mental health on wildland crews Chief Purvis told me, “We've definitely stepped that up the last few years.” This stepping up was after past precedent where personnel “could contact, basically, an EAP,” an Employee Assistance Program, essentially a short-term counseling and referral program. That is to say Cal Fire talked with an employee in crisis a little, and sent them out to see a counselor. Often these providers had no real understanding of what backcountry firefighters faced; Cal Fire connected the two parties and that was that.
Today Cal Fire operates an ESS system: Employee Support Services. Which Purvis says has “has grown exponentially since they started.” He continues, “ESS is at all of our large incidents. They're there for support. They're there for therapy. They're there to just talk with everybody — see how the feelings are going, see what people have going on.” A far cry from a referral or “suck it up,” and more inline with California’s granola reputation. And plainly necessary.
About his unit station, and others like it, Purvis says, “Locally, as a unit, we've gone to peer support teams. We have designated people in each of the battalions [to talk with].” He continues, talking about on-tap mental health support, “It's available 24–7, that's where, if you bring it back into a smaller incident, like [a] car accident, if there was something there that triggered some type of an effect, we have access to resources, 24–7, to be able to provide our employees.”
The culture moves slowly, but it does move, and as often it is, California is leading the way. Why should some weird tough-guy code prevent the people facing the worst of civilian employment circumstances not be treated well, facing horrors as an understood component of their working environments?
Cal Fire after the Camp Fire demonstrates another realm of possiblity and action and shows a way to better care for those we ask to do the often unaskable. This is important. I’m going to give Chief Purvis the sort of quote I can’t often relay in print:
We're fortunate within the county that we also have a county-wide critical incidents/stress debriefing team which includes chaplains from the sheriff's department, Chico PD. We don't have it just for the fire department — because Cal Fire has their ESS and prior support — but we're there to support the other agencies because we work so hand-in-hand with multiple departments, that we need to be able to take care of the EMS responders, we need to take care of PD officers. We need to take care of everybody else that's involved in the incident. And so by having that as a countywide team were able to take care of everybody that needs it.
After the Camp Fire I walked a landscape that was incredibly difficult to comprehend, overwhelming. And I walked away from it, with my pictures, to write a story of the fire’s consequences. What of those who don’t get to walk away? Because it’s their job, and we ask them to return — send them to the next fire, and other fires elesewhere as part of the nation’s mutual aid system?
Cal Fire is working to treat them better, the USDA Forest Service now viscerally understands that its fire crews can’t be taken for granted. Scientists tell us that substantial fire incidents are going to continue to grow in size and number—to face that reality, we need to face how we treat those we task with confronting that reality.5
Thanks so much to Chief Patrick Purvis at Paradise Station 81 for the interview and touring me through the Cohasset prescribed burn while I was in Paradise. He sure didn’t have to do so.
The Pestigo Fire in northeastern Wisconsin killed between 1,500 and 2,500 people in 1871.
Especially as we continue to build residential developments to increase wildland/urban interface areas and densities, and expect that our fire services will put out the fires that threaten homes in these risky locales.