Wildfire crews adapt, help hurricane victims

BOISE – Normally this time of year, Martin Esparza and his team of 35 wild-land firefighters from up and down the California coast would be on a blaze somewhere in the West.

For the past 21 days, the crew has instead been in New Orleans, supporting city firefighters and rescue crews who need fresh water, food and showers in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Come this Monday, Esparza has been told to be ready to deploy again in the aftermath of Hurricane Rita, which hit east Texas and the Louisiana coast Saturday with floods and high winds.

“We basically walk into hell and make it survivable,” Esparza said from Los Angeles.

With fires neither as big nor as devastating this summer as in other years – Esparza calls it “a slow fire season” – the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise has instead rotated more than 6,000 firefighters, nearly a third its nationwide force, to help with Gulf Coast hurricane relief.

The first time firefighters were deployed for a giant storm was in 1992 for Florida’s Hurricane Andrew. Since then, the logistical and communication skills of so-called “incident command teams” have become a hot commodity in crises that have little to do with digging fire lines or rappelling off a helicopter onto a steep slope to battle advancing flames.

“In the last few years, we’ve sent fire-community people to the shuttle recovery,” said Randy Eardley, a spokesman at the Boise fire center. “At one point in our history, we were focused on fire. Now we’ve moved into an all-risk response.”

Wildland firefighters have helped out on everything from quarantining California chicken farms hit by infectious Newcastle disease to the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

About 4,300 members of NIFC fire crews have been mobilized through the Boise agency for hurricane relief. Dozens of satellite phones and more than 4,000 radios – half the Boise fire center’s cache – have been shipped to Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, needed in part because winds and high water knocked out much of the region’s conventional communication infrastructure.

One fire team, managing a distribution center in Mississippi, has coordinated delivery of 2,600 truckloads of water, ice, food and other goods to 53 counties in six states during the past 15 days to help relieve nearly 400,000 Katrina refugees. Incident management teams are also staffing refugee shelters in Phoenix and San Antonio, Texas.

Duties of the fire crews have ranged from the banal to the elaborate, from making sure the fire department in New Orleans’ French Quarter had a place to go to the bathroom to ensuring that air-traffic controllers at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport had access to important weather information.

Firefighters helped provide more than 97,000 meals at the airport to evacuees in recent days, according to the U.S. Department of Interior.

“When the nation finally started reacting and sending rescue units over, they didn’t send much logistical help, so during the initial push for the first week and a half, a lot of these units went without showers or hot meals,” Esparza said. “We basically create a small town that supports the incident. If you ever visit one of our camps, we find an open lot and bring out the resources we need. Within a day, we can begin providing food, showers and other resources for firefighters or members of the public.”

Across the nation, 8.1 million acres have burned this year, nearly double the 10-year average.

Still, unusual moisture patterns in the West favored big grass fires on the open range, such as the 180,000-acre Clover fire in southern Idaho, the state’s largest, which burned rangeland and sage but little else. Rainfall in the mountains soaked vulnerable timber stands, keeping forest fires relatively small.

As a result, many seasonal firefighters might be sent home by late September, as the most dangerous months of fire season have passed.

But hurricane season has intervened, keeping firefighters on the front lines in a different sort of battle.

Congress has already appropriated $62 billion for the ongoing Katrina relief effort, of which $46 billion goes to disaster relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Some have estimated that Katrina will cost the government $200 billion or more – and firefighters are going to get their share of it. FEMA just allocated $1 million to buy the fire agency in Boise 400 more hand-held radios.

“It’s extending the season. They (national fire officials) are keeping a lot of the seasonal temporary force on right now who ordinarily might be let go,” said NIFC’s Eardley. “I’d anticipate we’ll have crews there for quite some time.”