Hidden toll of fighting extended fire seasons

In a workforce that has long been male-dominated with a “cowboy up” attitude, Todd Legler is trying to normalize discussions about mental health.

Legler is the Shoshone National Forest’s risk manager in Wyoming and also serves on a national team that deals with the most complex fires.

Before that, he fought fires on an engine crew for the Forest Service in Arizona. In all, he’s been with the agency for 23 years, since he was 22 years old.

In that time, the United States has seen more active, dangerous and destructive wildland fires.

The total acres burned across the United States has doubled over the past 20 years, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Another study showed fire seasons increasing by 80 days since the 1970s.

Fighting the bigger blazes – sometimes in areas where homes or whole neighborhoods are destroyed – firefighters, their families and support crews have seen their stress levels increase dramatically.

“These fires are very catastrophic in nature, going through towns and subdivisions,” Legler said, recalling the Dec. 30, 2021, Marshall fire in Colorado that destroyed 1,091 structures and damaged another 149 residences.

“I couldn’t imagine what that would be like to lose your home over the holidays. Something on that scale can carry a lot of stress, whether we acknowledge it or not.”

Legler said it’s not uncommon for a firefighter to now receive 800 hours or more of overtime in a fire season.

“When I started, we didn’t have big, long fire seasons every year,” said Riva Duncan. “We might have a busy fire season and then go one, two, three years before we had another.

“They were also shorter. We didn’t have to be away from our family and friends as long. We also didn’t see a lot of them affecting communities. They were backcountry.”

Duncan worked for the Forest Service for 30 years, part of that time as a hotshot crew leader in the 1990s.

Hotshots and smokejumpers are considered the elite of the Forest Service’s firefighting crews.

Now retired, Duncan is the executive vice president of the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a nonprofit that advocates for federal wildland firefighters.

Survey shows depression

A recent inquiry helped characterize the extent of the issues facing the nation’s 18,700 federal firefighters.

The survey of more than 2,600 current, former and retired wildland firefighters found that “17% of wildland firefighters reported symptoms consistent with a diagnosis of depression, and 13% reported symptoms consistent with generalized anxiety disorder, both about two to three times higher than the general populations,” according to a story in the American Psychiatry Association’s “Psychiatric News.”

The article goes on to note: “The prevalence of probable post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was nearly 14%, which is four times the rate in the general population.

“Further, less than half of the respondents who had symptoms consistent with PTSD reported that they had been clinically diagnosed with the disorder, highlighting that this condition remains underdetected, unrecognized and undertreated in a clearly at-risk group.”

In the past, firefighter safety was more basic – roll down your sleeves, wear leather boots and eye protection – Legler noted, but that’s changing in part due to people like him.

“Folks do see or hear about a lot of trauma, and mental safety is just as important as physical safety,” he said. “I’m starting to notice our employees want this. Some almost crave this about mental health and recognize how important it is.”

Tim’s Act

On a national scale, Grassroots Wildland Firefighters has helped push legislation in Congress that would attempt to alleviate some of the stress firefighters encounter.

Named the Tim Hart Act, it honors the Cody smokejumper who died fighting a New Mexico fire in 2021. His widow, Michelle, has joined in advocating for the act.

“It’s Tim that gave me this voice. It’s Tim that’s making people pay attention,” she said. “I hope that his voice and his memory has an impact on other people … and I hope that it makes some real lasting changes.”

Following Tim’s death, Michelle said she received a lot of support from the fire community and felt an obligation to speak up for others because of Tim’s love for his job and the people involved.

“You can’t stand by and watch this very big injustice happen,” Michelle said.

In addition to increasing pay and tracking chronic health issues on a national scale, the Tim Hart Act proposes launching new mental health programs and providing seven days of annual mental health leave for all firefighters.

The legislation is also seeking to allow firefighters who are not eligible for the Family and Medical Leave Act unpaid leave to care for family members with serious health conditions.

A 2022 report by the Government Accountability Office cited seven barriers to the recruitment and retention of wildland firefighters: low pay, career advancement challenges, poor work-life balance, mental health challenges, remote or expensive duty stations, limited workforce diversity and hiring process challenges.

Peer support

Following the 1994 deaths of 14 wildland firefighters on Storm King Mountain in Colorado during the South Canyon fire, recognition of firefighter stress saw a “gentle shift” from forest administrators, Duncan said.

“Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM), when we have a serious accident or fatality, used to bring in a therapist wearing a suit who had no clue what our job was like,” Duncan said. “That didn’t go over well, as you can imagine. The agencies had good intentions, but it didn’t go well.”

She credits a group of people in the Bureau of Land Management for pushing a peer support program that was eventually agency-sanctioned.

Now Duncan, as a trained peer supporter, will accompany a trauma-trained clinician to help firefighters following serious accidents or fatalities.

Legler serves as a team lead for a CISM response team. Although he receives many calls for his help, he said he limits himself to about five a year.

“If I can’t take care of myself first, I can’t take care of people in need, because they do take so much out of you,” he said.

Toughen up

Things were different when Duncan was coming up through the firefighting forces.

Back then, if there were firefighting deaths or a home burned down, no one talked about the resulting mental health issues or stress.

“You sucked it up and moved on,” she said. “I think a lot of people had unhealthy responses to that like drinking and other harmful things.”

For Duncan, the stress may have been amplified by being one of only three women in a 20-person crew.

“We really couldn’t show that things were getting hard because we had to prove we were even tougher to earn our spot to be there,” she said. “I think we’re getting to the point where people applaud men for being in touch with their feelings and vulnerable, but I think it’s still precarious for women to do that.”

Some of her own hotshot crew members were very frank in telling Duncan and her fellow female firefighters they shouldn’t be there.

“That made me buckle down,” she said. “I kind of got a reputation as a hard ass. I know there were people who didn’t like me because I was tough.

“And that’s another thing that women face, when we do show that toughness we’re kind of expected to show, then it’s used against us. ‘She’s a bitch. She’s harsh.’ ”

Duncan said she did not deal with the stress well.

While working in Northern California there were a number of fatalities.

She focused on taking care of her own crew, burying the anxiety until she began having panic attacks. To self-medicate, she drank a lot and did “dumb shit,” until finally seeking help from a therapist.

Isolation

For former firefighter Chelsia Leach, who grew up in Billings and now lives in Helena, it was the isolation of an assignment to Idaho’s panhandle region that got to her.

She was the only woman on a 20-member Forest Service hand crew, the grunts who dig fire lines and throw dirt on burning logs and stumps.

“Lots of the men were not stoked about having a female on the fire crew,” she said, and it wasn’t isolated to just older men. The feeling was expressed by younger men, as well, often in crude jokes or remarks.

In addition, there was the physical stress of hauling heavy water bladders or chainsaws and other gear into the backcountry.

No stranger to exertion, Leach is a long distance trail runner, competing in events like the Bighorn Trail Run, a Wyoming ultramarathon.

“There was a lot of pressure to be tough and ready to go,” she said. “It was easy to feel pressure to not be the weakest.”

Leach said her female friend, who is still firefighting, struggles with being constantly on the road and the feelings of isolation that can bring.

During her posting in northern Idaho, Leach said she used to walk to a small town’s pay phone to call friends and family since there was no cell service.

Preseason

A lot of the mental health work Legler has done for the past five years from his base at the Shoshone National Forest is having pre-season talks with Forest Service firefighters – as well as state and other wildland crews – about how to recognize and deal with stress in an attempt to normalize the problem before issues grow larger.

“We’re giving firefighters permission to say it’s OK to say, ‘I’m not OK,’ ” he said.

He also provides resources to meet challenging times, including a guide to direct discussions among firefighting families. As a husband and father of two children, Legler has taken this lesson to heart.

Although he may be looking for rest and relaxation on his days off, the reality is his family has been working to pick up the slack while he is gone for days, putting them under pressure.

“So for me to come home and expect to do absolutely nothing is not fair to my family,” he said.

A survey of spouses by the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters found “59.9% of respondents feel they are secondary to the commitments of their partner’s job while 43.4% feel they’re left to operate without a partner for seven-plus months of the year.”

“It is incredibly stressful having your partner gone, mentally and physically,” Michelle Hart said. “Emotionally, during the summertime, I felt like I was a single person. I hung out with my single friends because my husband wasn’t around.”

The long separations – including uncertainty about where Tim was, or what he was doing – caused several fights over how much longer he would stay in the profession, Michelle said.

“It’s exhausting being worried about them all the time and not hearing from them,” she added, sometimes going two weeks without a phone call during fire season.

“So you’re just waiting – and I’ve talked to other spouses – you’re always just waiting for that phone call to hear that something horrible has happened. Unfortunately, I drew that horrible, very unlucky card to actually have one of those phone calls.

“It’s your worst nightmare, and you live every day waiting for it to happen. And that takes a really significant emotional toll on the family as well.”

Legler noted it can also be difficult for firefighters who develop close relationships with their crew to be away from them for months following the fire season.

“Now you have to reintegrate into society as a different person,” Legler said. “Then in six months, you have to reintegrate with your firefighting family again.”

“You get used to not having your person around,” Michelle said. “So when they come back it’s different for them and for you. You basically have to relearn how to live together.”

Tim never talked to Michelle about the trauma he may have experienced, which included two fellow smokejumpers who were seriously injured and a former firefighting acquaintance who died by suicide.

Tim also suffered several serious injuries before his death, including hospitalization following a severe concussion and cuts to his eye suffered in a UTV accident after the brakes went out and he crashed while traveling 45 mph.

“He didn’t call me until the next day to tell me … because he didn’t want to worry me,” Michelle said. “And I was furious with him that I didn’t know that.

“And again, it’s not uncommon. You talk to most firefighters and they have either had a very close call, someone very close to them has suffered a serious injury or has died, or they themselves have suffered a serious injury.

“That’s a lot of trauma that, one, is culturally hard for them to talk about and want to have that conversation and deal with it. And two … the resources are just harder to access.”

Attraction

Like many, Legler was drawn to the job of firefighting by the excitement and camaraderie.

In some ways, the work is similar to wartime with all of its moving parts – from engine crews and air support to hand crews and mobile kitchens.

There’s also the strategy of trying to determine the best way to attack a fire and deploying personnel.

Unfortunately, the decisions may be made under significant stress and with a lack of sleep following several 16-hour shifts in a row.

“As a whole, there’s a lot of stress in the system – stress at home trying to make ends meet, political stress, economic stress,” Legler said. “You cannot do this job without having some level of trauma. After five or 15 years, you carry that trauma with you.

“If you don’t unpack it or address it, it can lead to your being in some pretty tough spots.”

Michelle said she can’t imagine how difficult it is for spouses to stay together when one of them is a career firefighter. For her, it felt like Tim was choosing to be away from her.

“It’s so much deeper than that,” she added. “It’s a career. It’s a love. It’s a drive. It’s a passion. It’s also the way they finance their lives. But I don’t think there’s a really good way to describe what it’s like to live through that every year. You get half of a life.”

Legler said the dispatchers and crews that organize, clean and repair gear for firefighting also experience the tension.

“They may not see flames or breathe the smoke, but dispatchers hear everything going on out there, like if someone gets burned over or a helicopter goes down.”

Legler estimated there are around 100 people in the Forest Service doing similar outreach work with firefighters. Two weeks ago he held his third class of the preseason, talking to around 180 people. He figured that if only five people get the message, that’s a win.

“Obviously, there’s always room for improvement,” he said. “But we’re seeing more people request help or ask for resources.”

The anniversary of Tim Hart’s death was June 2.

He was severely injured after crashing into rocks when he parachuted into turbulent air over the New Mexico fire.

Still alive after the crash, Tim was life-flighted to a trauma center in El Paso where Michelle sat at his bedside for a week-and-a-half.

“It was the most horrible experience of my entire life,” she said. “And I ended up having to take him off of life support, and I sat next to him as he died.”