![]() ![]() It’s very important to be flexible! You may start a workday thinking you’ll make it to that concert you bought tickets for that night and then find yourself hiking up to a fire that just started at 4 pm. When not on a roll, firefighters work a standard 40 hour work week. This can include cutting down trees with chainsaws and piling it into burn piles or scattering it, prepping and digging line for prescribed burns, station and tool maintenance, engine maintenance, patrolling high use areas to ensure campfire regulation compliance, paperwork, and general readiness to be prepared when fires happen. My record is 29 hours straight.ĭuring a regular work week when there is little fire danger we do a lot of project work. Night shifts and longer shifts of 16-24 hours are possible depending on the fire and area you are in, but not super common. Wildland firefighters can work 14 days straight (called a roll) with 16-hour days and possibly up to three days travel before and after the official 14. The sections came from the most asked questions I received as a mentor. The following sections will have lots of information that may not entirely make sense to you until you fight fire, but I hope they will give you a comprehensive overview of what it’s like to be a wildland firefighter. If you don’t want to be out in the ash and dirt and smoke you can be in wildland fire in a dispatch position, manning a radio and coordinating fire resources in a central dispatch center. All these positions are important in fire. You generally start on an engine or hand crew and work up to a helitack (helicopter) crew, hotshot crew, heli-rappeling, or smoke jumping. There are different types of wildland firefighters. Excerpted from a current BLM fire position announcement All of the above is true in my experience. Work requires prolonged standing, walking over uneven ground, and recurring bending, reaching, lifting and carrying of items weighing over 50 pounds and shared lifting and carrying of heavier items, and similar strenuous activities requiring at least average agility and dexterity. Physical Demands: Duties involve rigorous fieldwork requiring above average physical performance, endurance and superior conditioning. Risks include smoke inhalation, fire entrapment, snake or insect bites and stings, exposure to excessive machinery noise, and falling and rolling materials. Temperatures vary from above 100 degrees F to below freezing. Work Environment: The work is primarily performed in forest and range environments in steep terrain where surfaces may be extremely uneven, rocky, covered with vegetation, and in smoky conditions, etc. But Looking at wildland fire job postings, the descriptions sound like something out of the early days of the wild, wild west:
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