West Plains firefighters train for upcoming wildfires

The men and women of Crew 212, dressed in dirty yellow nomex shirts, heavy trousers, hardhats and boots, sat on the dirt road — a trail really — in the thick young pine forest behind the Riverside Middle School in Chatteroy taking a break.

Nearby sat several chainsaws.

The entire campus of the public school was taken over last week by the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, Eastern Washington Interagency Wildfire Training Academy (EWIWTA), where both new and seasoned wildfire firefighters trained alongside established volunteer and career firefighters from fire departments across the state in preparation for the approaching fire season.

The purpose of the academy is to develop wildfire training and coordination with various local, state and federal firefighting agencies, according to EWIWTA public information officer-in-training and Medical Lake Fire Department Capt. Jacob Kirwin.

The middle school campus had been converted to a complete fire camp, with small personal tents pitched in playfields and larger communal tents in the parking lot under which a complete field kitchen had been established.

Inside the school, firefighters received classroom instruction on everything from an introduction to wildland fire behavior, to leadership, vocabulary, safety and a host of job-specific instruction.

For Crew 212 outside in the thick pine forest, it was hands-on instruction about the safe deployment of chainsaws under various conditions.

Lane Bitz, a probationary career firefighter for Spokane County Fire District 10, and a crew 212 member, said it was a shift in perspective.

“It’s different,” Bitz said, comparing fighting wildland fires to urban structure fires. “Cutting a hole in a roof is different than cutting trees.”

Wildland firefighters must complete a “task book” for each specific job they are assigned that can be filled through training or hands-on experience. Each book is then reviewed and signed off for each task. The task books are good for three years, explained Spokane County Fire District 3 Division Chief Bill Dennstaedt, who was also serving as a branch director trainee during wildfire operations.

“There’s a book for every position,” Dennstaedt said.

A two-person chainsaw crews consist of a sawyer and a swamper. The sawyer uses the chainsaw to cut anything from small debris to full-grown trees, while the swamper pulls the debris out of the way to make room for hand line construction crews who follow.

They are in-turn part of a standard 20-person wildland fire fight crew that’s broken into four squads, all under a single crew boss who leads the crew.

The purpose of the full camp, according to Dennstaedt, was to make the training as realistic as possible, especially for new firefighters who had yet to experience life on a fire line.

“They gain an understanding of what it’s like,” Dennstaedt said. “It smooths out the bumps.”

Camps like that at Riverside are used for larger and more complex fires that require more resources to battle, according to Dennstaedt.

“Complexity analysis tells us what type of team we should be calling to a particular fire,” he said.

Planning for the 2019 fire season began at the beginning of the year, according to Kirwin.

The training is a win-win for both the DNR and Riverside School District: wildland chainsaw crews are trained in preparation for the upcoming fire season, while at the same time they are trimming the thick trees in the woods behind the middle school, thus reducing wildfire risk.

All told, 380 trainees, 50 support staff and about 40 members of the Air National Guard participated in the Chattaroy fire academy, one of three held this year across the state.

Normal wildfire conditions are expected this year east of the Cascades, according to the National Interagency Coordination Center in Boise, Idaho. Western Washington and Okanogan, Ferry, Stevens and Pend Oreille in Eastern Washington are expected to be above normal.

Lee Hughes can be reached at [email protected].