A reporter embeds with wildland firefighters during one of the deadliest blazes in California history.
An entire city, maybe an entire country, was starting to appreciate the reality that wildland firefighters inhabit. Dirty work is often assumed to be unenlightened work, but wildland firefighters have a unique empirical understanding of natural forces. This includes troubling facts, such as the distance that floating embers can travel (miles) and the speed with which a wind-driven fire can move (about ten per cent of prevailing wind speeds). Firefighters also have access to a ground truth that is out of reach for the general public, and even for many scientists, about how our world is changing. In the past ten years, they have witnessed new and dramatic kinds of weather, unfamiliar fire behavior, and blazes that grow to an unprecedented size and intensity. Firefighters told me again and again how much they loved their job: the physical labor, the adrenaline, and the freedom of working outdoors. But they expressed how frustrated they were that, as a society, we are not doing routine work—creating defensible space around communities, managing landscapes, igniting prescribed fires—to help prevent such devastation.