150 Mo. Firefighters Bring Home Valuable Experience

Story by: Guest Contributor

First posted on 09-07-2007

Ask Nathan Morfeld how he spent his summer and you will hear about a trip to Idaho. It won’t be one of relaxing amid cool mountain breezes, however. Morfeld is among more than 150 Missourians who spent part of their summer helping quell wildfires in the western United States.

Morfeld, of Freeburg, was a natural resources major in college. He went to work for the Missouri Department of Conservation a year and a half ago as a forestry resource assistant. His first formal training for fighting wildfires came at the annual Midwest Wildfire Training Academy in Jefferson City. Since then he has taken two other courses to broaden his firefighting skills. He had a few chances to use his training here, but joining the campaign to extinguish the 147,000-acre Cascade Fire Complex in August took his experience to a whole new level.

“We were some of the first ones there,” said Morfeld. “It started with just four crews, ours and three Indian crews from South Dakota. We left for six days, and when we came back there was probably 1,000 people there. It was impressive to see a fire complex come to life and the phenomenal effort it took to bring together the sheer mass of people and equipment to put out these fires.”

Morfeld said western fires behave very differently from those he has helped fight in Missouri. For one thing, the fallen evergreen needle “duff” on the forest floor can harbor smoldering fire out of sight. If it flares up beneath trees with low-hanging limbs, trees can explode into flame, sending showers of embers that can start fires a mile away.

One of his crew’s tensest moments came while fighting the Whisky Fire.

“We were always in a safe zone and kept our situation awareness, but we had to scramble a couple of times to hold our line. Once, we had been trimming the lower limbs off of trees for a day or two and thought we had this fire extinguished. We were moving along when we saw smoke back there. We went back to check, and a tree just ignited right on the fire line. We had to get it down before it fell across the line and started a whole new Whisky Fire.”

While Morfeld was working fire lines and felling exploding trees, other Conservation Department workers were performing a variety of jobs on some of the hundreds of other fires that burned millions of acres nationwide this summer. Their contributions ranged from providing specialized global information system (GIS) services to overseeing fire lines.

Not all the Conservation Department’s out-of-state workers were foresters. Morfeld’s team alone included personnel from the Conservation Department’s Forestry, Wildlife, Private Land Services and Fisheries divisions. Missouri fire departments and the Mark Twain National Forest also send firefighters to combat wildland fires nationwide.

Besides training its own personnel, the Conservation Department teaches volunteer and professional firefighters how to fight forest and other natural-cover fires in their areas. The agency also works with the USDA Forest Service to coordinate the activities of Missourians who volunteer to fight wildfires wherever they are needed nationwide. This year, the agency sent volunteers to California, Georgia, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.

The Forest Service reimburses states for their workers’ time spend fighting fires away from home, but why send Missourians across several states to fight fires? Part of the reason is that Missouri sometimes needs other states’ help to fight its own fires. Beyond that, out-of-state firefighting gives Missourians valuable experience in conducting large-scale operations. It provides hands-on firefighting experience and hones the organizational skills of fire and other emergency administrators.

An example of the usefulness of this experience became clear in January, when a freak ice storm shut down power and emergency services across a huge swath of southwestern Missouri. Coordinating with the Missouri State Emergency Management Agency, Conservation Department personnel set up an incident command center in Springfield and directed heroic e fforts to rescue Missourians and clear thousands of downed trees from roads so emergency services could reach those in need.

“Those skills don’t come from classroom training,” said Conservation Fire Training Coordinator Bruce Palmer. “Classroom training and mock exercises just aren’t the same as making decisions about real problems when people’s lives and property are on the line. Spending time in other states is part of the cost of being prepared at home.”

Morfeld’s perspective was more personal. “You never get a view like that on a vacation,” he said, “and you feel like you did something good. When you finish, you say, ‘Missouri put this fire out.’”

Missouri was still sending firefighting crews out of state in early September. Palmer said some western fires probably will burn until the first snow falls.

-Jim Low-

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