After eight years of fighting wildfires, Solize Ortiz has learned to work with the challenges and dangers of her profession.
The Oregon firefighter has been in smoke so thick it’s nearly impossible to breathe, and at times she’s unable to make out the faces of others.
“Sometimes you can only see silhouettes,” Ortiz said. “You start to recognize how people walk and their mannerisms. That’s usually the best way to identify people on your crew.”
She’s learned to gauge danger -- like when a flaming tree is about to crash to the ground, and in which direction.
“A tree makes a lot of noise when it’s about to fall,” Ortiz said. “You have to be aware of those sounds.”
Ortiz’s colleague Fernando Hernandez knows what it’s like to be covered in dirt and soot for days on end with no shower in sight. The longest he’s had to go without is 15 days.
“It’s a badge of honor, unfortunately, sometimes,” said Hernandez, who’s been battling season blazes for 20 years.
Ortiz and Hernandez are among more than 7,500 firefighters called on to battle Oregon wildfires in a season like they’ve never seen before.
Fueled by a fierce and widespread windstorm that started on Labor Day, the fires have spread to scorch close to 1 million acres so far this year -- about double the average annual number for each of the past 10 years.
Nine people have died. Five are missing. More than 2,200 homes and 1,500 businesses, barns or other structures have been destroyed, but many thousands more have been saved thanks to the efforts of firefighters.
Those summoned to put out the blazes include year-round professionals who work for local fire departments or fire districts; federal agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management or Bureau of Indian Affairs; the Oregon National Guard, which was summoned this year at a moment’s notice; and even a few inmate crews.
But most are wildland firefighters who work for private companies that contract with state and federal government agencies -- with some traveling from states as far off as Arkansas and North Dakota to help.
The Oregonian/OregonLive spoke to the owner of one of those companies, Salem-based Grizzly Firefighters, and two of the company’s firefighters, Ortiz and Hernandez, during short breaks they received from their assignments last week.
Owner Teresa Ortiz, who is the mother of firefighter Solize Ortiz, said she’s never seen a fire season like this in the 18 years since she founded her company. Some of her firefighters have had to evacuate their own homes – or have their families do so while they’re fighting blazes on the front lines.
“There’s always a mental part of the job when you’re trying to save people’s homes,” Ortiz said. “But this year is different knowing their own homes are at risk. They’re worried about their families. It’s like I’ve never seen it before.”
Despite all that, the firefighters out on the field are still laser-focused on the task at hand, Ortiz said.
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Among all public servants, firefighters perhaps more than any other are lauded as heroes -- garnering enormous and heartfelt praise for saving homes, businesses, human lives, pets and even wildlife.
Wildland firefighting, in particular, is considered a high-risk job – with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting 400 total on-duty deaths in the profession in the past 20 years. Against conventional wisdom, the leading causes of death are cardiac arrest, vehicle accidents and aircraft crashes – with entrapment in fast-growing wildfires listed as the fourth most prevalent cause of fatalities.
Experts say the dangers have increased in recent decades as wildfires have grown in size, intensity and frequency due to climate change, forest management policies that have left the backcountry overloaded with fuels, and homes and businesses that have been built into the fire-prone wilderness.
Add onto that the COVID-19 pandemic this year, and firefighters' risks of leaving home to do their jobs have only grown.
Teresa Ortiz said the industry has faced personnel shortages because of the threat of COVID-19.
"I have had people who’ve said, ‘My family won’t let me go, period,’ " Teresa Ortiz said. The concern, she said, is real given the tendency in past years for other viruses to spread through crews that work in such close proximity to each other for days on end.
“It’s called ‘camp crud’ and it spreads like wildfire, no pun intended,” Ortiz said. “The fear is Covid-19 is going to spread like wildfire.”
Ortiz has enacted a list of precautions, including the use of hand sanitizer and temperature screenings, and she’s stuck by her longstanding rule of only one firefighter per tent. She said none of the 120 firefighters she manages have tested positive. But even with strict measures out in the field, she said, the virus can spread and she knows of firefighters from other Oregon companies who’ve fallen ill.
The Oregon Health Authority doesn’t make public the number of firefighters who’ve contracted Covid-19, and representatives from the Oregon Department of Forestry and the U.S. Forest Service didn’t respond to requests for this information.
But according to an NBC News report, eight members of a Bureau of Land Management crew based in Oregon tested positive for the virus days after arriving on duty in June. The report also found more than 220 federal firefighters across the country had contracted the virus as of late August.
Due to the shortage of firefighters, Teresa Ortiz said she and other wildland firefighting companies banded together last week to send a new class of recruits through a 40-hour training class. They could be working the front lines starting this week.
All recruits must be at least 18 years old and physically fit. One test requires prospective firefighters to walk three miles in fewer than 45 minutes while wearing a 45-pound vest.
Ortiz said this week’s 60-person class quickly filled to capacity, and Ortiz thinks that might be because recruits have seen the raging fires in the news and experienced the hazardous levels of smoke that had blanketed the state recently for days.
“They just look out their windows and see the smoke,” Ortiz said. “People just want to help. It’s an extremely rewarding business.”
Grizzly Firefighters pays new firefighters $16.54 an hour. Meaning after 90- to 100-hour weeks and with overtime pay, a two-week paycheck can top $3,500 before taxes for newcomers.
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Hernandez and Solize Ortiz are both crew bosses, meaning they each lead a team of 20 firefighters who spend a large portion of their shifts dousing flames with water or clearing brush and trees away so the debris won’t further fuel the fire.
“The first time I did it, I didn’t like it at all,” Hernandez said of his initial three-day assignment 20 years ago. “It was smoky and hard to breathe. It’s hard work.”
Others convinced him to give it another try and he grew to love it. He learned how fires behave and how to develop a good path of egress in case he needs to pull out at a moment’s notice. He also learned what gear to take to be comfortable -- and how to efficiently pack everything he needed, including his tent and sleeping bag, in the one duffel bag each crew member is allowed.
“I like the adrenaline,” said Hernandez, 53. “I like it, too, because you can do good things. You can save forests. You can help people.”
Firefighters on his crew this year are typically working 14 days straight, but their assignments can sometimes stretch to 21 days before they net a minimum two-day break. A work day can easily stretch 14 hours long.
Hernandez’s family back in Salem -- his wife and four children ages 10 and under -- have gotten used to his long absences. But the job allows him to earn a lot of pay in a relatively short time because he’s packing in the hours.
“I think it’s hard for them,” Hernandez said. “When I have a good signal I call them every day.”
When he’s out in the backcountry, however, cell phone reception is non-existent and his wife knows not to depend on a call.
There are few creature comforts. Hernandez knows the monotony of downing so-called “meals ready to eat,” or MREs, sometimes for days on end before catered food arrives.
“Breakfast MREs, lunch MREs, dinner MREs,” Hernandez said. “At least you have some food in your system.”
In their quest for a freshly cooked hot meal, some firefighters have resorted to placing aluminum-wrapped food on hot engines or their trucks, or using their shovels as frying pans while holding them over smoldering tree trunks.
Hernandez is currently fighting the Lionshead fire near the Warm Springs reservation.
Solize Ortiz has just started a new 14-day assignment fighting the Riverside fire near Estacada.
“I went out on my first fire when I was 18 years old. It was probably the scariest experience I’ve ever had,” said Ortiz, 26. “But it was totally fulfilling.”
Like Hernandez, she has learned how fire behaves and has become more confident about managing its dangers. She is accustomed to seeing flames shooting 20 feet high in the air and the heat baking her face and entire body.
Up close, the smoke is far worse than the haze that has smothered much of the state for the past week.
“A couple of days into a fire we have that gnarly smoker’s cough,” Solize Ortiz said. “It’s like coughing up lungs.”
She’s seen it all go up in flames -- trees, brush, structures, garbage and cars.
“Tires stink,” Ortiz said.
But Ortiz said the overall mission is worth putting up with the downsides of the job.
“There’s nothing more rewarding than to walk off a fire line, and to see signs in a town that say, ‘Thank you, firefighters!’ or to have a local come up to you and shake your hand or give you a hug in tears.”
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