Elora Van Jarrett is no stranger to wildfires. Having grown up in BC, she’s been around them her whole life. But unlike many of us who were raised in the province, Van Jarrett doesn’t just read or hear about forest fires — she’s on the frontlines fighting them.
The UBC forest resource management alum has spent summers with the BC Wildfire Service in helicopters, on intensive hiking expeditions and at the frontlines of the province’s wildfires.
In Van Jarrett’s 15-year career with the service, she has worked in almost every role — from battling wildfires with a crew of 20 people to taking to the sky as part of the Rapattack team, an initial attack crew trained in rappelling from helicopters into hard-to-access, fire-ridden areas.
According to Van Jarrett, being a wildland firefighter integrates her love for fitness, the outdoors and novelty.
“For me, what has kept me so long in it is just how much you’re constantly learning,” Van Jarrett said.
Over her career, Van Jarrett has worked in leadership and crew member positions and has seen the service grow and evolve to better support her peers.
“It’s really rewarding being part of it,” she said.
Raised in Nelson, Van Jarrett remembers looking up to the “cool” wildland firefighters. Today, she and many other UBC students and alum spend the warmer months of the year in rural communities and deep in the BC wilderness to keep our communities safe during wildfire season.
In the wake of the climate crisis, fire seasons in BC are getting worse — and wildland firefighters are taking note.
“Fire is burning differently,” said Julie Sheppard, a UBC forestry alumna and former wildland firefighter. She pointed to changes in fuel types, fire intensity and speed of growth as increasing the burden during wildfire season.
The changes in wildfires across the province have also created more arduous work in an already demanding job for wildland firefighters.
“To me, more than the fire behaviour, it’s the length of the season. It’s so crazy. We start working on wildfires in April and go straight through until October,” said Van Jarrett.
According to Van Jarrett, fire crews get a reprieve thanks to significant rainfall in June but even that has waned.
This makes new recruits and wildland firefighters committing to multiple seasons more important than ever.
As the province’s fourth-worst recorded wildfire season in history comes to a close, The Ubyssey sat down with student and alum wildland firefighters to learn more about adventures on those fiery frontlines.
Having your own story
Fifth-year political science student Adam Sameh Steele was first exposed to wildland firefighting during a chat with a classmate in an English class three years ago. He later joined several communities like the Varsity Outdoor Club and the Grouse Mountain First Aid Ski Patrol where firefighting was often the topic of conversation.
“By coincidence, I just had a bunch of people around me happen to do it. And the more you hang around a bunch of people doing something, at least for me, the more I got tired of hearing stories,” said Steele. “I wanted to have my own.”
The selection process of becoming a wildland firefighter is intense. Applications are open from October to February, with select applicants being invited for interviews in April. The applicants are screened based on “behavioural competencies as well as situational and technical questions related to firefighting in B.C,” according to a BC Wildfire Services statement to The Ubyssey.
Fourth-year forestry student Fiona Landwehr just finished her first summer with the BC Wildfire Service and encouraged applicants to familiarize themselves with the BC Wildfire Service’s criteria in preparation for their interview.
According to Landwehr, attitude is a big part of being a wildland firefighter. She encouraged prospective firefighters to highlight traits that portray themselves as someone who would “bring up morale in a crew” and to “show them you’re a little bit nerdy about fire, too.”
After the interview, applicants are expected to meet a fitness standard and complete online courses. Top scoring candidates are then sent to new recruit boot camps, where they receive the bulk of their hands-on wildland firefighter training.
“It’s very intense,” said Landwehr. “They tell you, ‘This is where you work. This is where you put in 110 per cent effort — show us what you can do.’”
At boot camp, trainees learn the chain of command, wildfire basics like fuel types and the fire triangle, the lookouts, awareness, communications, escape routes, safety zones (LACES) system, attack methods, safety protocols and communication styles.
According to the BC Wildfire Service’s statement, boot camps are “a lengthy process that ensures the most suitable applicants are selected each year to become part of our fire crews.”
Despite lengthy training, Sheppard said wildland firefighting is “a nice way to spend your summer” if you are someone who enjoys fitness, the outdoors and problem solving.
“It’s a job that’s fun. If you’re outside, you get to do different things and it pays well. For anybody who likes the outdoors and even just hiking and nature, I think that’s a big draw,” she said.
As a boot camp trainer, Van Jarrett has helped many beginner wildland firefighters learn the ropes and grow into their roles, some going on to climb the ranks into leadership and decision-making positions.
“When I’m out on the fire line in the summertime with my crew, it’s always really cool seeing those people out firefighting and seeing them at this new level of competence and confidence,” she said. “It’s just really cool seeing where they’ve come from and what they’ve turned into.”
Long days and hard work
Steele completed his first season this summer as a wildland firefighter with the BC Wildfire Service on the initial attack crew in Fort Nelson. And Steele said, so far, his experiences have been positive.
“I’m a bit of an endorphin junkie. I love moving around and doing something really physically challenging that also has meaning,” he said. “So the satisfaction after a day is like no other.”
“I get paid to do what I love. I feel like I’m doing what my body is meant to do.”
There are four major wildland firefighting crews: the initial attack crew, the unit crew, Rapattack crews and Parattack crews. Initial attack crews perform early assessment on young fires and hit them early on. Unit crews are called in for bigger fires, while Rapattack and Parattack crews take to the sky and either rappel or parachute down from a fixed-wing aircraft to more remote fires.
The initial attack crew Steele was part of does a preliminary risk assessment of the fire, evaluating its size and intensity, as well as whether the surrounding area has houses or infrastructures at risk. His crew also did project work, which involves attending to smoldering hot spots left over from old fires, and equipment maintenance.
At the time of his interview with The Ubyssey, Steele was on standby, or “in the barn” as wildland firefighters call it. When Steele’s crew gets a call, they drive or fly to the fire location, sometimes needing to hike into an accessible spot or use a chainsaw to cut their way in.
From there, he puts out hot spots, areas previously on fire and now smouldering. These spots can be difficult to see, so they use drone scans to map out the region. Cold water is blasted onto the fires, and pressurized hoses remove any dry organic debris that could ignite.
“That’s what we’ve been doing for the past week,” said Steele back in July. “Nice and long days. It’s hard work.”
Sheppard, who spent three seasons as a unit crew member, said a lot of the work is getting “wet on hot,” clearing paths for safe accessibility to the fire, extinguishing fuel and trying to keep fire from spreading.
“It can actually be really monotonous, repetitive work,” said Sheppard. After the initial attack does their assessment, the larger 20-person unit crew is called in to tackle the fire. Wildland firefighters don’t find themselves tackling surging wildfires head-on. Instead, they focus on more contained fires and control where the bigger ones burn by hosing the fire’s edge directly and limiting fuel in its surrounding area.
While wildfire fighting by the unit crew tends to focus on larger fires, the fires encountered on mountainsides and deep in the bush by the Rapattack team are generally smaller, but carry an additional burden due to the lack of accessibility.
“The remoteness definitely increases the risk that you’re taking, because outside help is so much harder to get,” said Van Jarrett.
Once on the ground, a hose is shunted from the crew’s helicopter, and they get to work, engaging in a workflow similar to the initial attack team. Parattack similarly involves aircrafts, known as jumpships, but crew members parachute down to the fire rather than rappel.
“Something that I found really interesting in coming over to the unit crew was that when you’re at [Rapattack] or initial attack in general, you’re winning most of the time,” said Van Jarrett.
She added this line of work is different from the unit crew where many of the fires they tackle have grown in size and intensity so the wins are fewer and far between, a fight that is “pretty mentally fatiguing.”
“You have a tremendous weight on your shoulders, being like, ‘You have to do this well, you must put this fire out and just take care of it so it doesn’t turn into a bigger issue for people down the line.’”
Safety and risk
Being a wildland firefighter is dangerous work. In some cases, routine fire attacks can become tragedies.
The BC Wildfire Service saw its first death in decades in July 2023 when Devyn Gale, a 19-year-old firefighter and UBCO nursing student, died battling a wildfire during her third season with the service.
Gale was a sister, daughter, competitive gymnast and compassionate student nurse. Her death was felt across the province, including the many communities she uplifted. She brought “a lot of joy to her family and her grit, integrity, and passion to grow made it easy to find pride in her,” according to her obituary.
The BC Wildfire Service community responded with a procession in her honour and a memorial service on the anniversary of her passing.
“It did hit the community really really hard,” said Van Jarrett. In the aftermath of Gale’s passing, Van Jarrett felt a shift in the attitude on the job.
“In the past it was pretty easy to think of this job as summer camp. But since that happened, the mindset has changed [to], ‘This is a serious job with some very serious dangers.’” Now, Van Jarrett said safety is even more heavily scrutinized.
In its statement to The Ubyssey, the BC Wildfire Service described safety as its “top priority.”
“The BC Wildfire Service philosophy is that safety is mandatory in all fire operations and should be given first priority in the planning and implementation of all fire suppression activities,” it wrote.
Still, tragedies happen on the job. An August report from WorkSafeBC found there were “multiple violations” leading up to Gale’s death.
Specialized crew members called dangerous tree assessors routinely inspect trees in fire-ridden areas to make sure crews are safe from toppling trees. Unstable trees are flagged for other specialized workers called “fallers” who chainsaw them down. But, as the WorkSafeBC report explained, a dangerous tree assessment was not completed following concerns about a suspected cedar tree — which fatally fell on Gale while carrying out her duties.
According to an August Global News article, the BC Wildfire Service is working to address observations from the report.
“We are taking action on all the findings from WorkSafe BC and building on our commitment to safety and support for all crew members,” said Minister of Forests Bruce Ralston, who oversees the BC Wildfire Service, in the article.
But coverage of the WorkSafe BC report sparked upset in some members of the BC Wildfire Service community.
In an open letter posted by wildland firefighter Jess Broder following an interview by the CBC, Broder highlighted what they felt was “misinformed” and “unfair” reporting. They wrote that dangerous tree assessments are among the more stressful tasks in wildland firefighting, and that given the unpredictability of the forest, safety could never be completely guaranteed.
As a supervisor, Van Jarrett emphasized the safety of her crew is of the utmost importance.
“In a leadership role, you’re responsible for the safety of your crew. That’s certainly not something to be taken lightly because it is a dangerous job. I think that’s something that’s always in the back of your mind,” she said.
She also pointed to experiences where she felt the risks to her crew were too high and chose to step away from the blaze.
“To me, the reward wasn’t worth the risk, and I was supported in that decision,” she said.
Sheppard, Landwehr and Steele said they generally felt safe on the job.
“I never feel like there’s an undue risk taken. I mean, right from the get go, safety is the name of the game,” said Steele.
Crew members generally look to their supervisors and more experienced wildland firefighters for guidance and decision-making, but are encouraged to communicate any and all concerns. Sheppard felt well looked out for.
“There is danger associated with it, and it is a risky job to be doing. But I always felt pretty supported by the decisions the leadership around me were making regarding safety,” she said.
Leaning on each other
Community was a common theme touched on by wildland firefighters.
“The closest people in your life, all summer, is your crew,” said Van Jarrett.
Sheppard pointed to the “strong friendships” she developed with her team that helped her to feel safe on the job.
“You become really close really quickly, in a way that is different from some of your regular friends,” she said. “We spent a lot of time together and in situations where we had to have each other’s back, and it was dangerous.”
“I think that also was part of what made me feel secure … I trusted the people I was with.”
For Steele, the connections he has made with his peers have singled out this community as one made up of “very admirable and impressive people.”
“When you’re doing such physically demanding work … that’s so potentially dangerous, you form really strong bonds with people, you see what people are made of when you’re in a stressful situation,” he said. “So it’s really conducive to making friends.”
According to Steele, safety is the number one aspect of wildland firefighter culture, but that sense of community is next on the list.
“A close second is the atmosphere created between co-workers — looking out for each other, lifting each other up, taking care of each other, helping each other out — it’s selfless service, really.”
Applications for joining the BC Wildfire Service are now open.
A previous version of this story misstated that Devyn Gale was a volunteer firefighter when in fact she was paid. The same version of this story misstated that helicopters are involved in the operations of the Parattack team when it is in fact fixed-wing aircrafts that the Parattack team parachutes from. This article was updated on November 2, 2024 at 10:29 a.m. to reflect this change.
This article was further updated on November 29, 2024 at 7:00 p.m. to add additional context to the media coverage surrounding Gale's passing.
Share this article
First online
