It was a long night. Got to love the fire fighters. Got to hate the bureaucracy of fire fighting. At 6:00 this morning the fire was down to nothing. But by the time they have there morning meetings it was 10:00 when they geared up to fight the fire. By then it was up and running again. My rant for the day.
Ya know, the consumer of fire fighting services have a complicated relationship with fire fighters. Many of us don't know much because we've never seen a fire being fought except on the news. We want to think the best, and we want to believe the best, but the eye-witness experiences I've had make me question what kind of thinking is going on.
In Reno I had a wildland fire truck pass me and get off the freeway a long way ahead of me. By the time I got up to the exit I could see a fire at some distance and the truck had pulled up close to it, the fire about the same size as the truck. No wind, just some pretty tall sage burning. As we passed by I commented to my wife that it was nice to see them get there so quickly so they could put out the fire right away. A couple of days later we passed coming back the way we had come and the entire mountain side was black.
Another time we heard there was a grass fire in a valley where we drove through frequently. We were on the road and passed where the fire was, and it looked to be covering a couple of acres. There were about six large firetrucks and bunch of personal pickups just downhill of the fire, and about forty guys standing around shooting the bull. It looked more like a kegger than firefighters looking for a way to put out a fire.
Another time the firefighters actually got questioned... because a bunch of multimillion dollar homes were destroyed when they failed to fight a fire early. I saw that fire too, up on the side of a mountain as I drove past early in the morning. It was a small fire too, and I remember thinking that a helicopter with a bucket could put it out in one dump. I was confident that it would be put out easily and right after I saw it... but over the course of the day the news kept updating to say that the fire was getting bigger.
I've spoken to fire fighters that said they had to wait on fires so they would get bigger and take longer to fight... because if they put them right out they wouldn't get paid as much. And I've seen cases where if a fire department didn't spend every cent they had over the course of a year they would buy all kinds of personal stuff so they wouldn't have their funding cut the next year.
All is not as it appears in fire fighting land.
I've had some fire fighting training, both in the military and privately, and I have some reservations about how governmental agencies work.
