Former fire chief returns from Florida fires

By LAURA BEHENNA

Bigfork Eagle

Former Bigfork fire chief Rick Trembath may be retired, but he just can’t seem to stay away from firefighting.

Trembath is a member of the Northern Rockies Incident Management Team, one of several regional teams made up of long-time firefighters and other professionals experienced in handling large wildfires. He has worked in wildfire management for 25 years in 18 states, he said.

Trembath returned to his Bigfork home in late May after two weeks in southern Florida, where the Northern Rockies team supervised management of several wildfires in the Big Cypress National Preserve, just north of Everglades National Park. He served as safety officer for his team and the less-skilled firefighters they worked with on the blazes.

“I’m like the consciousness of the team,” he said. “I have to take a comprehensive look at all hazards.”

Dangers in Florida included rattlesnakes, alligators, poison ivy, dehydration and of course, unpredictable fire behavior.

“A lot of firefighters are killed or hurt from falling trees,” Trembath added.

Then there’s the human error factor.

“You see a lot of little mistakes people make, thinking it won’t happen to them,” he said.

He raises “what-if scenarios” with the rest of the group to get the members thinking about how they would resolve emergencies. He also makes decisions about when and how to close highways.

Similar teams from other parts of the U.S. take turns managing these kinds of fires for two to three weeks at a time, he said. The National Interagency Fire Center, based in Boise, Idaho, recruits the teams to work on clusters of fires that have become hard to control. The center is made up of local, state and federal agencies from the Forest Service and National Park Service to the National Weather Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Fire behaves differently in Florida than in Montana, Trembath said. For a start, Florida vegetation is adapted to the state’s warm, humid climate, and the native plants contain volatile oils that burn easily, unlike Montana’s plant life. When humidity drops, the air gets drier, and dry air combined with windy weather spreads fires rapidly. Also, Florida is so flat that it’s difficult to see what’s happening at a distance.

The level terrain also means highways have to be elevated to protect them from floods, Trembath said. Canals line the highways to drain water away from the roadway. Wire fences also run parallel to the highways to keep alligators off the pavement.

Alligators didn’t pose much danger to the firefighters unless someone got too close to one, Trembath said, adding that the reptiles can easily kill a human if provoked.

As safety officer, Trembath had to ask himself, “How much risk for what benefit?” For example, in places where only vegetation was burning, the firefighting crews didn’t take any “extra measures” as they would if a town were threatened, he said. They put more effort into protecting homes and communities.

Trembath spent much of his time checking safety on the freeway that traveled through the preserve. Only if a nearby blaze or thick smoke endangered people in their vehicles would the team close the freeway. Highway closures could be dangerous because of backed-up traffic, but letting people drive through dense smoke could obscure drivers’ visibility enough to cause pile-ups if someone had to hit the brakes suddenly, he explained.

To keep the fires under control, helicopters would drop buckets of up to 600 gallons of water on the hot spots, while crews on the ground would burn vegetation to rid an area of fire fuel. The canals and fences along the freeway made it hard to get into the forests on the other side, so firefighters often had to light “burnouts” by shooting a chemical fire-starter gel into the woods from guns made for that purpose. Helicopters contributed by dropping balls filled with fire-starter that ignited on impact.

“We’re using fire against fire an awful lot in this country,” Trembath commented.

The incident management teams’ tours of duty are usually just a couple of weeks long to keep the firefighters’ physical and mental fatigue from overwhelming them, Trembath explained. But while they are on site, they work hard from morning until dark, he said. They have little time to do much else except sleep.

Wildland firefighting pays well with all the overtime workers get paid, yet few young people show interest in getting involved, Trembath said.

He got involved in firefighting as a youth in 1967, when he joined a “hotshot” crew that traveled all over the country to 12 different fires.

“That whole summer we went from fire to fire, usually the toughest parts of the fire,” he said.

He polished his management skills while working for the Forest Service, while staying active in fighting wildland fires and volunteering for the Bigfork Fire Department.

One benefit of being retired is that Trembath has more time to go out on distant fires, although it could mean being away from his family for a whole summer, he said.

Not every fire is thrilling, however. The Big Cypress fires in Florida weren’t particularly exciting, Trembath said, even though they’d been burning for more than three months.

“As fires go, this wasn’t real complicated compared to something like the Derby fire, where we had so many people in harm’s way,” he said.

Lightning started the Derby fire August 22, 2006 between Big Timber and Absarokee in southern Montana. The fire burned until early October and destroyed 26 homes and 20 outbuildings, according to Gallatin National Forest information.