TRANSCRIPT 🔗
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Speaker 1: This is Latino USA, the radio journal of News and Kurturre Latino USC's Latin Latino USA.
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Speaker 2: I'm Maria Inojosa. We bring you stories that are underreported but that mattered to you, overlooked by the rest of the media. And while the country is struggling to deal with these.
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Speaker 1: We listen to the stories of black and Latino Studio United, Latino Front, a cultural renaissance organizing at the forefront of the movement. I'm Maria Inojosa, Ola Latino USA.
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Speaker 2: Listener, here's a show from the archives. And before we start, little warning. In this episode there's a brief mention of suicide. So take care.
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Speaker 3: And once you get there and you can get the briefings, the plan, what they want you to do, you start getting the little butterflies right. You start driving up towards the line and you know what to expect because you've being on other fires, but every fire is different.
00:00:51
Speaker 1: Right From Futro Media and PRX, It's Latino USA. I'm Enojosa Today Into the Fire with El Dorado Hotshot Armando Perez. Massive wildfires continue to ravage California over the holiday weekend, forcing thousands from their homes wildfire.
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Speaker 4: Danger in the state of Texas, so we're talking about ninety nine percent of the state experiencing some level of droughts.
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Speaker 1: This is the view from the ground during the worst wildfire season in California's history.
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Speaker 4: Firefighters near and far coming together today to mourn the loss of one of their own killed on the line of duty.
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Speaker 2: President Biden is now considering declaring a climate emergency.
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Speaker 1: Armando Perez, or Mando, as he likes to be called, never imagine that he would be responding to some of the worst wildfires in US history as a member of a special firefighter team called the hot Shots.
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Speaker 3: My family was very traditional, old school Mexican family. It was all about working family. So when I was growing up, I thought I would be in the construction business because that's what my grandfather did. A lot of my uncles did that.
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Speaker 1: But for the past decade, Mondo has worked as a wildland firefighter with the El Dorado California Hot Shot Crew. Hot Shots get that name because they work on the hottest part of wildfires. There are just over a hundred of these hot shot teams in the entire United States, and Mondo is part of one. Mondo's career in firefighting wasn't just unexpected, it had a pretty unusual start as well.
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Speaker 3: When I started getting to my teenage yeers, young teenageers, I started running around with my local friends and we started getting into trouble. When I was sixteen, I got sent to juvenile detention and I did two years, and that's where I kind of got introduced to firefighting.
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Speaker 1: At least thirty states in the country have laws that allow for the employment of the incarcerated population in emergencies and disasters, and the work is not always voluntary. The constitution explicitly denies incarcerated people the right to refuse to work.
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Speaker 3: The program is we're do It was a little bit better just not being locked up in your cell all day.
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Speaker 1: The work of incarcerated firefighters has been denounced as inherently exploitative. Prisoners only get paid one or two dollars per hour. In some states like Texas and Georgia, they don't get paid at all.
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Speaker 3: You can to understand that it's pennies what they pay you. Right, you're out there and in the middle of nowhere risk in your life. There's chances you get hurt or high out there.
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Speaker 1: And then perhaps the worst part of it all once they get out of prison. Many of these firefighters have extreme difficulties pursuing a career because of their background.
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Speaker 3: When I got out, when I paroled, it was a little hard finding work based on my record.
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Speaker 1: But Mondo, who today is forty years old, persevered and became an exception. He's an example of the paradox and transformative potential that this kind of work represents.
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Speaker 3: I mean that work was hard work, but it was work there.
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Speaker 1: His experience while in prison helped Mondo land a pain formal job with the hot shots in El Dorado. Still, even in freedom, conditions are far from ideal. For one, the job is very dangerous. Over five hundred career, volunteer and wildland agency firefighters, and these include incarcerated firefighters, have died since nineteen ninety and the number of fatalities is only going up. In twenty twenty, one hundred and two firefighters perished. And then the pay is low. It was only last year that a minimum pay of fifteen dollars per hour were set for all wildland firefighters. Advocates are fighting to improve access to health benefits and mental health services, which is key in a profession that is so demanding on both the body and the mind. To understand why Mando and thousands of other wildland firefighters continue to risk their lives under increasingly difficult and record breaking fires. Mando is going to recreate what a typical day for him is going into the fire and also coming out of it. Here's Armando Perez in his own words.
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Speaker 3: My names are Mondo Perez, and I am a hot shot for the Eldorado Hotshots. I don't want to come off as bragg cocky, but we're like the top of the wildland firefighters. We're considered a type one fire line crew, right. It's us and the smoke jumpers on the smoke difference are the ones that jump out of the planes. We're kind of the ground resources. We hike in everywhere, drive to our destination, get off, back up, and hike. The hikes can be thirty minute hike, they can be five hour hike. We do them all. We're starting to see fires. When we normally didn't seehim around January February typically it was about six months and
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that was like the old ways. Now we have what people are trying to call the fire year, so it's year round, and it's starting to be more common. Ladies. The fires has been more intense, especially out there in the timber country where if you have the right winds and the topography lined up, and obviously it's been hotter lately, the fires they burn pretty intense. So if there's fires out there going on, they'll call us because we're in national resource, so we get scooped up pretty fast, so it never gets easier. It's actually getting harder and harder. I wake up in the morning, I hug and kiss my wife. With the kids is funny because they tell everybody the routine is, I go up to them, I'll hug them and I'll kiss them, and i'll pull a little pink too. I don't know I do it, but that's my routine with them. If one of them wakes up, then I'll talk to them real quick. Then I'll ask me when you're getting back, and I give them the same answer. I don't know, it'll probably be fourteen days from now, and then yeah, I just go downstairs, get my coffee, lock up, and then jump in my car and take off and then I'll see them in two weeks. Once we start traveling, we start kind of gathering our thoughts, right, like, hey, what do we expect? What am I going to do? And most of us start getting information through the phone. Right the internet nowadays it's easy to get information and where you're going, like, hey, what is fired doing? What are the expectations? Who's there, who's not there? And once you get there and you can get the briefends the plan what they want you to do, you start getting the little butterflies. Right. You start driving up towards the line. You know what to expect because being on other fires, but every fire is different. Right, you get there, you jump out, you guys get all geared up. Okay, it's game time. Right, You get that feeling like oh man. You start looking up. You see the fire, see your fuels? Right, you got brush, you got trees. You kind of start making assumptions your head, like if we're in tree country, there's crowning where the fire runs to the top of the trees. If you're in brush, heavy brush is going to burn super hot. You line your guys out and you see their faces, especially the new ones. Right. You start looking at the face of the new people and you're like like, okay, I remember that feeling so you're just looking at them like okay. You just try to prepare them for whatever comes right as best as possible. You tell them what to expect and what the plan is. If things go not according to plan, what to do. Then you break out into your squads or your mods, and one mong goes one way to other mogles the other way, and you kind of try to attack the flank of the fire. Right. You just start hearing the chainsaws fire up and start cutting brush, and then you know it's like, okay, we're here, we're doing it. The biggest thing is going out there and making sure the guys can cut line right efficiently. It's pretty much the act of removing fuel. So let's say you got a forest, right, and you got brush or bushes and trees, just continuous fuel. We're trying to get on one side of the fire and remove a line of brush, secle fuel break, and we're going over with the chainsaws. Chainsaws do cutting right, and then you have a group of folks behind the chainsaws which are the scrapes or the hand tools, and they scrape the actual organic material, so it ends up looking like a trail. It wouldn't be the perfect walking trail, but good enough for us to get in and out and then create that fuel break. So when the fire does get to that point, it kind of puts itself out on my squad boss myself. This is my ninth year on the forest. Kind of started from the bottom up. I was a senior firefighter for seven years. So the squad boss is like the closest to the guys, the actual workers in the chain of comme out. I'm like the first guy that the the screens go to the senior firefighters. They come to me if I don't have an aswer for them to bump it up to my captain and so on. I'm just running around and then listening to the radio traffic, because once you get on the fire line, everyone's talking. You kind of gather more information just by hearing people talk. People on the other side of the fire, the other side of the line down the road, they're throwing bits and piecea out there, and you kind of get all that information. You start putting it together. You start painting this picture in your own head, so you just kind of put that in the back of your k nogin and you continue to colign or firing off whatever you're doing. We talk amongst ourselves. We give our guys updates and what the chainsaws are doing up front. If their captain, the superintend they're all scouting around, they tell us what they see up ahead of us, like, hey, this fire is doing this. If we get to this point and the winds are doing this, find out a good idea to continue. Just little information at that. We're just we're hearing it on the radio. We're talking about sterior. If we order a helicopter to come dough water drops or bucket work, whoever ordered that helicopter has to talk to them and they'll ask us, hey, what do you guys need to say, And we're like, hey, you see that main head of the fire, can you cool it off for us? And then don't go in there and do their work. One thing we learn from our eye ups is always been thinking about the next step. What are you going to do next? What if this happens with it? So you start throwing those what ifs in your head while still trying to stay engaged on what's currently happening. So it's just an ongoing process. People are tired, you're kind of trying to snack in between as you're going up and down these hills and trying to find time to squeeze in a snack while still trying to get productivity out of your folks. You continue going. You got people sweating hard, tired, looking for the next piece of line, and continue cutting on. If you're close enough to the fire, it gets extremely hot,
right even with little winder foot two flames. You're sitting there taking a little bit of heat, trying to go diregs hot. You're like, man, my face is burning every now and then you pop out trying to get a little bit of fresh air away from the heat. Get back in it, start thinking like, man, it's almost quitting time. I hope nothing crazy happens when they say, you know what, as far as doing this, they might say we need to burn off now. Nowadays the fires are too intense or too complex to get in there and do it safely. So we've been doing more burning operations than anything, where we go in there and light to fire ourselves, kind of give ourselves a buffer zone. So when the fire does come, it kind of just peters out there and it doesn't continue. If you start burning, you're probably gonna be burning well into your next shift on a fire. Our shifts are typically sixteen hours and then we've been down for eight, but lately they've been going longer, so you're scheduled for sixteen, but if the need should arise, you will do whatever you need to do twenty four or thirty two. We've done seventy two hour shifts before. They're not the best, but when you're lacking resources and the fire is just pushing your hand, you have to do what you got to do. And as long as we have line handline all the way around it, the engines come in, they put a little water on the edge, kind of secure the edge, and they feel good. Then you could say it's not out, but it's contained right, it's controlled. It's in a good spot where the hot shots can walk away, and then you can bring another resources behind us and they could monitor it until they put it out. Competing, we like to go where the actions at. We're better equipped for that. We're a bunch of people that get restless sitting around too on. So once the fourteen days come up, we're done. They send us home. It starts with the drive home. Right when you start driving home, I got thirty minutes thirty five minutes to kind of start winding down, because you go from going to one hundred miles an hour like intense fighting fire, and your brain's always going to coming home and you have to find that shut off. Right on my drive home, I'll just turn off some music, listening to music and kind of start winding down, let in my mind kind of relax, get away from fire for a little bit, start pre engaging myself with the home life you get back and to give you. It used to be two days they just passed on recently, where now we get three days off mandatory, which is awesome because two days was not enough. You spend one day watching packing and getting all your stuff in order, and then your second day you can kind of enjoy the family, and then the next day you're back at it. So these three days help out. It helps out her recovery because fourteen days of just banging your body out there, it gets pretty uh, it gets pretty grueling, and your body doesn't recovering. My family is my world. I'm married, five to five kids. I've been married
for twenty years now. I don't know how my wife does it, puts up with this job, but she's there. She's hanging out tough. My kids they love what I do, even though they miss me. I think they get a sense of pride knowing that their dad is a wildland firefighter or even more than that, a hot shot. So you get home, you try to decompress. If you sit there with your family, try to absorb what they're doing, and you're trying. You're trying to fill in two weeks of time you missed in two or three days, and it's impossible. It's impossible. So you just got to kind of slow down and just take what's there and make the best of it. I mean, the option is not doing this anymore, right, and most of us love what we do, but it doesn't come with a price. Fire stressful, man, it's extremely stressful. It's hard. I mean, people out there, you lose sleep out there just thinking about the next day or the next roll. Right, we get back and it's like three days for us, it's a lot. We're like, oh heck, yeah, three days. But in reality is as soon as day two or three comes around, you start taking that Oh man, I'm getting ready, I gotta get out of here again. Not wanting to leave, but it's going to happen. Right, you know that the order is going to come, You're like, oh, man, here we go again. I'm gonna be gone for two weeks, and knowing that you're going to miss those two weeks again, it doesn't make it any better. It's not easy not to get all dark and gloomy. But the suicide rate for a while on firefighter is high for any firefighter actually, and I think it has to do with the fact that when you do come home, it off. It's hard. You do this long enough, you start seeing too much, right, You start seeing people pass away, you start seeing people get hurt, and then you feel like you don't have the support from everyone around you, and it kind of starts bothering you and you start thinking like, man, is this really worth it. I can't try to speculate what goes through other people's minds, but for me, I understand it's not easy. I mean, you think about it. You have your kids are missing you, your wife's missing you, your husband's missing, your boyfriend, and then you have the job right, and the job stressed was as it is already because you're worried about getting hurt or not coming home or are you doing the job right because You're affecting somebody's life out there if you don't do your job right. So all these things just accumulate, Right, everything just starts building up, building up, building up, building up, and then you come home and maybe all it takes is one thing to set you off. Everybody got to find out help what works for them, whether it's actual medical help, mental health. Right, you got to think about that. I don't know. It's a decent living what I do. Obviously, as you climb the ranks, you get paid better. But I mean, starting off, I wouldn't say it's the dream job as far as the finance part of it goes. But I mean you could make a good living, especially budgeting wise. You do it smart, you'd be fine. I don't do it for the money. I definitely don't do this for the pay. I don't love fires, but I love fighting the fires. I feel like I'm good at what I do, right, So that's the part that obviously makes it better, is you're always learning something and I'm getting better at it. But I love being outdoors. I love being a new country out there, seeing what's out the nature. It's beautiful. I guess the danger part kind of adds to it. Maybe I don't know. I'm not a thrill seeker or anything like that, but the challenge it makes you step up. Right, you see a fire and they're like, hey, we got to put this out. How are we going to do it? And it kind of gets you like, Okay, this is this is challenging, this is awesome, Like I want to stop this, I want to help out. You meet some unique folks here, like my crew example, you have twenty two people. We all come from different backgrounds, right, you put us together and through hard work, sweat pain, you guys build this bond, right, and you get to know each other. You see that even though you guys are all different, come from different areas, you guys are like minded and you have a goal, right, and you guys get together and you accomplish that goal. And at the end of the day, that feeling is like second to none. The act of stopping the fire, the challenge of doing it and knowing that you're saving someone's property or someone's livelihood, like you're doing for people you never met. Right, So we got out there and we saved these properties, and it feels good based on my background right the way I grew up where I came from. It wasn't an easy life, and I still have family out there living that life, and I hope the best for them. I always do. But seeing my kid's face, or hearing him tell his friends that his dad's a firefighter, seeing him talk about it, like the pride he has in his voice when he tells his friends it's awesome. I don't hide my previous life, but I don't go around broadcasting it. Right. If people ask me, I tell him. I'm pretty sure people out there judging me. But for the most part, I think it's helped out a lot of people. I've had a lot of people reach out to me talking about thank you. I know there's hope now and I appreciate you stepping forward and sharing your life with everybody. And that's also a sense of accomplishment. I feel good about that we are out there, even though the numbers are getting less and less. Crews are having hard time staffing for whatever reasons, but there's still a bunch of us out there that care and are continuing to do the hard work. I love this job a lot. I love my people around me, and I think that's what keeps me coming back. I know my wife, even though she don't tell me, I know she doesn't want me doing something different. But to be direct, I don't see myself doing anything else Southern hot Shot for a while when it's not fun anymore, and then when it doesn't make any more sense than I'll think about moving on.
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Speaker 1: Armando Perez is a wildland firefighter with the El Dorado Hotshots in California. This episode was produced by Victoria Estrada and edited by Andrea Lopez Crusado. It was mixed by JJ carubin special thanks to Amanda Montai of the Life with Fire podcast. The Latino USA team also includes Rinaldo Leanos, Junior, Flori mar Marquez, Marta Martinez, Mike Sergent, Luor Saudi, and Nancy Trujillo. Penny Leiramirez is our co executive producer. Our director of Engineering is Stephanie Lebau. Our senior Engineer is Julia Caruso. Our marketing manager is Lis Luna. Our theme music was composed by sang Gevribinos. I'm your host and executive producer Maria Noojosa join us again on our next episode. In the meantime, I'll see you on all of our social media and remember Okay, why Yes?
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Speaker 2: Bye.
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Speaker 4: Latino USA is made possible in part by the Heising Simons Foundation, unlocking knowledge, opportunity, and possibilities more at hsfoundation dot org. The Ford Foundation, working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for more than fifty years, advancing ideas and supporting institutions to promote a better world at Hewlett dot org.
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Speaker 3: Who Love