Students take on summer's heat, from California to Michigan, volunteers extinguish forest fires
Mary Petrides
Issue date: 9/17/09 Section: Focus
They trained, fought and got paid.
One battled summer blazes in the forests of California and Oregon; the other answered middle-of-the-night fire calls while a student.
Hillsdale College seniors Trent Demarest and Brandon Carmack share a common mission: fighting fires.
Forest of flames
For the past three summers, Demarest has fought fire on-call. Demarest said he worked one summer with Oregon's PatRick Corporation. Following this first foray, he said, he spent two summers with ASP Fire.
Firefighting in the wild entails mostly digging, he said.
"We definitely don't run toward a wall of flame with a hose," he said.
Demarest said a direct attack begins with the sawyers, who clear trees from the area. He said the crew next digs a trench three feet wide, baring mineral soil. Following this they remove brush and burn the area to clear it.
Work is hot - Demarest said he drinks about two gallons of water a day - and fires are loud.
"It sounds like a jet taking off," he said.
After the fire has burned out, Demarest said, the crew scours the ash fields and puts out any smoldering fires.
Demarest said crown fires - fires traveling through canopies - destroy trees and skeletonize forests, but smaller wildfires are natural and healthy for the ecosystem, purging the underbrush.
"What's not natural," he said, "is when you have this short-sighted political management that doesn't allow fires to burn that need to burn…a lot of fires we should allow to burn we put out, and a lot of fires we should put out we allow to burn."
Midnight man
While Demarest fought fires over the summer, Carmack did his duty at school.
He said as a freshman, a Ford F-250 lured him towards the City of Hillsdale Fire Department.
"I drove by the fire station and saw a Ford truck and thought it was the coolest truck in the world," Carmack said.
He applied and got the job.
During his freshman year, Carmack spent about 15 hours per week training - on Wednesdays for the city of Hillsdale and on Sundays for his state certification. He was on-call 24/7.
One battled summer blazes in the forests of California and Oregon; the other answered middle-of-the-night fire calls while a student.
Hillsdale College seniors Trent Demarest and Brandon Carmack share a common mission: fighting fires.
Forest of flames
For the past three summers, Demarest has fought fire on-call. Demarest said he worked one summer with Oregon's PatRick Corporation. Following this first foray, he said, he spent two summers with ASP Fire.
Firefighting in the wild entails mostly digging, he said.
"We definitely don't run toward a wall of flame with a hose," he said.
Demarest said a direct attack begins with the sawyers, who clear trees from the area. He said the crew next digs a trench three feet wide, baring mineral soil. Following this they remove brush and burn the area to clear it.
Work is hot - Demarest said he drinks about two gallons of water a day - and fires are loud.
"It sounds like a jet taking off," he said.
After the fire has burned out, Demarest said, the crew scours the ash fields and puts out any smoldering fires.
Demarest said crown fires - fires traveling through canopies - destroy trees and skeletonize forests, but smaller wildfires are natural and healthy for the ecosystem, purging the underbrush.
"What's not natural," he said, "is when you have this short-sighted political management that doesn't allow fires to burn that need to burn…a lot of fires we should allow to burn we put out, and a lot of fires we should put out we allow to burn."
Midnight man
While Demarest fought fires over the summer, Carmack did his duty at school.
He said as a freshman, a Ford F-250 lured him towards the City of Hillsdale Fire Department.
"I drove by the fire station and saw a Ford truck and thought it was the coolest truck in the world," Carmack said.
He applied and got the job.
During his freshman year, Carmack spent about 15 hours per week training - on Wednesdays for the city of Hillsdale and on Sundays for his state certification. He was on-call 24/7.
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