The Race To Extinguish A Fire

...and DOGE

I’m supposed to be writing about race, so I am. Did you notice how cleverly I once again wove race into the title of my post? Mission accomplished.

Yeah, I’m aware…I’ve been MIA for quite a bit. But come Monday, when I’m cut loose from the current fire I am on which prudence tells me maybe I should not identify, but here’s a couple of pictures - I think I’ll call it quits on my fire season and pull the plug. Getting back to America’s Thing With Race will bring with it an extraordinary amount to write about. But today, just a quickie about wildland fire and how DOGE has affected firefighting.

My role on fires is to manage and coordinate the medical team that we set up before we need them or, hopefully, before we don’t need them... EMT’s, paramedics, ambulances, helicopters, extraction teams, and supplies.

Let’s talk about supplies. The federal fire service has supply caches all over the country - enough so that when I order something that is stocked in the cache, no matter where I am, even above the Arctic Circle in Alaska, as I was a few weeks ago, I pretty much always get it the next day. But the medical supplies kept in the cache are pretty pathetic. It’s never been a real problem. In addition to ordering that kit of supplies, I fill out paperwork to order all the other over-the-counter medications and gizmos that 13 years of experience tells me I will need.

After the order goes through me, I hand it off to the ordering manager and that person hands it off to a group of people who have come together to serve the fire, or perhaps a group of fires if they’re located close together. That group of people is called a Buying Team. They have government issued credit cards and go to Walmart or medical supply stores, sometimes to a health food store, and get the stuff I need and bring it back to me. Usually if I order early in the day I will have my supplies that evening.

But that was then, and this is now. In order to hand the order to a team of people, there has to be people. Makes sense, right? And those people need to have a government credit card so they can buy stuff. Again…makes sense. Do you want to guess what we no longer have? Yeah…stuff. Thanks to Trump, Musk, and the Department of Government Efficiency, this year people to staff the buying teams are in very short supply - almost non-existent. I haven’t had a buying team on any of the three fires that I have been on in AK, NM, or now here. They were amongst the more than 148,000 people who got “retired”. Prior to this year I had NEVER not had a buying team.

The people that are left, you care to guess what they don't have? They don't have credit cards to buy stuff anyway.

Thanks to Trump and Musk’s drive for federal government “efficiency”, and getting rid of all the lazy government slackers - combined with reducing the credit card spending limit of the people that are left to one dollar, I can get what I need if it comes in the kit, and that’s it. Well, I guess that if it cost less than a dollar, including tax, I can get it.

When you put a lot of people together, sometimes a couple thousand, personal hygiene becomes a thing…a big important thing. Almost without exception, after about 10 or so days, all fire camps begins to experience what we call “camp crud”. People are sneezing and coughing and hacking and generally feeling kind of crappy. I’ve found Emergen-C, DayQuil, and NyQuil to be extremely effective. But before they get camp crud, personal hygiene is the key. Do you want to know what I can’t get in the name of government efficiency? Yeah, you nailed it… I can’t get hand sanitizer. I can’t get handi wipes. I can’t get Emergen-C. I can’t get DayQuil. And I can’t get NyQuil. Actually, I can’t get anything at all other than what is in that pathetic initial kit.

Trump and Musk’s government efficiency is a wonderful thing. But you know what would have actually been efficient? Figuring out what they were doing before they actually did it.

I’ll be back to writing about America’s Thing With Race in about a week. But honestly, by now, all Americans, every single one of us, should be able to see that Trump is driven by a deep, deep well of racism. So deep that it has affected our ability to fight fires. Our ability to care about our fellow Americans. Our ability to care about people coming to our shores for the same exact reasons that our ancestors came to our shores. Well… not my ancestors, but yours. Our ability to care about books. Our ability to care about museums. Our ability to care about history. Our ability to care about our children’s education. Our ability to care about our neighbors. Our ability to care about cruelty. Our ability to simply care.

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And I’m going to give a shout out to federal workers. I worked in the corporate world for a long time and then I worked with the federal government for a long time. Federal workers, working for a mission driven organization, worked as hard or harder and with as much integrity or more than any of my coworkers in the corporate world.