Wildland Fire Tender: Suppression Support

   My experience with wildland fire started in 2006 when I was hired to drive a type 2, 4000 gallon water tender for the season. Water tenders are used for keeping the dust down on roads, filling engines, pre-treating the green side of fire lines, filling porta-tanks, and many other interesting tasks that division supervisors can think up. We are required to drive these trucks into some often tense situations, usually to higher elevations where large quantities of water can more easily be pumped down the other side of a ridge or mountain to the ground crews who do the dirty work.
 
   At that point in my life, I was not quite ready to commit to what it takes to be away from friends and family for the entire season, so I chose not to return the following year. After entering college, driving a fire tender became the perfect seasonal job during the summer. I returned to driving tenders in 2012 and have done it every summer since. As my level of education has progressed, I have learned to watch for various ecological damage situations and ask more questions about why certain suppression techniques were being implemented. Through those questions I have received some valuable on-the-job training and experience, in addition to meeting numerous upper-level agency folks that now know me as more than just a seasonal truck driver.
 
   In addition to driving tenders, I have also taken a lower level fire ecology class in the past, and spent the summer of 2011 doing fuels monitoring for Prineville BLM Fire Ecology. With this class, I hope to expand on what I have learned so far.

Water Tender support. Stickpin Fire, Curlew, Washington 2015