The Wild Risks of Fighting Wildfires with Kate Dargan Marquis
On today’s episode of The Adrenaline Zone, Sandra and Sandy are joined by Kate Dargan Marquis, who has made a career out of the complex and dangerous business of wildland firefighting. Kate kicks things off by discussing the structure of roles in the wildland firefighting world, the situations they respond to, and the training involved, including constant heat conditioning. She then steps back in time to share how she got into firefighting by volunteering as a smokejumper in the summer before college—one of very few women at the time—before discussing some of the challenges she’s faced more recently at the high level of the firefighting business. In particular, she talks about the tensions between reducing environmental impact and protecting lives and how that will be the central problem for firefighting in the next twenty to thirty years as climate change continues.
Kate then moves on to discuss the cycle of wildland fire and how the teams respond, describing in detail the processes that unfold on a bad fire day. She also addresses how risks are mitigated, from the uniforms that firefighters wear to the equipment they carry and how training focuses on awareness that fire can become unmanageable in an instant (especially since fires are burning more severely than they used to). This unprecedented fire behavior is taking a toll on today’s firefighters, and the group discusses mental health in the wildland fire community, including the rise in suicide rates and how firefighting is a less rewarding job than it once was. However, Kate notes that leaders and departments in the community are now acknowledging these issues and taking steps to help its members get support and treatment. And finally, Kate discusses her journey as a woman in the male-dominated world of firefighting and gives some advice for those interested in getting into this risky but valuable profession.
Resources:
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Transcript:
Dr. Sandra Magnus: It lies somewhere between the pit of your stomach, your racing heart, and your brain, somehow trying to keep it all together. That's an area we call The Adrenaline Zone.
I'm retired astronaut, Dr. Sandra Magnus.
Sandy Winnefeld: And I'm retired Navy fighter pilot, Admiral Sandy Winnefeld. We’re two adrenaline junkies, who love spending time with people who are really passionate about pushing their boundaries as far as possible.
Every year it seems like more and more wildland fires are affecting our nation, particularly out west. They're more frequent, larger in scale, and occur during a long season. The reasons for this are complex and involve both human development and climate change.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Somebody has to go out and fight these fires in order to protect life and property. Kate Dargan Marquis has been doing this hot, tired, dirty, and dangerous work for decades. And she is our guest today on The Adrenaline Zone.
Sandy Winnefeld: Many thanks to our sponsor for this episode, Dunkin'. Slow steeped, ultra-smooth junk and Cold Brew should be at the top of any adrenaline seekers checklist.
We caught up with Kate at home early in the 2022 fire season.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Kate, welcome to The Adrenaline Zone. You've made a career out of the complex and dangerous business of wildland firefighting, from being on the frontlines to managing entire efforts to being an advocate for the responsible use of firefighting as a tool. So, let's start by baselining our listeners on the firefighters themselves. Where do most of these people come from and how are they trained?
Kate Dargan Marquis: I'm going to start off by saying there are a couple of different buckets of the fire service world that go to wildland fires. So, there are kind of what we call the essential Wildland Firefighters. These are people like the hotshot crews or the smokejumpers that jump out of airplanes or the folks that spend a month in the mountains, really doing wildland firefighting. And you see those folks in the news quite a bit. Think of that in the remote wilderness areas of the country.
Then there are folks like CAL FIRE Firefighters, which I was one of, and we work primarily on fire engines. We work all over the state of California. Our fire stations might be in suburban and urban environments, as well as wildland environments.
It's kind of a hybrid mix.
And then there are tens of thousands of local city Fire District firefighters that go to wildland fires under mutual aid. And so, there's a little bit of differentiation between all those.
They're all wildland firefighters when they respond to a wildfire and fight that type of fire, but they come from different environments. If you're a full-time like Federal US Forest Service wildland firefighters, that's all you do. You are trained in that. That is your primary mission.
If you're a suburban firefighter, you're trained in a lot of things. One day, it's a hazardous material. The next day, it's a heart attack. And the third day, you're going to a wildland fire in the north of Auburn.
Sandy Winnefeld: So, it sounds like there's sort of a big collection of people who could converge on a fire. You've got the real pros out there all the time. You’ve got the hired guns. Some are contractors, I would imagine. Some are in the service of, we've talked about suburban firefighters. So, the standards are pretty much the same. If you're gonna go back into the backcountry and fight a fire, you have to have this training.
Kate Dargan Marquis: Yes, and I want to say that there are different dangerous environments on wildfires all the time. But to give a nod to those firefighters where it's not their full-time mission, they are often responding to those conflagration-type fires that are intermixed with homes, and evacuation and life threats. And that's where things get dicey fast.
Sandy Winnefeld: Yeah, so the worst fires are where all these people show up. And so, if you're being called on as a suburban firefighter to go into the wildland, it's probably pretty bad.
Kate Dargan Marquis: It is. I mean, those are the ones that often catch the headline news. Like, let's think about the fire that happened in Marshall, Colorado, right around the first of this year in the wintertime, right outside of Denver there. That fire moved extremely fast and it was handled entirely by the, quote, 'suburban firefighting personnel' who were responding to those homes. I think it's almost a thousand houses burned within a matter of just a few hours.
And so, these environments are occurring all over the country. New Mexico is a good example. That's a much more traditional wildland environment there. So, firefighters are encountering those life-threatening situations not just for themselves, but for the public that they're serving in so many different areas now.
Sandy Winnefeld: So, Kate, I would imagine that regardless of where they come from, if you find yourself out there in the wildland fighting a fire, you have to be in pretty good shape. It's strenuous work. It's in the heat of the summer, probably, in the heat of a fire with plenty of bulky protective gear, you have to be able to move quickly when necessary to get to the fire or get away from the fire. Does that just come with the territory? How do these folks keep themselves in condition? Is it sort of voluntary or are there standards?
Kate Dargan Marquis: First off, there's a set of standards. I mean, it's not like there's a height-weight standard that you have to adhere to. But there is a presumption of physical ability.
A lot of attention is paid to heat conditioning as you go into the summer months. So, for example, when I was a fire captain working on a fire engine and a hot part of Central California, we started heat conditioning fairly early in the summer, and we'd go out during the hour right before lunch at 11, or we delayed lunch and go out at 12. And we would hike in full gear up steep slopes in the heat of the day.
I mean, we're just sweat pouring off of your read face, but over time, you get to the point were doing that in 100 degrees seems fine. You can do that. We'd recite our safety orders and fireline orders while we hiked, and it was training and heat conditioning.
That's a really important thing. We teach that you can't drive around in an air-conditioned fire engine and then jump out into 100-degree conditions. You have to just keep yourself warm throughout the day and not super chill your fire station and super chill your fire engine.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So, how did you get into firefighting in general? What attracted you to it?
Kate Dargan Marquis: It was almost by accident. I was backpacking in Yosemite with my brother as a senior in high school. I went to Halfmoon Bay High School in California. We camped next to a couple of smoke jumpers and we just sat around the campfire. I was 18. My brother was 17. We talked to the smoke jumpers and they just said, ‘Hey, it's a great summer job. You gotta try this.’
Because I was interested, I did a lot of backpacking, and I loved the outdoors. And so, I was like, ‘Sure, that's a good summer job. I'm going to college next year. I'll try for that.’ I started in late June of 1977. And went fairly soon. I think by the middle of July, we were in a big fire siege for the state. There were fires all over California that year. We were in a drought in 1977 and it ended up in one of the big fires of the time.
It's a tiny fire by today's standards. It was a big fire by those standards. It was 75,000 acres. It was called the Marble Cone fire in the Los Padres National Forest outside of Big Sur. So, Tassajara Canyon, Carmel, and Big Sur were where the fire was occurring.
There were very, very few women at the time. I think we had a fire camp of 800 people and I was like the one-woman firefighter in that camp. Not unlike some of your background, Sandra, probably the experiences you've had.
Anyway, the point was, I accidentally stumbled into it. I went to the Marble Cone fire. And we rode in a strike team of engines out to the fire line. So, imagine the sun is setting over the Pacific. It's a massive fire out there. It's a line, almost a mile long of fire engines threading their way up the mountainside in the twilight, and massive flames on the hill behind us, and it's like, ‘Oh, this is so for me. I'm doing it.’
Dr. Sandra Magnus: You just knew it, right?
Kate Dargan Marquis: This is what I want to be doing. So, I went ahead and went to college, but I stayed working as a seasonal and finished college and worked my way up. And I felt it after that first experience.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Just because of a conversation around a campsite?
Kate Dargan Marquis: Yeah!
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah, it's amazing.
Sandy Winnefeld: It's amazing where life takes us.
Kate Dargan Marquis: Yeah! And my two sons have chosen to go into the fire service, so now it's kind of a family thing, I guess.
Sandy Winnefeld: Well, I would imagine that there's sort of a many-layered set of risks in the firefighting business, beginning at the sort of strategic level all the way down to the tactical.
So, let's start at the sort of high level, the various perspectives of the various stakeholders who actually have an interest in how, in a macro sense, the firefighting business works. Some people don't want you to fight fires at all. Other people want you to fight every single fire tooth and nail. You've been involved in that a bit later in your career so give us a sense of where some of those tensions lie.
Kate Dargan Marquis: Yeah, this is gonna be the sticky wicket problem that we grapple with for the next 20 or 30 years as climate change forces this recognition that our current policy of suppress all fires has been proven to have a negative consequence to it in the long-term environment. Everybody pretty much agrees on that.
What we have also done though, is put people in those places and they're not going to go away very soon. The crux of that issue is there's almost no way to protect communities adequately without continuing a freely robust suppression policy.
The fires are burning with intensity and frequency, and the threat that we're just going to have to massively deploy fire suppression resources to protect communities and homes. The consequence of that is going to be continued environmental impacts that we cannot escape from. And that is the buildup of fuels and the slow decline of forest health.
And a lot of people are putting emphasis on natural fire management, like lightning-caused fires in remote areas, letting those burn under low conditions, not the highest most hazardous conditions, or prescribed fires, like the ones that they had started in New Mexico, but then escaped because unexpected winds came up.
There's a very fine needle that must be threaded. If we want to optimize for the environment and community protection, we're going to have to have burned landscapes and fire suppression at the same time, it's an extremely complex challenge to me.
The most complex part of it is, and we're seeing this play out in New Mexico right now, people are unwilling to accept community loss as a consequence. When it comes down to the choice of prescribed fires or burnt homes, people will always say, ‘I'm not willing to take that risk.’
And so, it's theoretical, when we're talking about it legislatively. But when it gets to communities, and they feel like they're threatened, they want the firefighters there.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Well, there's so much to unpack in what you just said.
Kate Dargan Marquis: It's hugely complex.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: But even as we record this, there's a host of fires burning in the West, like over 6700 wildland firefighters assigned to fight them. So, you mentioned earlier that you were on a big fire at the time, which is now a small fire, so does it seem like we're experiencing more and more wildfires every year?
I think you mentioned a little bit about policies that fail, but also there's still a finite number of people available to fight the wildfirs, so that's probably a big impact on the workforce, too.
Kate Dargan Marquis: Yeah, capital 'W' Workforce is a big conversation policy-wise right now. So, what we're discovering absolutely, Sandra, to answer the first part of your question. Yes, unequivocally, the frequency, size, and severity of fires are going up.
Now, that's partly climate change. It is partly just the fact that we find ourselves in a western mega drought, whether or not that's absolute climate change, or it's just exacerbated by climate change, we'd be in a drought anyway.
So, climate change is a component. The cycle of drought and precipitation in the West is a component because we're in a dry cycle, undoubtedly. But people want to push this off on climate change. It is also because we are still building in these environments. It's the fastest growing residential landscape out there. I mean, we're building residential single-family homes in wildland settings today. The problem is still getting bigger because we're still putting people in places where we know these fires are going to exacerbate and burn and threaten them in the decades ahead.
I mean, the new houses are still going up. So, we're continuing to not recognize some of the root causes of the issue, which is people in burnable landscapes.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: It's funny that you say that because I lived in Hurricane Alley for a long time. And it's the same thing where there's a lot of building happening in areas where you know, there's a natural disaster or natural weather pattern that's completely going to put all of that at risk, but we do it anyway.
Sandy Winnefeld: Are people building next to the fighter bases and wondering why there's noise?
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah, it's the same thing.
Sandy Winnefeld: The real estate agents sell them on weekends.
Kate Dargan Marquis: Yeah, the human way is until you're impacted a sufficient number of times, you're willing to endure a certain amount of threat, risk or pain. Like, I pay attention to this in the flood scenarios. I'm not saying this is an academic perspective. But in my casual research, what FIBA is finding is that about the third time you're flooded out, people lose their desire to remain in the community. And so, I have a talk that I give on what the 2030s 40s and 50s are likely to look like. People will depopulate these areas eventually.
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[After the Break]
Sandy Winnefeld: So, Kate, let's descend from the strategic level all the way down to the tactical level. Tell us about the sort of cycle of wildland fire and how the teams respond, how that works, how they're detected, and how we respond?
Kate Dargan Marquis: Yeah, I'll give you a California example in a typical outside of a community on a bad fire day. Let's just take the city of Auburn. Up there is northeast of Sacramento and mid foothills area in the Sierra.
On a bad fire day, it will probably be a red flag day where the National Weather Service has published a warning of red flag. That means that winds and humidity’s are expected to be at critical levels, usually out of the north or northeast part of California. We're not necessarily talking about high temperatures, but often in the summer, there are.
Let's just assume that we're talking about 90 degrees outside, the winds are starting to pick up. They're blowing at 10 miles an hour, but we think they're going to increase to 30 to 40 miles an hour by the next day.
We get an afternoon fire, vehicle fire on the I-80, it sets off a wildland fire, and immediately there's going to be a joint dispatch of all the available fire engines, and probably hand crews and aircraft in that area.
So, on a red flag day, we're going to send probably 10 fire engines and an Air Attack and at least two air tankers and a couple of hand crews and one or two bulldozers right away as soon as that fire report comes in. The tones will go off and all of those resources will start going in. Then they're going to get there and that fire is going to be already blowing away. They can't contain it. They know that they're going to be in for a large fire spread.
So, immediately, the incident commander is going to set up somewhere in a vehicle, a separate vehicle, and a few of the fire engines are going to start trying to anchor the fire, they'll do an assessment of where the structures are and where the most significant life threat if there is one, where that's going to be. And the fire engines will deploy to the life threat fairly quickly, while the air tankers try to slow the fire down in that vicinity. The airplanes will then start laying down fire retardant between where the fire is burning and the homes while the fire engines go to that particular area and try to make sure that people are starting to clear out of the way while that happens. The bulldozers roll off their tracks and start trying to cut the fire line if they can. That's the beginning stage of a large fire.
Sandy Winnefeld: Wow!
Kate Dargan Marquis: The incident commander is going to make an assessment of how big this fire's likely to be. So, he or she may think, in their minds, 'I think I can pick this up by tomorrow morning', or they're gonna think, 'This one's likely to go, like, this one is headed into rugged terrain. As soon as it gets past the structures, it's off and going, so I'm going to focus on structure protection, and I'm going to order a massive amount of resources,' and those resources started to roll.
Here's where I was telling you in the beginning, they come from different buckets. Now, this is the city of Auburn, right? We're right at the edge of the city limits. So, there are downtown Auburn City firefighters that are responding to this, there's CAL FIRE, wildland fire engines that are responding – by the time that that big order goes out the city of Sacramento, the Yuba County firefighters, I mean, all of those firefighters geographically, we're pulling from the closest area starting to feed resources into that fire. That's why they're coming from all these different areas in different backgrounds.
Sandy Winnefeld: I can only imagine now, way down at the tactical level, the kind of risks that these firefighters are taking when they're actually on the line – burns, respiratory hazards, heat-related issues you talked about earlier, physical injuries, and even heart attacks because it's such a strenuous environment.
I wanted to ask you how you go about mitigating all of those risks? Let's start with your equipment. What's the average firefighter out there lugging around out there in the backcountry?
Kate Dargan Marquis: First off, they're usually dressed in either all cotton under clothing. So, t-shirts and underwear so that if they do get burned, it doesn't stick to their skin. So, no polys.
Then their outer layers are Nomex, a specially treated fabric. I'm sure you may use a similar fabric in the astronaut world and military world around fires.
Sandy Winnefeld: Yep.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yep.
Kate Dargan Marquis: Their day-to-day uniforms are Nomex and the yellow firefighting suits that they wear, which are really like a heavy fabric. it's not lightweight, but it's not like Canvas either. They wear the pants and jackets for that. Then they have a helmet with a suspension system. They have a Nomex shroud that comes around. Oftentimes they may have a Nomex hood that they wear that just keeps just their eyes exposed.
No airway protection in particular at this point in time. They're usually just breathing through their nostrils in whatever environment they're in. High gauntlet gloves and high-top eight-inch boots with steel shafts, etc.
So, that's really what as a person you're wearing, a Nomex outfit. It makes you hotter, so it traps your body heat. So, we do have to heat condition. Once the flame is removed, it will not burn if the flame is removed. So, if you're in a compromised environment, your pack of gear, you usually carry a substantial amount of water, you're carrying some personal gear in your pack, you're certainly carrying a fire shelter, and some tools with you in your pack. So packs will weigh anywhere between 20 and 30 pounds, depending on how much water you're carrying on your back.
And a lot of fire engine firefighters are carrying a lot of hand tools, they're really working with the hose and the water system on the fire engine, but they're also multipurpose. They can put down the fire hoses and grab tools and head off without water.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: You know, it's funny, we had to wear cotton clothes at the space station for the same reason. If there was a fire, it wouldn't melt to our skin. My personal experience with Nomex is that it's hot in the summer and cold in the winter, so it's completely not helpful.
Sandy Winnefeld: Yeah. And even though it doesn't burn, it does char pretty well.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah.
Sandy Winnefeld: I can tell you from experience.
Kate Dargan Marquis: It does. Yeah. Kudos to the company that can come out with some kind of self-cooling fabric someday. You know, transfer ambient humidity to an evaporative surface on the inside of the coat.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah, that's gold right there. But when you're out there in the, you talk about the command and control and the communication, but there's always the risk of fires going to do something completely unexpected. I imagine that happens quite a bit actually.
How do you handle, abort, escape criteria or even actually deal with animals that are trying to get away as well? It seems like that whole in-the-moment situation can be really dynamic.
Kate Dargan Marquis: It is super dynamic. I mean, there's a lot of emphasis in a younger firefighter’s training and awareness all the time that fire can turn instantly from a manageable environment in front of you to an unmanageable one.
There's a lot of training that goes into just grass fires where the flames are just a few feet high one moment, and then can be eight feet high the next when the wind hits the wrong direction.
So, in terms of teaching firefighters how to approach a fire in the black, on the burned side of the fire is one of the key fundamental training things that we tell them. You try to never be in the green or unburned area with fire moving towards you. You always try to find an entry point so that you're following the fire from the backside of it, from the place where it's burned from, that gives you some added safety.
That's not always possible and with the way the fires are burning more severely, like, I don't know if you recall the story that hit the national news about the fire tornado in Redding back in, I think it was 2017. There is unprecedented fire behavior that's occurring that is creating a length of flame and movement of the flame that is so rapid that it is surprising people.
So, the risk on the ground is greater than has ever been. This is truly taking a toll on people. It's one thing to walk into an environment – you know, in your military background, Sandy, it's one thing to walk into an environment, you think you have a good battle plan, you've got the resources, and you know you've got the air support behind you, you know you got a good fighting chance. It's another to walk into a 'We don't know what the hell we're getting into' environment. The psychological toll of that is more profound. And that's what we're discovering with our firefighters today.
I see it with my own family and firefighters that I'm close to. The repetitive exposure to a worsening environment, you can't expect what you were trained to, isn't necessarily what you're facing. Each year, it just seems to get worse and weirder and harder. And that's taken a toll.
Sandy Winnefeld: Yeah, that resonates with what a lot of our wonderful soldiers and Marines experienced on the ground in places like Afghanistan, where you don't know when you're going to walk into a bunch of improvised explosive devices. We've already done an episode on somebody who did that, or an ambush or something like that. It really sets you on edge.
And so, do you have any issues with PTSD and that sort of thing? I would imagine you do with some of the folks who've been in some more difficult conditions?
Kate Dargan Marquis: Yeah. So, I'm going to make a confession here. The short answer is yes, absolutely. I've had to dig deep into kind of my own presumptions that I made 30 or 40 years ago when I started out when it was like, I grew up in the era when it was like, ‘Quit your whining. Suck it up. Get on with it.’
That was my environment and that is still often the way we deal with things. But I've had to move from 'They're just whiners' to 'It's a real issue'. I mean, PTSD is an actual issue. I experienced it myself at the Cedar Fire in San Diego. And the impact of all of the devastation, the loss of life of one of our firefighters on the line, and what I saw the community go through just affected me at a level that I couldn't get away from psychologically very easily.
While it wasn't profound, I did seek treatment and resolved it. But I see other firefighters going through much worse than that. I mean, as I said, they're out there for weeks at a time, repeatedly being deployed to large fires for lengthy periods of time, not able to get home, not able to rest. And I want to go back to the smoke environment that they're operating in. Like they're not on assisted breathing. They're breathing in a difficult environment with toxins for weeks at a time. It's a very real problem. Certainly, diagnosed PTSD illnesses and suicide rates are way up in the wildland fire community.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Wow, that's unfortunate.
Sandy Winnefeld: I would imagine, like, you're out there, like you said, for weeks at a time. It's not the life of luxury – you know, heading back to a nice hotel for a shower at the end of the day.
Kate Dargan Marquis: Let me just say it's not fun.
Sandy Winnefeld: Living out there, yeah. But it's exciting and it's probably rewarding, but it's not in the midst of a heck of a lot of fun. That's incredible.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: It sounds like close calls are not necessarily a brush with the fire, but it's just simply the exposure to the constant devastation and the stressful environment that can cause a lot of problems for people.
Kate Dargan Marquis: Yeah, I think the PTSD and suicide issues have a lot to do with the grind of it. And there's certainly, this is more on the federal side right now, the US Forest Service is having trouble filling all of its positions this year. There's a lot of congressional discussion and action through the infrastructure act to raise the pay.
They're still basically at a minimum wage level of pay. Most people are just saying, ‘Look, it's not worth it.’ What used to be a rewarding, outdoor-oriented, sometimes exciting, sometimes physically demanding, but generally, the camaraderie, the experience of it, you got more positives than negatives. And it was an enjoyable career, even as a seasonal firefighter. That is not the case for so many people now.
Sandy Winnefeld: This sounds like the same journey we've been on as a military where society is changing, generations are changing, and the environment is changing. It's been a lot of interesting work adjusting to these new sorts of facts on the ground.
I'm just wondering, does the community have formal leadership training for people who are now in a position of responsibility for all the different aspects of leadership, including recognizing when people are in trouble, but everything else that goes along with it? Do you have that kind of training?
Kate Dargan Marquis: Well, it’s growing. So, most departments, and once again, because there's a variation in where these firefighters come from, there's a variation in the systems and services that each of them has access to.
So, the federal wildfire fighting folks may have a different set of leadership discussions than the downtown city of Sacramento firefighters may have. But almost every department now is acknowledging the impact of the wildland component on its members, and they are building programs for recognizing, getting them into services, preventative treatments, everything from yoga, and just general good mental health practices to classes, like you're saying, for leadership to recognize signs and symptoms, and organizational cultural shifts that we can make, like, how do you encourage open communication and vulnerable conversations in a profession that typically doesn't encourage those kinds of things?
Sandy Winnefeld: Welcome to my world. I totally understand.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah, I totally get that.
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[After the Break]
Sandy Winnefeld: One of the things that we did have done reasonably well as a military, but it wasn't a natural act, and it took a long time was what we call joint operations where we coordinate air operations and operations on the ground.
I've got a good friend who owns the company, 10 Tanker. There are other people out there who do these airdrops. How has that evolved over time? How do you coordinate with the people on the ground?
I would imagine if you're on the ground, you don't necessarily want to get dumped on unless you're actually in the fire and then you want to get dumped on. But how do you coordinate that and how's it evolved over time?
Kate Dargan Marquis: I don't know if we talked about this previously, but I spent several years as an Air Attack officer. And so, in the firefighting vernacular that's called an air tactical group supervisor, but the CAL FIRE shorthand is just 'Air Attack'.
In my particular aircraft platform, I had two during two different periods, but the most fun one was the OV 10 Bronco that came out of marine reconnaissance use in Vietnam. So, with a fire, the way it would work is like, remember when I said you'd get 10 fire engines and 2 air tankers and an Air Attack dispatched to that Auburn fire we were simulating a few minutes ago.
So, the Air Attack will lift off from an airbase, usually with one or two air tankers in tow coming with them. We're talking on the way into the fire. There's a very structured airspace requirement for three miles from the incident location.
From an aviation standpoint, we basically control the airspace in a three-mile radius around the incident, and aircraft check in and out. You're basically functioning as an air traffic controller as an Air Attack.
You're keeping your eyes on the ground, you're understanding where the fire is, and you're generally watching where the troops are, but your job is to control the airspace, deconflict any issues in the airspace, and positively affirm aircraft, whether it's rotor wing or fixed wing into a fire.
So, that umbrella of airspace coordination is existing over a fire, and they are talking amongst themselves. And when air tankers drop down into a fire, they check in with Air Attack, they get cleared, they are told you're approved for the drop, they come around, they do a circle around it, they announce 'tanker on final'. And from an Air Attack perspective, you have to have visual certainty, you have to have visual eyes on that air tanker when they go in for their drop, and you have confirmed that there are no personnel below, you announce it to the ground, and you're watching the air tank make the drop. They make it at 150 feet above the ground.
Sandy Winnefeld: Wow! I would imagine that there's probably some new technology coming along. Is there machine learning trying to predict which way a fire is going to go? Or the best way to attack a fire? Or are we still kind of on the edges of that?
Kate Dargan Marquis: We have passed the edges and are entering that realm. I would say that the academic research and civil space for this is exploding like wildfire, to use the metaphor.
I mean, there are dozens if not hundreds of companies around the world working on these kinds of questions. But I'm gonna stand back and I'm gonna say, surprisingly, there is yet no reliable way to know where a fire is located from above. We cannot tell you with certainty where a fire is every moment of its occurrence yet. Those technologies are not yet fully in place.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So, do you guys use unmanned aerial vehicles to help with some of that?
Kate Dargan Marquis: Yeah, usually there's ground deployment of drone UAV on individual fires. On some large fires, the Global Hawk has gotten involved and has transmitted intel products off the Global Hawk. I think there are a couple of other companies that are running the civilian versions of those.
So, the unmanneds are in use, the fixed wing, there's a whole stack. I mean, helicopters that have infrared cameras mounted underneath them to aircraft that are flying specific missions for certain types of remote sensing, and certainly satellite systems. It's not like there are none. There are lots of systems out there but there's no ubiquitous system that is serving that up constantly to everyone.
Sandy Winnefeld: One of the reasons why I wanted Sandra as a partner in this podcast was because I believe that half the people in this world who take risks are women, right? And of course, she's had plenty of it. I would imagine being one of the first women…
Kate Dargan Marquis: If you count childbirth, perhaps more.
Sandy Winnefeld: Okay, I'll grant you that. I'd imagine that being one of the first women in this profession, and you mentioned being one out of 300 earlier on when we were talking, had its own interesting challenges, and now you've risen pretty much to the top of your profession. How has that journey been for you?
Kate Dargan Marquis: I would say it has been a growth experience. So, the first summer I worked as a firefighter, I spent a fair amount of time in tears behind the cookhouse in the evenings. Like I said, it was an environment where vulnerability and sharing your feelings were not a rewarded experience.
So, I learned how to have what we call grit, determination, and fortitude, fairly early. I was 18 years old. Frankly, it shocked me how mean men were to each other. That was the big thing I had to learn. Men are kind of mean to each other.
Sandy Winnefeld: No, girls can be pretty mean to each other, too.
Kate Dargan Marquis: That's true. At 18 I had to learn how to adapt to a male-oriented culture pretty quickly.
Sandy Winnefeld: Yeah.
Kate Dargan Marquis: And then I got it, like, 'Okay, there's just different rules. There are just different ways you communicate'. And I began to not take it quite so personally. I took it because it wasn't me as a young woman there, it was just that's just kind of how it operates. Like, those are the rules for everybody.
And while there was some discrimination about being a woman, and certainly I had to prove myself in a lot of ways like so many early women do. I think in my 30s and 40s, I started to develop, I don't know, kind of a respect and admiration for what that particular culture did, like, I get it.
Here's one of my side beliefs that I've developed out of this, there are not many places for young men to go in our world and find their way into manhood. The fire service is one of those places. It happens there. It happens all the time. I imagine the military is much the same.
There are precious few opportunities for young men to find their way. So, I don't really begrudge that culture. I think it has value. Now there are ways to make it, to tone it down at times.
So, I've worked my way through the fire service. I think if you talk to a lot of women who succeed in male-oriented professions, a lot of them have a similar story. If you can make it through the first years and find your footing, if you can survive those first few years of figuring it out, you probably develop a respect and camaraderie with those others and it seems to fade a little bit. You find your footing and your respect for one another.
Sandy Winnefeld: I'd suggest that it goes the other way, too. If you had walked aboard an aircraft carrier in the 70s or 80s like I was serving, it was a completely different place than an aircraft carrier today. A lot of that has to do with the fact that we have women on board and we just treat each other differently with a little more respect and a little less callousness. It really is a different feeling. I think there have been some benefits going the other way, I would say for sure.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah, I've noted both of those. One, you have to get used to a different culture, and two, women are a civilizing influence on the teams that they are on. I saw that. It was very interesting. This almost instinctively, that doesn't mean the culture goes away, but it definitely softens a little bit.
Sandy Winnefeld: Are you trying to say men behave better when women are around us?
Dr. Sandra Magnus: That's not what I said, I might have implied it.
Sandy Winnefeld: There you go.
Kate Dargan Marquis: Well, because I have no official hat that I'm wearing today, I am right on board with those things. What I have found personally, as I went through that change, it ended up that everyone appreciated that shift. The men liked that environment, too. When given permission to be a little bit more human with one another and vulnerable with one another, they kind of like it. Nobody wants to go too far. Like, we don't want whiners or we don't cry babies, but being able to just talk about the real stuff in a way that wasn't competitive, people like that.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Well, I imagine at the end of the day, it's a lot like the environment I was in where it was, at the end less about whether you are male or female, and more about, in the stress of the environment, in the heat of the moment, can you deliver and be relied on? And do you have good judgment and can your colleagues count on you to show up? That's really what it comes down to.
Sandy Winnefeld: So, Kate, we’re getting close to the end here. Firefighting is really a dangerous and complex occupation. You've made that very clear today. You've been doing it for a while. What keeps you going? What are you doing at this point in your career?
Kate Dargan Marquis: Well, I mean, let's be honest, I'm 63. I haven't been on the line for 20 years, well, almost 20 years or 15 years. Because I worked in a management rank, not many fire chiefs are, quote, 'on the line in the same environments'. But nonetheless, you're responsible for those things.
Why do I keep doing it? Well, first off, I have a profound love of the environment and earth. I'm moved by the climate change problems in front of us. So, there is a bigger picture, and I just happen to have acquired expertise that's needed today. I mean, I still recognize that it's a needed, my perspective and voice, are still a needed addition.
I don't say that with hubris. I just say that I still feel that I make a contribution that's important. And I look at my 4-month-old grandson and think, I can't hang it up. I got to find time to make contributions because I'm doing it for them.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: As we wrap up, do you have any advice for people who might be interested in getting into this risky profession?
Kate Dargan Marquis: I absolutely do. I mean, I have advice for the policymakers if any of them happen to listen to this, which is we are going to have to invest in the salary benefits and schedule structure that make it a more livable profession for those folks that do endure those conditions - that there is compensation that has to occur.
The other is for the firefighters themselves. To every woman out there who wonders if she could, she probably can. I want to encourage that. We need more women in the fire service of every different style.
For anyone, man or woman, boy or girl who's interested in this profession, it is still a fantastic way to go through life. I mean, you're contributing so much and the friendships that you make, the camaraderie that you experience, your sense of purpose, and doing a valuable thing with your career – not many professions offer that these days. It's a great lifestyle.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: I'll share a story really quick as we wrap up. When we were in East Texas searching for the Columbia piece parts as they fell across the field, there were a lot of wild firefighters who came – I mean, hundreds who came and camped there, stayed there for a month, and helped us walk the line and try and find all of the evidence that we needed to figure out what happened to Columbia.
I was so impressed with that community and their dedication and their high spirit. It really left an indelible impression on me. I really to this day, as thankful that they were there. So, I think it's a wonderful community from the little lens that I have.
Kate Dargan Marquis: I'm sorry for that. I’m glad you had that experience of mitigating.
Sandy Winnefeld: Unfortunately, we could talk for another hour, because this is fascinating. From the very beginning of putting together this podcast, we wanted to have a wildland firefighter and somebody with experience in that. This has been a terrific discussion. Thanks for your long career and what you've been doing to help keep our country safe in that regard.
We wish the best for your children who are in this business as well and that they'd be safe and effective. Once again, thanks for entertaining our listeners with a really fascinating discussion today. We really appreciate it.
Kate Dargan Marquis: This is all my pleasure. I hope your listeners enjoy it, will get something out of it and thank you for doing what you're doing and bringing stuff to people and telling them stories.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: That was Wildland Firefighter Kate Dargan Marquis. I'm Sandra Magnus.
Sandy Winnefeld: And I'm Sandy Winnefeld. Many thanks to our sponsor, Dunkin'. Dunkin' fuels the people who take on every challenge headfirst and we know the right kind of fuel that they need, an ultra-smooth Dunkin’ Cold Brew.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Join us back in The Adrenaline Zone next week for a new episode and be sure to follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.
