When forest fires start to burn beyond the reach of fire trucks the Smokejumpers of the US Forestry Service are called upon to parachute from their planes and deliver firefighting right at the heart of the inferno. They carry their gear with them and spend their first 48 hours cut off and alone, tackling what must seem like hell on earth.
In 1939 T.V. Pearson, the Forest Service Intermountain Regional Forester, initiated the Smokejumper program as a means of quickly providing initial attack on forest fires. The idea was to parachute self-sufficient firefighters in to the fire zone, fresh and ready for the strenuous work of tackling the inferno in rugged terrain. The Smokejumper school launched in 1939 as an experiment in the Pacific Northwest Region and the first fire jump was made in 1940 at Idaho's Nez Perce National Forest. In 1981, the first female smokejumper in the nation successfully completed the training program at the McCall Smokejumper Base in Idaho.
Today, the Smokejumpers travel all over the country from Texas to Alaska, to provide training, experience, and leadership and to deliver quick initial attacks on wildland fires in hard to reach areas. The highly trained firefighters are delivered into the danger zone by turbine engine DC-3s and Twin Otter planes. Onboard the plane is a spotter whose role is to communicate essential information about the wind, fire activity and terrain to his pilot and jumpers. The jumpers carry most of what they need with them on their bodies as they leave the plane but the supplies and heavy-duty firefighting equipment they need follows them out in a targeted cargo-drop, making them self-sufficient for the first 48 hours.
In addition to their protective clothing kit, Smokejumpers also carry a variety of hand tools. This can include saws, axes and shovels as well as specialized firefighting tools. Decades of experience have allowed the Smokejumpers to develop tools that meet their specific needs - the McLeod rake was developed at the turn of the 20th century, and was designed to rake the fire line with its teeth and effortlessly slice through branches and soil with the opposite end.
Delivering crews and cargo can be a dangerous endeavour, with planes needing to fly as low as 200 feet in order to make targeted drops through the dense smoke. The Forest Service is currently developing a timing mechanism to delay the cargo 'chutes from opening. This would allow planes to drop the equipment from roughly four times as high as current methods allow.
As the duties involved in Smokejumping can be hazardous and extremely arduous, jumpers are required to have an extensive history in wild land firefighting and be skilled in using all the tools of the trade. The jumpers are also required to maintain excellent physical fitness and possess a high degree of emotional stability and mental alertness. The training period for new smokejumpers commences in the cooler spring months. Aircraft exiting procedures, parachute maneuvering and emergency procedures, parachute landing rolls, timber let-down procedures, parachute and cargo retrieval, and tree climbing are all on the training agenda. After training is complete, and during periods of fire inactivity, trained jumpers are assigned to various forestry projects away from the base. Operating from about early June through to late October, there are currently over 270 smokejumpers working from Forest Service bases located in McCall and Grangeville, Idaho, Redding, California, West Yellowstone and Missoula, Montana, Winthrop, Washington, and Redmond, Oregon.
Today, the Smokejumper service is evolving to meet the challenges of the current fire environment. They are branching out to assist in managing America's natural resources in support of the Forest Service. Smokejumpers' training and skills, excellent mobility, and a Safety First attitude will keep the program thriving in decades to come.
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