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SPECIAL FEATURES
Into the Fire DEWITT NATIVE MORGANE RIGNEY ON FRONT LINES OF WESTERN WILDFIRES David Tyler
Five years ago, Morgane Rigney was working in Syracuse handling emergency calls at a security monitoring company. The 2008 Jamesville-DeWitt graduate liked her job – enjoyed the intensity that came with being in a high-pressure environment – but sought something more.
“I had a mid-twenties crisis where I asked ‘Do I want to be doing this for the rest of my life?’” she said. When her inner voice answered back ‘no,’ it was clear that a change was needed.
A friend was living in Flagstaff, Ariz., working on a trail crew there. She asked Rigney to join her, and she jumped at the chance.
She spent a year working on the trail crew, and loved working outdoors, but wanted something more challenging, so when recruiters from the fire service came around, she took the chance.
Four years later, she’s glad that she made the jump.
Rigney is a member of Mormon Lake Hotshots, based in Flagstaff, one of 110 mobile Hotshot crews in the country who specialize in fighting wildfires. The Hotshots are a part of the U.S. Forestry Service and were originally formed in California in 1940. They’re nicknamed the Hotshots because they often work the most intense parts of a wildfire and earned fame from the feature film Only The Brave.
Rigney recently returned to Flagstaff from fighting the Bobcat Fire in the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles, which had burned nearly 115,000 acres and consumed more than 200 structures, killing one person.
Prep, Burn, Hold
In late September, Central New Yorkers may have noticed the haze of high-elevation smoke from the fires out west. This fire season, and each of the past few seasons have been some of the most intense on record, with millions of acres and thousands of homes and structures being consumed by wildfire.
The number and size of the wildfires this season have caught the attention of the nation, but for Rigney, now a senior firefighter with the Hotshots, the intensity of the job remains the same.
“Even though there’s a ton of big fires all over the region,” she said, “at the end of the day, that’s not going to change our tactics that much, because we can only fight one fire at a time.”
The Mormon Lake Hotshots are a 20-person team that makes up a small but critical component of fighting a massive fire like the Bobcat Fire. Rigney estimated there were 800 people on that fire, with about 100 in support providing food and supplies for teams on the ground fighting the fire.
While the job changes from fire to fire based on the terrain and vegetation, the plan usually revolves around three major tasks: Prep, Burn, Hold.
“On the truly massive fires, nobody’s going to be at the front of the fire trying to stop it,” Rigney said. Instead, after evaluating the terrain, they put together a plan for containment to determine where they’re going to make a stand against the raging flames.
“Hey, I’m a lady… I’m a pretty skinny lady, and I’m able to do this job, and there’s a place for you here. Getting more diversity in the job is really important.”—Morgane Rigney
“We’ll scout and we’ll come up with an overall plan of exactly where we’re going to be able to box that fire in,” she said. Then they go about the exhausting work of setting a fire line.
“Setting line” involves two to four chainsaw teams blowing out everything within a 30-foot swath before diggers move in to cut a two- to three-foot wide channel right down to the mineral earth. These lines can be a mile long, and more often than not, need to be set in places that are inaccessible to heavy machinery that could aid in the task.
Winds, and thus fire, are dramatically affected by mountainous terrain, and often wildfires grow more powerful as they’re fueled by updrafts flowing up steep hillsides.
“A lot of time, we’ll put line on these super steep ridge lines, and then we’ll set the fire from the line and push it back down the slope toward the main fire,” she said. “If it does cross our hand line, we jump on it immediately and try to contain it before it gets too big.”
To say that the work is grueling is an understatement.
During the season, which for the Mormon Lake Hot Shots stretches from April through September, the team is deployed to fire scenes for 14-day stints, and if they’re needed, that deployment can be extended to 21 days. To sustain themselves for up to 72 straight hours in the burning wilderness, they carry three days of food and water. That plus their equipment means they’re
Morgane Rigney hauls debris while setting a fire line on the Bobcat Fire outside of Los Angeles last month.
carrying about 50 pounds into some of the most rugged terrain our nation has to offer. For those carrying a chainsaw, which Rigney did for the first time this season, the load is over 70 pounds.
They work the fires for 16 hours a day. Sometimes, there are sleeping arrangements provided for them. More often, they sleep on the ground, ready to awaken and tackle the fire at a moment’s notice.
Once their deployment ends, they have two days of rest before they’re sent off to the next site.
“About 80 percent of it is pure mental grit,” Rigney said. “But it gets easier every season. It still sucks. It’s still really hard. But I think your body gets used to it.”
She likened the physiques of most of the guys on the crew to professional soccer players. The job requires strength, but just as important is endurance and the ability to be nimble.
“The guys I work with, they’re all very, very strong,” she said, “but they can also run seven miles at a sub-seven (minute) pace.”
In the offseason, “I let off the gas pedal for a month and half to let my body heal a little bit” before starting training for the next season, she said. That starts with a lot of weight work followed by a ton of cardio exercise.
“You don’t train for fires, because you can’t,” Rigney said. “Spending a couple of hours in the gym or even running 10 miles, it doesn’t compare to setting line for 16 hours a day.”
She said the Hot Shots train for Criticals, which are the first two weeks of training prior to each season when the supervisors push the teams to the maximum.
“The first two weeks of the job, they basically run the s*** out of you,” Rigney said. “They try to wash out new guys [who might not be able to keep up.]”
“The first fire we get on, in April or May, everybody kind of hurts a little bit,” she said. “But then you get into it.”
Safety is number one
Central New Yorkers watching coverage of the wildfires see aerial shots of massive flames and interviews of residents who have survived harrowing escapes from the wrath of the fires.
It begs the question, do you ever get scared?
“I was a lot my rookie season, but I think the things that look scary, generally aren’t really dangerous, and the things that are dangerous are things you figure out with time,” Rigney said.
“There’s a lot of things that look scary to people who aren’t familiar with fire behavior and what fire does,” she continued. “95 percent of the time it’s not the fire itself that I’m ever scared about, it’s about other potential injuries that occur when fighting the fire.”
Because they're rarely fighting fires on flat terrain, falling debris is one of the primary causes of injury.
“I know a couple of people who got smoked by a rock,” she said. “You can get pretty beat up.”
When in these situations, Rigney said she’s on constant lookout for hazards.
Still, when faced with a massive wall of flames, it’s natural to react. “Intellectually, I know that I’m fine,” she said. “But it’s kind of a human thing to see these incredibly powerful flames 15 feet away from you and it’s kind of a natural response for your heartbeat to go up a little bit.”
Rigney is the daughter of Kerin and Michael Rigney of DeWitt. They’re proud of their daughter and pleased that she found something she’s passionate about. Knowing that they’re concerned for her wellbeing, Morgane is in frequent communication with her parents.
“She’s very cognizant of the kind of worry that it might cause us,” Kerin Rigney said. “She is a person who is just really careful. She believes that safety is number one. That really gives us a lot of solace.”
In Rigney’s first year, four years ago, she was the only woman on the 20-person team, and for most of her time with the Mormon Lake Hot Shots, she’s been either the only woman or one of two.
When she started, she feared she would be treated like the “token woman” and not given the opportunity to truly show what she can do. That’s not been the case.
“It’s always been, ‘you’re on the crew. you’re going to carry and do just as much as everyone else,’ and the expectations are just as high, which makes for a really great environment for everyone,” she said. “I’ve personally never had any issues. I work with a bunch of really incredible professionals.”
She hopes that by telling her story, more young women will consider getting into fire fighting.
“I want girls that are at J-D High School, and they’re looking for a career path … I want to be able to say to them, ‘Hey, I’m a lady … I’m a pretty skinny lady, and I’m able to do this job, and there’s a place for you here,’” she said. “Getting more diversity in the job is really important.” SWM
