Today, Explained - A firefighter on battling wildfires

Episode Date: September 16, 2020

After 16 seasons of wildfires, Glen Haydon has figured out how to cope. For everyone else, there’s an app for that. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca months ago on the show i said something like anything that was bad before is worse in 2020. And the West Coast's wildfires are no exception. 10% of Oregon warned or ordered to evacuate. More than 3 million acres burned in California. The worst air quality in the world from San Francisco north to Vancouver. Smoke wafting across the entire continent. And if that weren't bad enough, a president who wants to deny this has anything to do with year after year of record-setting heat on a warming planet. But that particular element is nothing new, and it's not helping anything. Today, we're going to hear from a helper, a hero. My name is Glenn Hayden.

I work for the U.S. Forest Service as a wildland firefighter. I've been doing it for 16 years now. Currently, I'm on the Fork Fire on the El Dorado National Forest. I've kind of been fighting fire in my backyard here in California for a long time now. Tell me what your life has been like the past few weeks. Really busy. For our crew, kind of we're off rotation. So normally we're out on two-week assignments,

and we come back, we get a couple days off, we go for a two-week assignment, and we've already worked, I think, 91 hours of overtime this two-week off-rotation period. And I think everyone has some idea of what firefighters are doing to fight these wildfires, but I'm sure there's a lot of things that you do that people have no conception of. Can you just tell us what fighting a wildfire involves? There's kind of a couple stages of it.

Kind of the first stage and the most exciting and the part that kind of gets all the news coverage is the normally initial attack of it. The really exciting part where there's the big flames and all the smoke and that's kind of what hooks a lot of people into this job is that kind of exciting part and for us the first couple days of this fire was was pretty intense. It was huge huge flame lengths the wind was howling we were picking up spot fires for the first 24 48 hours it was it was a really aggressive firefight but then kind of the second stage of firefighting kicks in the wind dies down the we're able to kind of get it hold on

it and that's kind of the the long slog of firefighting that is the unglamorous part. The mop-up work, the digging in the dirt to kind of extinguish every last little ember, the hand-feeling sections of the line where at the end of the day you're just covered with soot and ash and dirt and sweat, and that's probably 90% of the actual firefighting work is securing those control lines after the main flaming front has passed. What exactly is a line for people who don't know? That's pretty much where we hold the fire. We get hand tools and we'll scrape away a foot or two of mineral soil and that can be our control line.

A dozer can come through and push the big section down to mineral soil and that'll be our control line. A dozer can come through and push the big section down to mineral soil, and that'll be a control line. It can be a road. It's just the line that we choose that we're going to try to hold it. This is where we're going to make our stand. And while you're doing that cleanup work, are you inhaling smoke? Are you putting yourself at risk or or does it feel like you know safe um we make it as safe as possible we go through and we

take off at all the hazard trees or all the anything that could potentially hurt us in our work environment try to try to minimize that but yeah it's still it's still extremely smoky. It's still, you're digging through ash and there's just clouds of kind of ash and soot around you. There's still the hazard of the fire itself. And that's just kind of something that we have to deal with. It's kind of why firefighters retire early. They acknowledge that this is kind of part and parcel of it. My wife always says, why don't you guys wear a mask? Like, just try wearing a mask. But wearing a mask for the hours that we work and the

type of labor we do, you'd either be covered in ash within the first hour or you'd fill up with sweat. And it's not a very functional alternative, unfortunately. So you mentioned that you've been doing this for 16 seasons, 16 years. What's changed over 16 years of wildfires? The pace and the length of the season are the main things. We had kind of the six-year drought a few years back that kind of sort of ended. And kind of ever since then, our seasons have gotten longer. It's gone. It used to be the first week of November, you could reliably, the fire season was done. Sometimes it was earlier, but it was always around then. It wasn't a question of it was probably over.

The last year as we've gone to thanksgiving there's been assignments available in in december and it's just extended kind of longer and longer each year and and this year is is by far the worst um i've experienced and why do you see as the biggest cause for these things getting worse. Weather is always kind of the primary driver of fire. So if we have bad weather, bad winds, extremely dry conditions, you're going to get big fires. Another big factor is just people have moved into the woods. People are everywhere.

And kind of that combination makes firefighting difficult. It makes prescribed fire difficult. Definitely those combination of factors are making things more of an issue for fighting fire. Yeah. I mean, how many more years of this do you think you have in you? As many as my body will allow me. I love the job and I love the adventure of it i love being outdoors i love the camaraderie of being with the crew and until my knees or my back or

something tells me i have to i have to stop i'm gonna keep doing it so it doesn't sound like uh you ever regret becoming a firefighter uh no. At this point, I couldn't really imagine doing anything different. I sometimes ponder what I would do when I retire, like get a little coffee shop and work part-time or do something. But yeah, being outdoors and doing this type of work, it's highly addictive for certain types of personalities. A Bit of a thrill? Yeah. I think you have to be a certain type of crazy to do this job. There's plenty of jobs that pay a lot more and you work a lot less. It's not as difficult.

You sleep on the dirt a lot. You're dirty all the time. You get more tired than you've ever been in your life at least once a season. But the benefits of it are adventure and helping people in their time of need and doing service for your community. So there's a lot of, at least in my mind, those pluses massively outweigh the small sufferings we go through. Does your wife feel the same way as you do,

or is she worried about you up there in those hills? She worries. She always worries. We've had one day off in the last 21 days and I've been home five of those nights. So we just don't see each other that often sometimes which is hard but we try to make up for it during the winters and during the times that we're not busy. When you're at work, you kind of put on the work face and you do what has to be done. And then when I go home, I really kind of cultivate laziness and cultivate being able to relax and kind of do the opposite of what I do at work. Do you feel like when you guys head up there to fight these wildfires that you're fully supported?

Do you feel like you have everything you need? With the exception of this year, yes. What happened this year? Well, normally for a fire this size that we have that I'm on right now, we would easily have double or triple the resources to help us out. But because everybody's on fires, there's just not anybody left. And it's like that all across California. Everybody's just kind of making do with what they have.

It's a very weird year in that sense. If you could call up Governor Gavin Newsom and make any request, what would it be? I don't know if he can magically make more firefighters. If he could, that'd be awesome. But I don't think this is something that we can just firefight away. In the long term, we need more prescribed fire. We can't necessarily fix the climate real quick. We're going to be dealing with these fires

for a long time. We're going to have to have communities and people really invested in fire prevention. And I don't think just getting more and more firefighters, I mean, that's one solution, but I think we need, as a people, to look for more long-term, reliable solutions. Well, I really appreciate you making time to speak with us, Glenn. I hope you stay safe, and I hope you get a very long and lazy winter to relax with your wife when this season's over. Well, thank you. I hope so, too. Really appreciate your time, man.

Are you fighting fires today? Yep. We're going to be back out on the line here in probably 30 or 40 minutes. Okay, well, good luck, Godspeed, and be safe. All right. Well, thank you very much.

Thanks for your time. Glenn has found ways to cope with the wildfires. Strategies for everyone else in a minute. I'm going to go. Thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it. You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an aura frame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday.

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Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. The wildfires are traumatic for the people close to them and people afar, and it's Dr. Beth Jaworski's job to help. She's a social psychologist at the National Center for PTSD, which in 2020 means she makes apps to help people deal with their emotions. A few years ago, she designed one for people in Sonoma, California after wildfires tore through that region. I asked her what's distinct about the trauma of wildfires.

I think the silver lining here is that most individuals who experience these kind of traumas do not actually go on to develop clinically diagnosable disorders, so things like post-traumatic stress disorder, major depression. But I do think that disasters can be really, really destabilizing.

Orange skies on Wednesday have morphed into a concrete gray layer of smoke and ash, and tonight conditions went from bad to dangerous across the Bay Area. You might be more angry and irritable than usual. You might feel really anxious or nervous. Hundreds of families have lost their homes in the Bay Area wildfires. With entire towns reportedly wiped out and hundreds under evacuation orders. You know, you could imagine someone who has had to evacuate, has found out that they've lost their home, and now they're in temporary shelter. They're being asked to perhaps fill out paperwork for insurance. And that is incredibly difficult. As someone who has spent a lot of time in higher

education and who works for the federal government, I'm no stranger to paperwork and forms. And I think they're complicated. Right. Okay. So short term, it's going to be a tough road, but the trauma isn't long term. But what about the trauma of all these wildfires in 2020 when you layer it on top of... The US has more confirmed coronavirus cases than any other country in the world. On top of... Across the nation, protesters continue to flood the streets from coast to coast, demanding justice for George Floyd.

And on top of that, a powerful hurricane. Hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, and extreme heat. I mean, this is just like layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of trauma. Life feels a little apocalyptic right now. So, you know, after a really traumatic event like a wildfire, it's obviously really important to provide people essentials. So things like food and water and shelter, access to health care, being able to connect with loved ones.

But there's also mental health impacts of disasters. And this is something we have a team of folks that are dedicated to building mobile apps for mental health support. And people almost never turn their smartphones off. So when is the last time you actually turned it off, completely turned it off? I like to let it die as often as possible. For example, for COVID-19, our team has released an app that is designed to help people manage stress and to cope and to connect them with resources for things like meeting their basic needs,

but also for things like finding online therapists. You know, we're seeing increasing numbers in substance use disorders and people relapsing now. So connecting people with online resources for managing addictions. There's also, you know, we're seeing increasing people reporting that they are having suicidal ideation. For people going through these moments of feeling like they're about to relapse with any sort of addiction or even contemplating suicide, if you tell them to download an app, they might kind of feel like belittled or that you're not

taking them seriously. Have you had to deal with that? Yeah, that's a great question. And something I definitely want to make clear is that this app is intended as a perhaps a starting point as a way for people to connect with the kinds of resources they might need, but certainly not as a replacement for human connection and trained professionals. Tell me what your COVID app looks like. I mean, first of all, what's it called? And what happens when you download it? Walk me through the process.

Sure. The app is called COVID Coach. COVID Coach. COVID Coach. This app came from a long tradition of apps being named something coach. So there are four key sections in the app. There's the manage stress section. So these are the kinds of things like audio guided exercises. To begin, close your eyes and take a deep breath into your belly.

There's also some tools where you can get suggestions for activities that you can do from indoors. So things like you can watch the otters at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. As you do this, imagine that the tension throughout your body begins to melt away. I highly recommend it. Feel your muscles becoming softer, more relaxed, and feel the warmth and lightness that replaces the tension that was there before. Another section in the app is called finding resources. And this is a list of a lot of different types of tools. The other two key sections of the app are the mood check section. So this is where people can track their symptoms of depression, anxiety, PTSD, and well-being, and they can track it over time. And then the other section is learn.

So this is a lot of topics that help address some of the key emotional reactions and help normalize some of the things people might be going through right now. So for example, coping with grief and loss, or how do you find humor in times like these? Because humor can be beneficial, even if it's just for a few moments. It's something that makes you smile. And then exhale with a sigh. The other thing I should mention about the app is that it allows you to set reminders. And this is great for being able to make it a habit to prioritize yourself and self-care, even if it's just a few minutes a day. So you can set reminders for tracking your mood.

You can set reminders for trying out tools. You can even set reminders for worry time. Worry time? Worry time. It might seem counterintuitive that you would actually schedule time to focus on worries. But research suggests that scheduling a specific time to focus on worries can be helpful because instead of then worrying all the time, you've set aside deliberately a specific time to focus on what is worrying you. So this can help people control what psychologists would call rumination or continuously or repetitively thinking about the same issue. So we could all go into our calendars and edit the entirety of 2020, which we blocked out to worry, to just maybe an hour a day or 10 minutes a day?

Yes, yes. It sounds like though this app is called COVID Coach, it really has sort of broad applications to everything people are going through this year. Yes, we actually have heard that. We've found that people are really able to find something for whatever it is that they might be going through. And one thing I should mention is that because this is made by the government, this app is completely free. Again, take a deep breath. There's no content behind a paywall. What you see is what you get when you download it. Think the word relax silently to yourself. And you also don't need to create an account to access the app. So we have no

identifying information collected. You will be able to access it and recreate it later on your own. These resources are free to everyone. We think of it as a public mental health strategy. To all the people who might not have a smartphone or who have one and are listening to this, but still just maybe won't go through with it and download the app, what would you say is most important for sustaining mental health

while the country burns, goes through hurricane season, goes up to an election where we will most certainly be gaslit and continues to deal with this pandemic, this economy, and everything else. Make sure that you give yourself time to adjust, be gentle on yourself, allow yourself to mourn the kind of losses that you might have experienced. And, you know, actually, I think that there is a quote that comes up when you open the app that I think really beautifully summarizes what I've been saying.

It's, the older I get, the more I'm conscious of ways very small things can make a change in the world. Tiny little things, but the world is made up of tiny matters, isn't it? And that's a quote from Sandra Cisneros. And I just think it's so important that we figure out the small things that we can do each day to make the world a little better. Dr. Beth Jaworski is a real-life COVID coach, but also one of the people behind the COVID Coach app,

which you can find and download wherever you find and download your apps. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි Now you are feeling refreshed and alert, relaxed and ready for whatever is next.