Wildland Firefighters: Staying Safe - Personal Protective Equipment

Aerial wildland firefighters do what they do in order to help and support the wildland firefighters on the ground (aka ground pounders) contain and control the wildfire. They do this by putting the retardant or water/foam where the ground pounders need it most. From time to time I want to remind myself and those of you who find your way to this blog about the important work that wildland firefighters on the ground do to keep us safe. My intent in this article is to talk a little about what I have learned about one specific aspect of what the ground pounders do, in this case personal protective equipment.

An important aspect of how wildland firefighters on the ground (aka ground pounders) stay safe is because of the type of clothing, helmets, gloves, boots, etc. that they wear. A few years ago, NOVA did an episode called the Fire Wars, the website that went with the program is still up and they have a page devoted to what wildland fighters wear and carry in their packs, for those of you who have a flash plug-in for your browser, there is a flash version. You will see that wildland firefighters also carry a fire shelter, which I'll get to in a later post.

The clothing, boots, gloves, helmets, boots, etc that wildland firefighters wear are also known as personal protective equipment or PPE. PPE must be worn properly, the video below goes into some detail about what happens when PPE is not worn or used properly. I believe that the intended audience for the video is probably wildland firefighters. However, I learned something from watching the video and I thought that some of you might enjoy the video.

direct link to video on youtube from the National Interagency Fire Center.

Note:

If you are interested in a federal wildland firefighting job, you might want to go to the jobs page of wildland fire dot com.  A brief discussion of what is involved in applying for federal and/or state/local wildland fire crews, may be found on this webpage from the National Wildfire Coordinatiing Group . Most states have state wildland firefighting agencies, a partial listing of (U.S.) State Wildland Fire Agencies by the folk at Wildland Fire dot cam may be found here.