Wildland firefighter basic training available at community colleges, tech schools, training centers

By Steve Hammons

Basic training to work as a seasonal wildland firefighter consists of an efficient, nationally-standardized combination of classes referred to as the S-130 and S-190 training courses. This training is developed by the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG).  

The NWCG coordinates interagency standards for wildland firefighting among federal, state, regional, and tribal agencies and operations throughout the U.S. The NWCG also produces training manuals for the wildland firefighter S-130/S-190 courses. 

The courses are available at community colleges, vocational training centers, technical schools, high schools offering dual credit, stand-alone wildland firefighter training academies, and various agencies and organizations. Individuals applying for jobs as seasonal wildland firefighters must be at least age 18. 

It’s tough, dangerous work. In recent fires in the West, some wildland firefighters needed to deploy their emergency shelters, which are far from 100 percent effective. Three firefighters were injured. Rescue helicopter crews have recently plucked wildland firefighters from very dangerous situations. 

Yet, with overtime and hazardous-duty pay, and sometimes working 12-hour or 24-hour shifts (or longer in emergencies), wildland firefighters can earn substantial pay during the months of the fire season. They can also earn the satisfaction of working together as a team to help save forests, wildlife and domestic animals, homes, communities and human life. 

TRAINING AND HIRING 

The S-130/S-190 training for basic wildland firefighting includes four components:

- S-130: Firefighter Training
- S-190: Introduction to Wildland Fire Behavior
- I-100: Introduction to the Incident Command System
- L-180: Human Factors in the Wildland Fire Service 

Passing a “work capacity test,” known as the “pack test,” is also a related part of the training and requirements. This fitness training and test are meant to simulate basic real-life physical requirements for extended trekking over rough terrain and vigorous work with hand tools, chain saws and other gear. The pack test for wildland firefighters involves:

- Completing a 3-mile hike
- While carrying a 45-pound pack

- Within 45 minutes

When the S-130/S-190 courses and pack test have been successfully completed, the candidate can apply for entry-level wildland firefighter jobs. If hired, the Incident Qualification Card or “red card” can then be issued which authorizes the entry-level wildland firefighter to work on the fire lines and other emergency situations. 

In addition to the basic S-130/S-190 classes, many other advanced and specialized wildland firefighting training courses are also available through the NWCG. 

Member agencies of the NWCG include the following: 

- Bureau of Indian Affairs (U.S. Department of the Interior)
- Bureau of Land Management (U.S. Department of the Interior)
- Fish and Wildlife Service (U.S. Department of the Interior)
- Forest Service (U.S. Department of Agriculture)
- International Association of Fire Chiefs
- Intertribal Timber Council
- National Association of State Foresters
- National Park Service (U.S. Department of the Interior)
- United States Fire Administration (Federal Emergency Management Agency) 

Jobs for seasonal wildland firefighters can be posted during the late fall and winter between September and December. Some hiring announcements may close in January, though hiring for upcoming fire seasons can continue through March. 

HAZARDS AND FUTURE NEED 

For many people, the 2017 Hollywood movie “Only the Brave” about an interagency hotshot crew was a window into the world of wildland firefighting. Josh Brolin, Jeff Bridges, Jennifer Connelly and Andie MacDowell were some of the actors portraying the Prescott, Arizona, community and a real-life hotshot wildand firefighting team. 

The movie told the story of the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire incident in central Arizona when 19 of the Granite Mountain Hotshots wildland firefighters of Prescott died, even though they had deployed their emergency shelters as they were about to be overrun by a wall of flames. 

Interagency hotshot crews consist of 20-22 wildland firefighters who have enhanced training, equipment, experience, capabilities and readiness. According to the NWCG website, there are 68 hotshot crews nationwide, composed of 1,360 firefighters. Much like a small, forward military unit, they can operate in remote wilderness areas for extended periods. 

Occupational hazards for all wildland firefighters can include breathing wildfire smoke, and sometimes the smoke from buildings, vehicles and other hazardous materials. Fatigue, stress, heat, rugged terrain, accident injuries and burned, falling trees pose additional dangers. 

But for those interested in facing the dangers, challenges and rewards of wildland firefighting, there will likely be a need for more wildland firefighters in the future. 

The length of the summer and fall fire season has been gradually expanding. Forecasts predict that this pattern will probably continue, with wildland fires remaining a threat for longer periods each year. 

The severity of wildland fires has also been increasing, as reflected in the current fires in the West. A record amount of acreage has been burned, as well as many homes and communities. Lives have been lost. 

These patterns seem to indicate that there will be an increased need for a more-robust force of seasonal wildland firefighters in the years to come.
 

For more information:

National Wildfire Coordinating Group

U.S. Forest Service, Wildland Fire Careers

(Related articles "Navy Research Project on Intuition," "Human perception key in hard power, soft power, smart power" and “Storytelling affects human biology, beliefs, behavior” are posted on the CultureReady blog, Defense Language and National Security Education Office, Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, U.S. Department of Defense.)

 

Athens County, Ohio, was key spot when colonists, Redcoats fought Shawnee in 1774 Battle of Point Pleasant

By Steve Hammons

At the junction of the Ohio River and the Hocking River in southeastern Ohio in 1774, the then-King’s governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, established a forward base as part of “Dunmore’s War” against the Shawnee and other tribes of the region in the months, weeks and days before the American Revolution.

In a planned two-pronged attack on the Shawnee in the southern Ohio and Ohio River Valley area, Dunmore’s force of approximately 1,700 men traveled from Fort Dunmore (Pittsburgh) to rendezvous with a Virginia colonial militia force near what is now Point Pleasant, West Virginia. (Fort Dunmore was previously known as Fort Pitt, and Fort Duquesne under the French.)

But for some reason, including suspicious ones, Dunmore chose to stop short of Point Pleasant, and built a base camp he named Fort Gower, 45 miles up the Ohio River. Dunmore built Fort Gower at the mouth of the Hocking River, originally called the Hockhocking by Native people. That location is now the village of Hockingport in Athens County, Ohio.

Dunmore sent a message downriver to militia Col. Andrew Lewis, commander of a force of about 1,000 men who had proceeded toward Point Pleasant. Dunmore told Lewis that he had changed plans and was now going to attack some Shawnee towns deeper in southern Ohio instead of joining forces with Lewis’ militia at Point Pleasant.

As the militia force arrived in the Point Pleasant area, without Dunmore joining them, the Shawnee and some Mingo and Lenape (Delaware) allies attacked. Shawnee Chief Cornstalk led between 300 and 500 warriors in a fierce, prolonged and bloody battle – but were defeated by the colonial forces.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER

Lord Dunmore was John Murray, a Scotsman with the title 4th Earl of Dunmore. He was appointed as colonial governor of New York from 1770 to 1771 and of the Virginia colony in 1771. He advocated for and launched a series of attacks into the Shawnee and other American Indian lands abutting the Ohio River Valley and southern Ohio, known as Dunmore’s War.

By 1774, Dunmore was also ruling over restless colonists who were increasingly unhappy with British control. On the western frontier of the Appalachian Mountain Range, settlers and those seeking more land were also starting to resist British governance, laws and taxes.

New arrivals to the colonies were heading west, trying to acquire land and a better life. In doing so, they pushed deeper into the lands of the Shawnee, Cherokee and other Native people who had lived there for thousands of years.

The Cherokee did not join the Shawnee, Mingo and Delaware warriors at the Battle of Point Pleasant, also called the Battle of Kanawha, even though the original Cherokee land then extended into the far western side of what is now West Virginia. In fact, Cherokee territory extended up to the exact area of Point Pleasant on the Ohio River, also then known as the Ohi yo or Ohiyo.

Why didn't Cherokee warriors join the fight? Part of the reason might be that British government agents were active among Indian tribes, trying to manipulate alliances and loyalties – and divide and conquer.

The Shawnee and Cherokee also had somewhat different cultures. The Shawnee to the north were patrilineal and the Cherokee to the south had a matrilineal society. Another probable and related reason might have been that Cherokee women had been voluntarily intermarrying with Scottish, Scots-Irish and Anglo newcomers since earlier times of friendly contact.

In the Cherokee tradition and culture, these men joined their wives’ matrilineal clans. Children of these marriages were also members of mothers’ and maternal grandmothers’ matrilineal clans.

The two tribes' languages also had different roots. The Shawnee spoke an Algonquian-based tongue that was widely used in the north-central regions of North America. The Cherokee spoke a type of Iroquoian language from areas to the north and northeast, such as today's upstate New York.

These elements were in play as the Battle of Point Pleasant unfolded. As a result of the defeat of Chief Cornstalk and his warriors, large sections of real estate were surrendered to the victorious forces. This pattern among the Native people had been going on for decades and would continue throughout the 1700s and 1800s.

Even as the Battle of Point Pleasant was being fought, the American Revolution was about to begin in earnest. It has been speculated that Dunmore might have been sabotaging and betraying Col. Lewis’ militia force to weaken these imminent American revolutionaries, potentially soon to be disloyal to the King. Did Dunmore also tip off the Shawnee, who ended up attacking first?

If Dunmore did get a backchannel message to Cornstalk and his warriors, did he give them accurate information about the strength of the militia force? Cornstalk's estimated 300 to 500 warriors attacked the militia force said to have included about 1,000 men. Was Dunmore trying to weaken both adversaries – rebellious colonial militias as well as the Shawnee and Native tribes in the region?

After the battle, many of the militia troops regrouped at the Athens County, Ohio, location of Dunmore’s Fort Gower. There on the mouth of the Hockhocking River, Dunmore forced, or tried to force the militia members to sign a loyalty oath to King and Crown. This loyalty oath is known as the “Fort Gower Resolves.” Many militia troops did not wish to sign such an oath.

But the victory at Point Pleasant for Lord Dunmore was short-lived. Before all the militia troops had even returned home from the Dunmore’s War campaigns against the Shawnee, shots had been fired at Lexington and Concord. The American Revolution had begun. And in 1776, Dunmore was forced out of Virginia by the new “Americans.”

OHIO RIVER VALLEY

Today, the village of Hockingport is one of the many smaller communities and larger towns along the Ohio River, on both the Ohio and West Virginia sides. Upriver, the Ohio flows through western Pennsylvania. And downstream, the great river continues along Ohio's border with Kentucky, Indiana and beyond before joining the Mississippi River at the southern end of Illinois.

The Hocking River, once a route Dunmore used to attack Shawnee villages, continues northwest from the Ohio about 27 miles to Athens. The town is the county seat of Athens County. It's also home of Ohio University, chartered in 1787 under the new and fragile U.S. government as part of expansion into the Ohio lands, and founded in 1804.

Hockingport is about 27 miles downriver from Marietta, Ohio, which historian David McCullough researched extensively for his best-selling 2019 book “The Pioneers.” 

In his book, McCullough focused on the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 that claimed "the Ohio Country" and areas north and west for the new U.S. government, as the French and British had done before, and as Spain was doing elsewhere in North America. 

The Northwest Ordinance also established guidelines for governing the new territories. Initial planning for the establishment of a school of higher learning in the Ohio Country (later Ohio University in Athens) was also part of the ordinance.

And Hockingport is also 17 miles southwest and downriver from Parkersburg, West Virginia, where the 2019 movie “Dark Waters” explored toxic dumping into streams and waterways of the area. 

Point Pleasant and the nearby town of Gallipolis, Ohio, are both 45 miles southwest and downriver from Hockingport. In 1966-67, a “UFO flap” occurred around Point Pleasant – one of those situations where odd lights in the sky, and sometimes seemingly-related phenomena, are seen in a particular area in certain time frames.

These have happened throughout the U.S. and around the world. The U.S. Navy is now referring to these airborne types of sightings as “unidentified aerial phenomena” or UAP because they seem to be of different types, some solid, some not.

The 2002 Hollywood movie "The Mothman Prophecies" was based on a limited representation of the best-selling 1975 book by researcher and writer John Keel about the '66-67 situation around Point Pleasant. The movie told only part of the story.

The movie was filmed in the small town of Kittanning on the Allegheny River northeast of Pittsburgh, and in Pittsburgh itself, from where Dunmore launched his assault into those Ohio River Valley lands back in 1774.

Kittanning is the name of a former large town of the Lenape or Delaware people located there. Lenape warriors fought alongside Chief Cornstalk at Point Pleasant. The word "Kittanning" refers to "main river," by which they identified the combined Ohio River and Allegheny River in western Pennsylvania as one river.

The nearby Kittanning Path was a major east-west Native American trail between that region and the higher Appalachian Mountains, and was later used by European colonists.

Many odd, glowing lights around the Point Pleasant region in 1966-67 were seen up and down the Ohio River. And a significant number of such lights were also reported around Point Pleasant's Chief Cornstalk Hunting Grounds, later called the Chief Cornstalk Public Hunting and Fishing Area, and now the 11,772-acre Chief Cornstalk Wildlife Management Area, supervised by the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources.

Could Cornstalk and his Shawnee people be looking in on their old homeland from time to time, remembering that terrible battle at Point Pleasant, and the days and years of struggle and sorrow that followed for the Shawnee and other Native people? Are they able to recall happier times in the Ohiyo lands too?

Are they, like many Americans today, trying to understand and sort out our complex national history – and discover a more perfect union?


(Related articles “Storytelling affects human biology, beliefs, behavior” and “Reagan’s 1987 UN speech on ‘alien threat’ resonates now” are posted on the CultureReady blog, Defense Language and National Security Education Office, Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, U.S. Department of Defense.)