Smoke jumpers pad up to tackle fires

By JANE WOODHEAD

The airplane attendants don’t dish out the Bloody Mary cocktails on this flight. They’ve ripped out the carpets, up-ended the seats, and the passengers – wearing hockey masks and helmets and weighed down with 70 pounds of equipment – are hooked down to a floor-length wire.

One by one, the red-suited men in this flying machine throw themselves out of the open door, into the roaring winds and down 550 metres to the ground below – but the wire is a static line that jerks open their parachutes as they fall away from the plane at the rate of six metres a second.

This is a practice jump. If it were for real, these eight parachutists – flying fire-fighters contracted to the forest service and known as the smoke jumpers – would be aiming to land within 18 metres of a forest fire, most probable in a heavily wooded area. So the most accessible part of all that equipment is a knife to cut themselves loose in the likely event that they land in a tree. The hockey masks protect their faces from any intruding branches.

On the ground, they’ll strip off their parachutes and padded suits (they wear no highly inflammable, synthetic materials underneath – only wool and cotton), and haul out their survival gear, which is stashed in pockets and "ditty bags" on their backs and their fronts and the sides of their legs: a radio, ropes, rain gear, insect repellent, food, a first aid kit – and a clean pair of socks. ("I should have brought my long underwear," muttered one jumper when they opened the door and an icy gale blasted into the plane.)

Their two-man cargo packs of fire fighting equipment and more survival gear will come hurtling down after them on smaller parachutes a few minutes later: great coffin-sized boxes holding a chain saw, shovel, axes, fire-fighting backpacks operated by a handpump, food, drinking water and sleeping bags.

When the smoke jumpers go in, they’re prepared to stay and fire fight for anything from 24 hours to two weeks.

"In most cases, we go in to cut a landing pad for a helicopter our of the trees and the undergrowth," yelled Dave Marshall through his face mask.

If the fire is "dry" – with no natural water source nearby – the helicopter drops a Portatank (a huge rubber bladder in a folding metal cage that can hold 4,500 litres of water) then heads for the nearest lake with a monsoon bucket swinging beneath it. The bucket is filled and refilled with water that is dumped into the Portatank to supply the fire fighting pumps.

The crew has been sent in to nine fires so far this summer: Six of them meant taking the jump and most of them were dry fires that could be extinguished by digging fire guards or smothering them with soil, said base manager Paul Thompson.

This is the first year of operation for Thompson’s smoke jumpers, who work under contract for the forest services of the federal Northern Affairs branch. The department had experimented with other smoke jumpers from 1973 until 1977, he said, then dropped the operation in favor of helicopters until this year. Thompson believes smoke jumping from the Douglas DC-3 built in 1942 is quicker and more efficient than using slower, smaller helicopters to drop fire fighters in inaccessible areas on ropes. And, perhaps surprisingly, it’s no more dangerous.

"We’ve had no injuries," said Thompson, "not from fires anyway. Most of our injuries are from playing soccer. That’s the most dangerous part of the job!"

No smoke jumper in Yukon has yet been blown into a fire. The steering apparatus on the parachutes and the accurate gauging of wind speed and direction mean that a jumper can usually target and land within 18 metres of a jump spot.

Marshall pointed tp the other jumpers who were craning their necks to watch something through the window.

"Their watching the streamers," he said, "to gauge the wind drift. It’s not foolproof, but it’s the best system there is."

Two "spotters" – hooked to the floor so they can’t fall out – accompanying the jumpers on each mission and are responsible for dropping the wind streamers: Four metres of colored crepe paper weighted at one end. The spotters hurl the streamers through the open door above the jump spot and then everybody watches their fall to assess the speed and direction of the wind.

The jumpers can then target themselves fairly accurately – although their padded jump suits are made to float in case they end up in a lake. The suits also feature high, protective collars and foot stirrups that pull the suits so tautly away from the crotch area that even a violent kick between the legs (as Thompson demonstrated on one unsuspecting but unflinching jumper) doesn’t even bat an eyelid. Even so, the thought of landing astride a tree branch at a speed of 16 kilometres an hour must still make them wince.

The parachutes are bought from suppliers in the United States for $1,200 apiece. Most of the equipment has to come from the States, said Thompson, where smoke jumping was first developed in 1939. He and some if his crew took their training at the North Cascade Smoke Jumping Base in Winthrop, Washington. Alaska has a team of 100 smoke jumpers, he said, and four airplanes; Canada’s only team and only plane are both in Yukon.

This summer’s operation is "something of a trial" for the smoke jumpers, he said, but he hopes the forest service will be bringing them back – same time next year.