Speaker 1: This is Latino USA, the radio journal of News and
Speaker 1: Kurturre Latino USC's Latin Latino USA.
Speaker 2: I'm Maria Inojosa. We bring you stories that are underreported
Speaker 2: but that mattered to you, overlooked by the rest of
Speaker 2: the media. And while the country is struggling to deal
Speaker 2: with these.
Speaker 1: We listen to the stories of black and Latino Studio United,
Speaker 1: Latino Front, a cultural renaissance organizing at the forefront of
Speaker 1: the movement. I'm Maria Inojosa, Ola Latino USA.
Speaker 2: Listener, here's a show from the archives. And before we start,
Speaker 2: little warning. In this episode there's a brief mention of suicide.
Speaker 2: So take care.
Speaker 3: And once you get there and you can get the briefings,
Speaker 3: the plan, what they want you to do, you start
Speaker 3: getting the little butterflies right. You start driving up towards
Speaker 3: the line and you know what to expect because you've
Speaker 3: being on other fires, but every fire is different.
Speaker 1: Right From Futro Media and PRX, It's Latino USA. I'm
Speaker 1: Enojosa Today Into the Fire with El Dorado Hotshot Armando Perez.
Speaker 1: Massive wildfires continue to ravage California over the holiday weekend,
Speaker 1: forcing thousands from their homes wildfire.
Speaker 4: Danger in the state of Texas, so we're talking about
Speaker 4: ninety nine percent of the state experiencing some level of droughts.
Speaker 1: This is the view from the ground during the worst
Speaker 1: wildfire season in California's history.
Speaker 4: Firefighters near and far coming together today to mourn the
Speaker 4: loss of one of their own killed on the line
Speaker 4: of duty.
Speaker 2: President Biden is now considering declaring a climate emergency.
Speaker 1: Armando Perez, or Mando, as he likes to be called,
Speaker 1: never imagine that he would be responding to some of
Speaker 1: the worst wildfires in US history as a member of
Speaker 1: a special firefighter team called the hot Shots.
Speaker 3: My family was very traditional, old school Mexican family. It
Speaker 3: was all about working family. So when I was growing up,
Speaker 3: I thought I would be in the construction business because
Speaker 3: that's what my grandfather did. A lot of my uncles
Speaker 3: did that.
Speaker 1: But for the past decade, Mondo has worked as a
Speaker 1: wildland firefighter with the El Dorado California Hot Shot Crew.
Speaker 1: Hot Shots get that name because they work on the
Speaker 1: hottest part of wildfires. There are just over a hundred
Speaker 1: of these hot shot teams in the entire United States,
Speaker 1: and Mondo is part of one. Mondo's career in firefighting
Speaker 1: wasn't just unexpected, it had a pretty unusual start as well.
Speaker 3: When I started getting to my teenage yeers, young teenageers,
Speaker 3: I started running around with my local friends and we
Speaker 3: started getting into trouble. When I was sixteen, I got
Speaker 3: sent to juvenile detention and I did two years, and
Speaker 3: that's where I kind of got introduced to firefighting.
Speaker 1: At least thirty states in the country have laws that
Speaker 1: allow for the employment of the incarcerated population in emergencies
Speaker 1: and disasters, and the work is not always voluntary. The
Speaker 1: constitution explicitly denies incarcerated people the right to refuse to work.
Speaker 3: The program is we're do It was a little bit
Speaker 3: better just not being locked up in your cell all day.
Speaker 1: The work of incarcerated firefighters has been denounced as inherently exploitative.
Speaker 1: Prisoners only get paid one or two dollars per hour.
Speaker 1: In some states like Texas and Georgia, they don't get
Speaker 1: paid at all.
Speaker 3: You can to understand that it's pennies what they pay you. Right,
Speaker 3: you're out there and in the middle of nowhere risk
Speaker 3: in your life. There's chances you get hurt or high
Speaker 3: out there.
Speaker 1: And then perhaps the worst part of it all once
Speaker 1: they get out of prison. Many of these firefighters have
Speaker 1: extreme difficulties pursuing a career because of their background.
Speaker 3: When I got out, when I paroled, it was a
Speaker 3: little hard finding work based on my record.
Speaker 1: But Mondo, who today is forty years old, persevered and
Speaker 1: became an exception. He's an example of the paradox and
Speaker 1: transformative potential that this kind of work represents.
Speaker 3: I mean that work was hard work, but it was
Speaker 3: work there.
Speaker 1: His experience while in prison helped Mondo land a pain
Speaker 1: formal job with the hot shots in El Dorado. Still,
Speaker 1: even in freedom, conditions are far from ideal. For one,
Speaker 1: the job is very dangerous. Over five hundred career, volunteer
Speaker 1: and wildland agency firefighters, and these include incarcerated firefighters, have
Speaker 1: died since nineteen ninety and the number of fatalities is
Speaker 1: only going up. In twenty twenty, one hundred and two
Speaker 1: firefighters perished. And then the pay is low. It was
Speaker 1: only last year that a minimum pay of fifteen dollars
Speaker 1: per hour were set for all wildland firefighters. Advocates are
Speaker 1: fighting to improve access to health benefits and mental health services,
Speaker 1: which is key in a profession that is so demanding
Speaker 1: on both the body and the mind. To understand why
Speaker 1: Mando and thousands of other wildland firefighters continue to risk
Speaker 1: their lives under increasingly difficult and record breaking fires. Mando
Speaker 1: is going to recreate what a typical day for him
Speaker 1: is going into the fire and also coming out of it.
Speaker 1: Here's Armando Perez in his own words.
Speaker 3: My names are Mondo Perez, and I am a hot
Speaker 3: shot for the Eldorado Hotshots. I don't want to come
Speaker 3: off as bragg cocky, but we're like the top of
Speaker 3: the wildland firefighters. We're considered a type one fire line crew, right.
Speaker 3: It's us and the smoke jumpers on the smoke difference
Speaker 3: are the ones that jump out of the planes. We're
Speaker 3: kind of the ground resources. We hike in everywhere, drive
Speaker 3: to our destination, get off, back up, and hike. The
Speaker 3: hikes can be thirty minute hike, they can be five
Speaker 3: hour hike. We do them all. We're starting to see fires.
Speaker 3: When we normally didn't seehim around January February typically it
Speaker 3: was about six months and that was like the old ways.
Speaker 3: Now we have what people are trying to call the
Speaker 3: fire year, so it's year round, and it's starting to
Speaker 3: be more common. Ladies. The fires has been more intense,
Speaker 3: especially out there in the timber country where if you
Speaker 3: have the right winds and the topography lined up, and
Speaker 3: obviously it's been hotter lately, the fires they burn pretty intense.
Speaker 3: So if there's fires out there going on, they'll call
Speaker 3: us because we're in national resource, so we get scooped
Speaker 3: up pretty fast, so it never gets easier. It's actually
Speaker 3: getting harder and harder. I wake up in the morning,
Speaker 3: I hug and kiss my wife. With the kids is
Speaker 3: funny because they tell everybody the routine is, I go
Speaker 3: up to them, I'll hug them and I'll kiss them,
Speaker 3: and i'll pull a little pink too. I don't know
Speaker 3: I do it, but that's my routine with them. If
Speaker 3: one of them wakes up, then I'll talk to them
Speaker 3: real quick. Then I'll ask me when you're getting back,
Speaker 3: and I give them the same answer. I don't know,
Speaker 3: it'll probably be fourteen days from now, and then yeah,
Speaker 3: I just go downstairs, get my coffee, lock up, and
Speaker 3: then jump in my car and take off and then
Speaker 3: I'll see them in two weeks. Once we start traveling,
Speaker 3: we start kind of gathering our thoughts, right, like, hey,
Speaker 3: what do we expect? What am I going to do?
Speaker 3: And most of us start getting information through the phone.
Speaker 3: Right the internet nowadays it's easy to get information and
Speaker 3: where you're going, like, hey, what is fired doing? What
Speaker 3: are the expectations? Who's there, who's not there? And once
Speaker 3: you get there and you can get the briefends the
Speaker 3: plan what they want you to do, you start getting
Speaker 3: the little butterflies. Right. You start driving up towards the line.
Speaker 3: You know what to expect because being on other fires,
Speaker 3: but every fire is different. Right, you get there, you
Speaker 3: jump out, you guys get all geared up. Okay, it's
Speaker 3: game time. Right, You get that feeling like oh man.
Speaker 3: You start looking up. You see the fire, see your fuels? Right,
Speaker 3: you got brush, you got trees. You kind of start
Speaker 3: making assumptions your head, like if we're in tree country,
Speaker 3: there's crowning where the fire runs to the top of
Speaker 3: the trees. If you're in brush, heavy brush is going
Speaker 3: to burn super hot. You line your guys out and
Speaker 3: you see their faces, especially the new ones. Right. You
Speaker 3: start looking at the face of the new people and
Speaker 3: you're like like, okay, I remember that feeling so you're
Speaker 3: just looking at them like okay. You just try to
Speaker 3: prepare them for whatever comes right as best as possible.
Speaker 3: You tell them what to expect and what the plan is.
Speaker 3: If things go not according to plan, what to do.
Speaker 3: Then you break out into your squads or your mods,
Speaker 3: and one mong goes one way to other mogles the
Speaker 3: other way, and you kind of try to attack the
Speaker 3: flank of the fire. Right. You just start hearing the
Speaker 3: chainsaws fire up and start cutting brush, and then you
Speaker 3: know it's like, okay, we're here, we're doing it. The
Speaker 3: biggest thing is going out there and making sure the
Speaker 3: guys can cut line right efficiently. It's pretty much the
Speaker 3: act of removing fuel. So let's say you got a forest, right,
Speaker 3: and you got brush or bushes and trees, just continuous fuel.
Speaker 3: We're trying to get on one side of the fire
Speaker 3: and remove a line of brush, secle fuel break, and
Speaker 3: we're going over with the chainsaws. Chainsaws do cutting right,
Speaker 3: and then you have a group of folks behind the
Speaker 3: chainsaws which are the scrapes or the hand tools, and
Speaker 3: they scrape the actual organic material, so it ends up
Speaker 3: looking like a trail. It wouldn't be the perfect walking trail,
Speaker 3: but good enough for us to get in and out
Speaker 3: and then create that fuel break. So when the fire
Speaker 3: does get to that point, it kind of puts itself
Speaker 3: out on my squad boss myself. This is my ninth
Speaker 3: year on the forest. Kind of started from the bottom up.
Speaker 3: I was a senior firefighter for seven years. So the
Speaker 3: squad boss is like the closest to the guys, the
Speaker 3: actual workers in the chain of comme out. I'm like
Speaker 3: the first guy that the the screens go to the
Speaker 3: senior firefighters. They come to me if I don't have
Speaker 3: an aswer for them to bump it up to my
Speaker 3: captain and so on. I'm just running around and then
Speaker 3: listening to the radio traffic, because once you get on
Speaker 3: the fire line, everyone's talking. You kind of gather more
Speaker 3: information just by hearing people talk. People on the other
Speaker 3: side of the fire, the other side of the line
Speaker 3: down the road, they're throwing bits and piecea out there,
Speaker 3: and you kind of get all that information. You start
Speaker 3: putting it together. You start painting this picture in your
Speaker 3: own head, so you just kind of put that in
Speaker 3: the back of your k nogin and you continue to
Speaker 3: colign or firing off whatever you're doing. We talk amongst ourselves.
Speaker 3: We give our guys updates and what the chainsaws are
Speaker 3: doing up front. If their captain, the superintend they're all
Speaker 3: scouting around, they tell us what they see up ahead
Speaker 3: of us, like, hey, this fire is doing this. If
Speaker 3: we get to this point and the winds are doing this,
Speaker 3: find out a good idea to continue. Just little information
Speaker 3: at that. We're just we're hearing it on the radio.
Speaker 3: We're talking about sterior. If we order a helicopter to
Speaker 3: come dough water drops or bucket work, whoever ordered that
Speaker 3: helicopter has to talk to them and they'll ask us, hey,
Speaker 3: what do you guys need to say, And we're like, hey,
Speaker 3: you see that main head of the fire, can you
Speaker 3: cool it off for us? And then don't go in
Speaker 3: there and do their work. One thing we learn from
Speaker 3: our eye ups is always been thinking about the next step.
Speaker 3: What are you going to do next? What if this
Speaker 3: happens with it? So you start throwing those what ifs
Speaker 3: in your head while still trying to stay engaged on
Speaker 3: what's currently happening. So it's just an ongoing process. People
Speaker 3: are tired, you're kind of trying to snack in between
Speaker 3: as you're going up and down these hills and trying
Speaker 3: to find time to squeeze in a snack while still
Speaker 3: trying to get productivity out of your folks. You continue going.
Speaker 3: You got people sweating hard, tired, looking for the next
Speaker 3: piece of line, and continue cutting on. If you're close
Speaker 3: enough to the fire, it gets extremely hot, right even
Speaker 3: with little winder foot two flames. You're sitting there taking
Speaker 3: a little bit of heat, trying to go diregs hot.
Speaker 3: You're like, man, my face is burning every now and
Speaker 3: then you pop out trying to get a little bit
Speaker 3: of fresh air away from the heat. Get back in it,
Speaker 3: start thinking like, man, it's almost quitting time. I hope
Speaker 3: nothing crazy happens when they say, you know what, as
Speaker 3: far as doing this, they might say we need to
Speaker 3: burn off now. Nowadays the fires are too intense or
Speaker 3: too complex to get in there and do it safely.
Speaker 3: So we've been doing more burning operations than anything, where
Speaker 3: we go in there and light to fire ourselves, kind
Speaker 3: of give ourselves a buffer zone. So when the fire
Speaker 3: does come, it kind of just peters out there and
Speaker 3: it doesn't continue. If you start burning, you're probably gonna
Speaker 3: be burning well into your next shift on a fire.
Speaker 3: Our shifts are typically sixteen hours and then we've been
Speaker 3: down for eight, but lately they've been going longer, so
Speaker 3: you're scheduled for sixteen, but if the need should arise,
Speaker 3: you will do whatever you need to do twenty four
Speaker 3: or thirty two. We've done seventy two hour shifts before.
Speaker 3: They're not the best, but when you're lacking resources and
Speaker 3: the fire is just pushing your hand, you have to
Speaker 3: do what you got to do. And as long as
Speaker 3: we have line handline all the way around it, the
Speaker 3: engines come in, they put a little water on the edge,
Speaker 3: kind of secure the edge, and they feel good. Then
Speaker 3: you could say it's not out, but it's contained right,
Speaker 3: it's controlled. It's in a good spot where the hot
Speaker 3: shots can walk away, and then you can bring another
Speaker 3: resources behind us and they could monitor it until they
Speaker 3: put it out. Competing, we like to go where the
Speaker 3: actions at. We're better equipped for that. We're a bunch
Speaker 3: of people that get restless sitting around too on. So
Speaker 3: once the fourteen days come up, we're done. They send
Speaker 3: us home. It starts with the drive home. Right when
Speaker 3: you start driving home, I got thirty minutes thirty five
Speaker 3: minutes to kind of start winding down, because you go
Speaker 3: from going to one hundred miles an hour like intense
Speaker 3: fighting fire, and your brain's always going to coming home
Speaker 3: and you have to find that shut off. Right on
Speaker 3: my drive home, I'll just turn off some music, listening
Speaker 3: to music and kind of start winding down, let in
Speaker 3: my mind kind of relax, get away from fire for
Speaker 3: a little bit, start pre engaging myself with the home
Speaker 3: life you get back and to give you. It used
Speaker 3: to be two days they just passed on recently, where
Speaker 3: now we get three days off mandatory, which is awesome
Speaker 3: because two days was not enough. You spend one day
Speaker 3: watching packing and getting all your stuff in order, and
Speaker 3: then your second day you can kind of enjoy the family,
Speaker 3: and then the next day you're back at it. So
Speaker 3: these three days help out. It helps out her recovery
Speaker 3: because fourteen days of just banging your body out there,
Speaker 3: it gets pretty uh, it gets pretty grueling, and your
Speaker 3: body doesn't recovering. My family is my world. I'm married,
Speaker 3: five to five kids. I've been married for twenty years now.
Speaker 3: I don't know how my wife does it, puts up
Speaker 3: with this job, but she's there. She's hanging out tough.
Speaker 3: My kids they love what I do, even though they
Speaker 3: miss me. I think they get a sense of pride
Speaker 3: knowing that their dad is a wildland firefighter or even
Speaker 3: more than that, a hot shot. So you get home,
Speaker 3: you try to decompress. If you sit there with your family,
Speaker 3: try to absorb what they're doing, and you're trying. You're
Speaker 3: trying to fill in two weeks of time you missed
Speaker 3: in two or three days, and it's impossible. It's impossible.
Speaker 3: So you just got to kind of slow down and
Speaker 3: just take what's there and make the best of it.
Speaker 3: I mean, the option is not doing this anymore, right,
Speaker 3: and most of us love what we do, but it
Speaker 3: doesn't come with a price. Fire stressful, man, it's extremely stressful.
Speaker 3: It's hard. I mean, people out there, you lose sleep
Speaker 3: out there just thinking about the next day or the
Speaker 3: next roll. Right, we get back and it's like three
Speaker 3: days for us, it's a lot. We're like, oh heck, yeah,
Speaker 3: three days. But in reality is as soon as day
Speaker 3: two or three comes around, you start taking that Oh man,
Speaker 3: I'm getting ready, I gotta get out of here again.
Speaker 3: Not wanting to leave, but it's going to happen. Right,
Speaker 3: you know that the order is going to come, You're like, oh, man,
Speaker 3: here we go again. I'm gonna be gone for two weeks,
Speaker 3: and knowing that you're going to miss those two weeks again,
Speaker 3: it doesn't make it any better. It's not easy not
Speaker 3: to get all dark and gloomy. But the suicide rate
Speaker 3: for a while on firefighter is high for any firefighter actually,
Speaker 3: and I think it has to do with the fact
Speaker 3: that when you do come home, it off. It's hard.
Speaker 3: You do this long enough, you start seeing too much, right,
Speaker 3: You start seeing people pass away, you start seeing people
Speaker 3: get hurt, and then you feel like you don't have
Speaker 3: the support from everyone around you, and it kind of
Speaker 3: starts bothering you and you start thinking like, man, is
Speaker 3: this really worth it. I can't try to speculate what
Speaker 3: goes through other people's minds, but for me, I understand
Speaker 3: it's not easy. I mean, you think about it. You
Speaker 3: have your kids are missing you, your wife's missing you,
Speaker 3: your husband's missing, your boyfriend, and then you have the
Speaker 3: job right, and the job stressed was as it is
Speaker 3: already because you're worried about getting hurt or not coming
Speaker 3: home or are you doing the job right because You're
Speaker 3: affecting somebody's life out there if you don't do your
Speaker 3: job right. So all these things just accumulate, Right, everything
Speaker 3: just starts building up, building up, building up, building up,
Speaker 3: and then you come home and maybe all it takes
Speaker 3: is one thing to set you off. Everybody got to
Speaker 3: find out help what works for them, whether it's actual
Speaker 3: medical help, mental health. Right, you got to think about that.
Speaker 3: I don't know. It's a decent living what I do. Obviously,
Speaker 3: as you climb the ranks, you get paid better. But
Speaker 3: I mean, starting off, I wouldn't say it's the dream
Speaker 3: job as far as the finance part of it goes.
Speaker 3: But I mean you could make a good living, especially
Speaker 3: budgeting wise. You do it smart, you'd be fine. I
Speaker 3: don't do it for the money. I definitely don't do
Speaker 3: this for the pay. I don't love fires, but I
Speaker 3: love fighting the fires. I feel like I'm good at
Speaker 3: what I do, right, So that's the part that obviously
Speaker 3: makes it better, is you're always learning something and I'm
Speaker 3: getting better at it. But I love being outdoors. I
Speaker 3: love being a new country out there, seeing what's out
Speaker 3: the nature. It's beautiful. I guess the danger part kind
Speaker 3: of adds to it. Maybe I don't know. I'm not
Speaker 3: a thrill seeker or anything like that, but the challenge
Speaker 3: it makes you step up. Right, you see a fire
Speaker 3: and they're like, hey, we got to put this out.
Speaker 3: How are we going to do it? And it kind
Speaker 3: of gets you like, Okay, this is this is challenging,
Speaker 3: this is awesome, Like I want to stop this, I
Speaker 3: want to help out. You meet some unique folks here,
Speaker 3: like my crew example, you have twenty two people. We
Speaker 3: all come from different backgrounds, right, you put us together
Speaker 3: and through hard work, sweat pain, you guys build this bond, right,
Speaker 3: and you get to know each other. You see that
Speaker 3: even though you guys are all different, come from different areas,
Speaker 3: you guys are like minded and you have a goal, right,
Speaker 3: and you guys get together and you accomplish that goal.
Speaker 3: And at the end of the day, that feeling is
Speaker 3: like second to none. The act of stopping the fire,
Speaker 3: the challenge of doing it and knowing that you're saving
Speaker 3: someone's property or someone's livelihood, like you're doing for people
Speaker 3: you never met. Right, So we got out there and
Speaker 3: we saved these properties, and it feels good based on
Speaker 3: my background right the way I grew up where I
Speaker 3: came from. It wasn't an easy life, and I still
Speaker 3: have family out there living that life, and I hope
Speaker 3: the best for them. I always do. But seeing my
Speaker 3: kid's face, or hearing him tell his friends that his
Speaker 3: dad's a firefighter, seeing him talk about it, like the
Speaker 3: pride he has in his voice when he tells his
Speaker 3: friends it's awesome. I don't hide my previous life, but
Speaker 3: I don't go around broadcasting it. Right. If people ask me,
Speaker 3: I tell him. I'm pretty sure people out there judging me.
Speaker 3: But for the most part, I think it's helped out
Speaker 3: a lot of people. I've had a lot of people
Speaker 3: reach out to me talking about thank you. I know
Speaker 3: there's hope now and I appreciate you stepping forward and
Speaker 3: sharing your life with everybody. And that's also a sense
Speaker 3: of accomplishment. I feel good about that we are out there,
Speaker 3: even though the numbers are getting less and less. Crews
Speaker 3: are having hard time staffing for whatever reasons, but there's
Speaker 3: still a bunch of us out there that care and
Speaker 3: are continuing to do the hard work. I love this
Speaker 3: job a lot. I love my people around me, and
Speaker 3: I think that's what keeps me coming back. I know
Speaker 3: my wife, even though she don't tell me, I know
Speaker 3: she doesn't want me doing something different. But to be direct,
Speaker 3: I don't see myself doing anything else Southern hot Shot
Speaker 3: for a while when it's not fun anymore, and then
Speaker 3: when it doesn't make any more sense than I'll think
Speaker 3: about moving on.
Speaker 1: Armando Perez is a wildland firefighter with the El Dorado
Speaker 1: Hotshots in California. This episode was produced by Victoria Estrada
Speaker 1: and edited by Andrea Lopez Crusado. It was mixed by
Speaker 1: JJ carubin special thanks to Amanda Montai of the Life
Speaker 1: with Fire podcast. The Latino USA team also includes Rinaldo Leanos, Junior,
Speaker 1: Flori mar Marquez, Marta Martinez, Mike Sergent, Luor Saudi, and
Speaker 1: Nancy Trujillo. Penny Leiramirez is our co executive producer. Our
Speaker 1: director of Engineering is Stephanie Lebau. Our senior Engineer is
Speaker 1: Julia Caruso. Our marketing manager is Lis Luna. Our theme
Speaker 1: music was composed by sang Gevribinos. I'm your host and
Speaker 1: executive producer Maria Noojosa join us again on our next episode.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, I'll see you on all of our
Speaker 1: social media and remember Okay, why Yes?
Speaker 2: Bye.
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