[Candor7]

Harvard Business Review complained about the lack of diversity in the firefighting business. >>>>>>>

What a bunch of a$$ hats at the HBR! Have any one of them EVER fought a forest fire? Its likely the most physically exhausting work any human can do, worse than being in combat by times.

And now they make a racial issue out of it?

I don’t care at all about the skin color of a forest fire fighter. If anyone is a dedicated forest fire fighter, they are in the super human category, regardless whether they are black , white, yellow, red, brown or effing purple.

I suspect that the majority of firefighters are white simply because anyone who is from an urban demographic like the majority of black folks are,likely wouldn’t be able to do the work, or have the woodland experience necessary to even attempt to do the work itself. Its not a “racist” issue.

[bobby.223]

Good post 7. I just lived thru one. The entire mountain I live on burned up. I was given 1 minute to get out by the sheriff that came up to alert me, the fire was moving that fast. The fire fighters stayed up here overnight keeping my home soaked while the fire raged all around them for hours and hours!! Balls the size of beach balls on these guys!! I was evacuated 7 days. Then when I returned, the ‘hot spot’ crews were up here for 2 weeks straight, 12 hours a day, putting out flare ups, digging up stumps, soaking hot spots etc. etc. They were a crew of about 14 Mexicans and one white guy and they worked their tales off. I couldn’t do their job in a million years. I’m still having nightmares about what I saw but thank God for all of those MEN.

[cartoonistx]

My son was a captain in a USFS HeliTack squad for 18 years. The reason it is a white man’s game has to do with many factors but mostly it has to do with educational factors. With the exception of seasonal wildland fire fighters, Forest Service requires employees to pass fire school, the equivalent of an AA degree.

[Sa-teef]

"....Have any one of them EVER fought a forest fire? Its likely the most physically exhausting work any human can do, worse than being in combat by times. And now they make a racial issue out of it? I don’t care at all about the skin color of a forest fire fighter. If anyone is a dedicated forest fire fighter, they are in the super human category, regardless whether they are black , white, yellow, red, brown or effing purple. I suspect that the majority of firefighters are white simply because anyone who is from an urban demographic like the majority of black folks are,likely wouldn’t be able to do the work, or have the woodland experience necessary to even attempt to do the work itself. Its not a “racist” issue...."

YES! forest fire fighters are VERY SPECIAL people!

Growing up in the Upper Midwest in the '60's I had occasion to volunteer to help with peat bog fires. Hey, it was a few days off school as an excused absence!

The peat fires were a recurring issue and they mostly just let them burn as long as they didn't get too close to homes or farm buildings. But they would ask for volunteers at the schools when need be so a half-dozen kids would pile into somebodies pickup and off we went. They would have some experienced person supervising us greenhorns (he probably drew the short straw that morning?), give us five gallon water cans with squirt nozzles and send us off to do battle.

It was classic whack-a-mole stuff. You would see a curl of smoke coming out of a spot so you run over there....-squirt- -squirt- -squirt-. Maybe it would stop and maybe not. One of the kids would have an adz and try to dig down to find the fire which sometimes helped and sometimes just gave the fire more oxygen. Pretty soon another wisp of smoke would appear and you run through the sometimes firm ground and sometimes knee deep mud and ooze: -squirt- -squirt- -squirt-. Not sure we ever did much that was useful but you gained an appreciation for the guys who actually did that as an often part-time career. They are built of firm stuff.

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Harvard Business Review has long since lost the plot. It's about getting an important, life saving job done, not checking boxes on a goals memo created by some snowflake who would never step up to the task at hand.

[HartleyMBaldwin]

Oh, I don’t know. I fought fires in the 70s and 80s, including several seasons on a hotshot crew, and it wasn’t really superhuman stuff. It could be dangerous at times, but I’d certainly never call it comparable to combat.

Lots of fun, mostly.