Speaker A
00:00:09.200 – 00:00:10.880
Hi there. My name is Germ.

Speaker B
00:00:10.960 – 00:00:12.400
Hey, this is Little Germ.

Speaker A
00:00:12.480 – 00:01:47.860
Welcome to episode 122 of the Germ and Worm Travel Health podcast, Wildfire Safety. Don’t get burned when you travel. It’s a big planet. See it in Good Health. I’m Dr. Paul Pottinger, also called Germ.

I’m an infectious diseases specialist at the University of Washington. Now, on this podcast, you usually hear also from my friend, Dr. Chris Sanford.He’s also called Worm, a family medicine doctor, also at the University of Washington.

But not today.

This is a special episode where I interview a wildland firefighter about ways that you, our listener, can stay safe when you travel, either domestically or overseas.

We’ll hear from this wildfire fighters take on what travelers can do to reduce their risk of getting caught in a wildland fire, and how they can stay up to date on developing threats and what to do when things get too hot to handle. And as a bonus, we’ll also learn about his experience as a firefighter in the Oregon wilderness for the past two summers.

It’s an important job, now more than ever, and it’s fascinating to learn about what actually happens out there on the front lines.

Before we start our conversation, a reminder to our listeners, please contact us with your own travel health questions, your stories, and your tips for success. Just Visit our website, germandworm.com or send us an email germandworm@gmail.com as always, our medical disclaimer.

This podcast is designed to inform, inspire, and entertain. But before you travel, please see a qualified healthcare professional for recommendations specific to you and your itinerary.

Now, most importantly, this is an opportunity for me to introduce you to this exceptional individual, because, as you may have surmised when he called himself Little Germ, he’s named Matthew Pottinger, and he is my son, Matthew. On behalf of Worm and myself, welcome to the German Worm Travel Health Podcast.

Speaker B
00:01:47.860 – 00:01:49.260
Hey, dad. Happy to be here.

Speaker A
00:01:49.260 – 00:02:53.780
You’ve seen me produce these many times, and now you’re our actual honored guest, so this is exciting for me. So to our listeners, soon you’re going to learn a lot more about Matthew, but let me set the scene for you.

He’s 22 years old and just a few months ago graduated from Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied evolutionary biology under mentor Dr. Jonathan Lossos. In fact, hopefully he will soon share some of his research findings if we have time at the end of this podcast.

But spoiler alert, he was an extremely successful researcher, and in fact, he was honored with the Quatrano Prize. They only give out one of these per year in the Department of Biology, and that’s the biggest department at Washington University, if I’m not mistaken. And he graduated summa cum laude, so clearly he’s inherited his mother’s brilliant brain.

And he’s not only a man of science, but also an accomplished athlete, a marathoner, an avid sport climber, and he’s passionate about horticulture, and he’s passionate about all things Lego. More relevant to this conversation, he’s also worked as a wildland firefighter for the last two summers.

Let me start with that question to you, Matthew. In your career about wildland firefighting and wildfire fighting, which is it? Is it. Are you a wildfire fighter or a wildland firefighter?

Speaker B
00:02:53.780 – 00:03:24.690
Yeah, so thanks for all that, dad. They’re both used pretty frequently. Generally, when you’re talking about the fire itself, we like to say wildfire.

If you’re talking about the area and like the field or the specialty, like I say, I’m a wildland firefighter. And if you are talking about different types of fire, you’d say like you’re in structure or you’re in wildland or what have you.

So the fire itself, I would say is wildfire, but really both work pretty regularly.

Speaker A
00:03:24.690 – 00:03:31.170
That helps me a lot because I. I really prefer to call it wildfire because I just can’t get that land in there. So that’s good that I’m not totally butchering the topic.

Speaker B
00:03:31.170 – 00:04:10.090
The important thing you do is you just don’t call it forest fire as much anymore.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, there are lots of forest fires, but in truth, a huge portion of the United States is not covered in forest and still has some form of plant matter on it, and that still burns. So you’ll notice the old smoky stuff said prevent forest fires. And it’s still totally fine if you say that.

But nowadays we’re trying to recognize, hey, you’ve got a lot of prairies and farmland and all sorts of other things that are really important to get right.

And we want, we don’t want to give a little kid the impression that only forests burn down because a huge portion and some of the largest fires that we get are in scrubland and grass and that kind of fuel type.

Speaker A
00:04:10.090 – 00:04:19.490
Okay, thank you. I’m learning things, and that’s, that’s helpful to hear.

So you’re a biologist, so how does a nice biologist like you get mixed up fighting wildland fires?

Speaker B
00:04:20.050 – 00:05:01.150
In truth, I just had a friend do it, and I kind of didn’t really realize it was a thing you could just go and do, you know, I’ve been in, well up until this May, when I graduated.

I was in a classroom without a break longer than three months for my whole life, you know, since I was five, which is kind of crazy when you think about it. And don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love academics and academia. I do plan on returning to that at some point.

But I figured it was time to try something different. You know, do something important and helpful, but also just really cool. And that lets me work outside and stay very active, meet interesting people.

And it just felt like a good time to try something different. And I’ve had a great experience these past two summers.

Speaker A
00:05:01.390 – 00:05:20.240
Okay, so great experience. I want to hear more about those experiences. First of all, tell us a little bit about the job. How do you fight wildland fires? Do you parachute in?

Do you drop orange crap from a tanker cutting down trees? Pink stuff? Yeah, there you go, the pink stuff. So how does the job actually work?

Speaker B
00:05:20.560 – 00:09:10.049
Yeah, And I want to start out saying here. I am very much the lowest rung of this ladder. I am no expert in wildland fire. I am someone who’s worked at the ground for a couple years.

But there are certainly more qualified people than me. If you, the listener, are interested in learning about it, I highly recommend consulting the resources that a government agency has.

I worked for Forest Service. There is now an integrated wild and fire service, although it’s still getting set up.

And so most of the independent agencies below it, I’d say, probably are the best place to look. That’s the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian affairs, the National Park Service.

And there’s also every state has their own agency that deals with wildfire. But, yeah, in general, when you’re looking to contain a wildfire, we have all sorts of different mechanisms and strategies within it. But the.

The fundamental you do is called anchor, flank, pinch.

Essentially, no fire, or practically no fire, expands from a start point in a perfect circle outwards, usually with wind direction or fuel type or some driving force.

You have part of the fire that’s more active, which we call the head, and then the sides, and then part of the fire that’s a lot quieter because it’s already burned up more. And that’s usually called the heel or the. The back or what have you.

Generally, you want to start somewhere where the fire can’t burn over, which we call an anchor point. Maybe that’s a river or a road or a big gravel pit, you know, something where the fire is going to hit it and stops.

And then we go out around that and create a break of the fuel. Because as you all remember from your kid, there’s a fire triangle. Fire needs three things to burn. You need oxygen, you need heat, and you need fuel.

There’s always going to be oxygen in the atmosphere, Aside from when we’re dumping water on something. But if we can break the fuel in wildland fire, that’s usually the best way to stop it.

So if we reach the heel first, we then start moving around the quieter sides of the fire because they are less dangerous. And then eventually you create this line that goes so long that you pinch around the head of the fire and capture it.

Now, that is the usual way we contain. That doesn’t mean we don’t attack the head. Sometimes, notably, hot shots probably do that. The most. There are most experienced crews usually.

We also will hit that with other resources. So aviation, we have helicopters, we have planes, and they’ll fly over. I personally spent most of my time working on an engine.

Engines are responsible for the plumbing. So once you get that line in with a hand crew, typically, you want to plumb as much of it as you can, given the resources available.

And that means putting out a bunch of hose that you can then use to spray down the edge of the line and prevent the fire from leaping over the line and what we call spotting, because if you spot over the line, then it can break out again, and everything you’ve done is for nothing, which can be very frustrating when it happens. I’d say that’s the general gist. There’s a lot of subdivisions within that you mentioned, people who are parachuting. Those are called smokejumpers.

I personally am not a smokejumper. I think my mom would have a heart attack if I were there. They generally are the first responders at really remote sites.

Similarly, rappellers who rappel out of helicopters are often the first responders at remote sites. And usually we can get out and get things when they’re small.

People don’t really know this, but we catch 99% of fires while they’re still small, because most things are started by lightning strikes deep in the woods. And if we get there fast, we can keep them from growing. But there are thousands and thousands of starts every year.

I think last year there’s something like 70,000 fires. I might be wrong in that. Yeah. People don’t realize that just a few will get really, really large, and then they become a big, big problem.

But in general, We’ve got. There’s just so much institutional knowledge within these agencies, and people are really passionate about what they do.

They care a lot about putting out fire, and we have a good time doing it. It’s definitely our favorite part of the job.

Speaker A
00:09:10.200 – 00:09:29.160
Okay, so that’s fascinating. So basically you were a glorified ditch digger slash weed whacker. So you’re trying to deny the fuel. That was your job. It wasn’t necessary.

You’re on an engine which I guess has water you can spray. That was part of it, but also part of it was making the line.

A line, if I’m not mistaken, just a bare patch where you’ve cut down brush and other potential fuel.

Speaker B
00:09:29.720 – 00:10:36.510
Basically, yeah. So we use water generally in a stage called mop up, which is after you dig that line.

Line digging comprises the majority of those initial resources, and usually the larger hand crews do the bulk of it. Because it’s just having 20 people dig a line goes a lot faster than having three people on an engine like me.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes if there’s a lot of fires breaking out around the forest, you know, you’ve just had lightning come through, you might reach a fire, and it’s only you digging because your boss is off running and coordinating an aircraft. And I’ve had a few experiences like that where it’s just me and my Pulaski alone in the woods.

But usually you get those large groups and then for mop up, that comes later.

Once the fire has been what we call contained, which is you’ve fully lined it, we then try to control the fire, which is not quite putting it out, but you want to be very confident that it’s not going to leave.

And then once it’s been controlled for a while, we check it over and over again, and if we find no heats, no smokes, and this is literally us going on our hands and knees crawling around acres of the forest. If we find nothing after a few days, we’ll call it dead.

Speaker A
00:10:37.150 – 00:10:42.590
So you mentioned a moment ago you might be alone in the woods with your Pulaski. Is that a little Polish manservant?

Speaker B
00:10:42.670 – 00:11:42.710
Oh, yeah, sorry. Sorry about that. We actually have one somewhere nearby. A Pulaski, for those at home, is essentially an axe with a hoe on the back of it.

So it is the firefighting tool. It was invented by a fire captain named Pulaski in 1980. Well, I believe it was hit by him in 1910. There was a really bad fire season that year.

And he’s kind of the Most legendary firefighter to ever exist. He. Well, we can go into that whole story if you want, but he is the kind of the father of wildland fire, in my personal opinion.

But this is the perfect tool for a firefighter. You use an axe head a little, honestly, a small fraction of time, but usually to split things like roots or really dense bare grass in the ground.

You know, that thick, weedy grass that takes a bunch of energy to get through. And then you spend the majority of time with the hoe side just tearing up the ground and trying to tear up as much as you can to build that break.

You want to dig down to mineral soil so that nothing can burn and pull everything out to the side.

Speaker A
00:11:42.710 – 00:12:02.220
Okay, so you used hoes and hose, h-o-s-e and h-o-e-s. That’s good. You’re a double hoe person. That’s good. I like it. Tell me this. When do we decide to put out wildland fires?

I mean, if I’m not mistaken, lightning is a natural thing. Fires are supposed to be part of the soil renewal cycle. So when do you put out a fire, and when do you let it burn?

Speaker B
00:12:02.780 – 00:15:01.809
That is the question. There are a lot of politics around that question, unfortunately. So within agencies that work with fires, there’s usually a fuel subdivision.

Sometimes they’re a subdivision of the fire. Sometimes they’re fire division. Sometimes they’re like a partner division that’s like, at an equal level.

And they go around the forest doing work, kind of evaluating what each. Each area is looking like, how much fuel is on the ground, how badly it needs fire.

Sometimes we’ll go and do prescription burns to try and burn it off and kind of evaluating how much, you know, we really need to let fire be on the landscape versus put it out immediately, Full containment and control. This changes a lot, Forest to forest. It changes within the forests depending on which ranger district you might be on.

I’m speaking as someone who worked for the forest service. Generally, each forest is in a region of the country. So I worked in Region 6, which is Washington and Oregon.

California has two separate regions for the north and the south. You know, Alaska is a region all by itself, and then whole sections of the south will be just one region together.

And each region litigates and controls these things differently. Each forest within that controls these things differently. This past year, the forest I worked on had a pretty strict just put everything out policy.

You know, we weren’t super interested in trying to let fires grow to decent size and clear out the understory because for one reason or another, the overhead above us decided that it wasn’t the best call for our forest. There is an intense debate about that within the field, just within individual offices.

Some people really believe that we should be letting more fire hit the ground to clear out the understory. Some people are still of the belief that, you know, pretty much all fire is bad and poses a major risk to life, property, industry.

Personally, I land somewhere in the middle. I think there is a fire is an immensely important part of our ecosystem.

However, we can’t just pretend that our past century of letting of intense control of wildfires hasn’t happened.

You know, a huge understory has grown up in the past hundred years because we keep, you know, putting out these fires while they’re small and they, it allows a lot of the underbrush to grow up.

And now if you were to try and just let a wildfire take that then it poses a major risk of creating a really strong burn where the fire gets out of the understory, climbs the trees and becomes what we call crown fire and takes out a ton of the timber and including these trees which are normally fire resistant. So it’s a very precarious point right now.

But a lot of people are really interested in this and there’s a lot of research behind it because it poses such a risk to our natural spaces, to the industry that takes place there and to the people who live out there. So this is a question being addressed.

Speaker A
00:15:01.810 – 00:15:59.860
I love hearing that because you know, in medicine what I do for a living, we have a lot of controversy. There are some things that are not agreed upon.

I think this strikes average person is kind of crazy that we haven’t figured out the best way to control blood pressure or the best way to prevent malaria or whatever the may be. So I love hearing that there’s some equipoise in other fields as well. So it’s not as simple as oh, it’s a national park, therefore we’ll put it out.

It’s wild land, that’s not national park, we’ll let it go or it’s man made, therefore we must quench it or it’s natural, we’re going to let it burn naturally. It sounds much more subtle than that. And, and I appreciate that.

For the record, you were posted in rural Oregon, in the Malheur, not too far from Prairie City, not too far from John Day. Some of our listeners may have been familiar with that. With that in mind, I mean that’s a part of the country.

I don’t think you’d spent Time in before.

I don’t need to hear about war stories or anything, but I’m curious, what one or two things that were most surprising or memorable to you from the experience?

Speaker B
00:16:00.660 – 00:18:27.070
That’s a tough question. I think some of those war stories do stand out for sure. But in general it was, you know, getting used to kind of a 9 to 5 or that’s not really true.

I usually got into work at 8 or earlier and left at 6 at night, 7 at night, 8 at night. And you know, there’d be two week long stretches where you have 16 day hours every day, no breaks.

And so getting used to working that intensely on one thing and before just going home and not having anything to do is a huge break from academics where you’re kind of always on at a lower level. Rural Oregon, very big culture shock compared to Seattle or St. Louis where I went to college. I really do like that town that I worked in.

I like the people there. But, you know, it’s. The town was 800 people. It’s a big change.

You know, if I wanted to go to a Walmart, it’d take me three hours to go and buy something out there. But kind of living the quiet life in the woods was really nice. I would fish for, for my meals.

Half the time it felt like, or at least I did the first summer when it was quieter and I had more off time. This past summer I had much longer hours because we had a more intense season.

And in terms of fire itself, you know, the truth is I love it when you’re actually the best part of being a wildland firefighter is fighting fire. But that’s not necessarily a huge chunk of what you do, depending on what part of the business you’re in.

You know, if you’re a hotshot and you’re constantly being sent from giant fire to giant fire there, then you get tons and tons of it.

But when you’re someone like me and you’re stationed to a specific forest and it’s your job to take care of that one forest, you know, you might have a few weeks at a time where there’s nothing going on. In that case, you get sent around to do the grunt work that needs to get done to keep the forest maintained.

But it’s not necessarily, you know, wildland. Like I’ve filled a bunch of potholes, which is actually surprisingly fun, I will say.

But the highlight of the job is certainly we do get a fire, which, you know, we don’t like to say we want fire and obviously we want to keep it under control. But as someone, you know, doing the work, it’s exciting. It’s a good time.

When we get something, we’re not out sending them or anything, or at least we hope nobody is. But you get out there, you do something exciting and thrilling and you know you’re doing an important thing while you’re doing it.

Keeping these fires under control protects our forest, protects the natural spaces. So it’s very rewarding in that capacity and it’s, it’s just satisfying to do the hard work yourself.

Speaker A
00:18:27.070 – 00:19:12.460
I want to talk about safety because it feels like a hazardous job.

And in fact, this summer there was a notorious event near the Colorado Utah border where ultimately four firefighters died in what’s called a burnover event. They perished due to the heat and the flame. So that’s horrible.

And that happened, of course, when you were in the same business, you know, one state over or something like that. So we were thinking a lot about that here at home. But I was also really worried, honestly, more about smoke inhalation.

You know, smoke is part of fire.

And so I think there’s been more and more focus from a health perspective on the longer term health effects, especially for people who are career firefighters. Tell me about your own thoughts about safety, especially around smoke.

And are there things you think you or firefighters can do to reduce that impact on health and safety?

Speaker B
00:19:12.540 – 00:23:49.250
Yeah, it’s. Everyone thinks about it. We don’t talk about it a ton.

We’re all aware and we know especially like you’ll see certain types of smoke are worse than other types. Structure firefighters are inhaling all sorts of crazy things if they’re not wearing full breathing apparatuses.

Luckily, you deal with less chemical compounds that can be especially hazardous out in wildland because wood smoke by itself isn’t the worst. Not usually.

That being said, the fine particulate matter of some like intensely burning things, and especially if it’s like hot and can get into your lungs, can really mess you up and lead to bad lung cancer and other health effects which are truly awful. This is a problem that fire agencies across the world are facing and all tackling in different ways.

The United States current policy is not, not a mandate on respirators or anything similar to them at all. In fact, it was against forest service policy to wear a mask during wildland fire operations for up until, I think this year, maybe last year.

It is now permissible. That wasn’t the kind of thing that people were enforcing too hard. Maybe if you had a really tough supervisor.

Usually it is seen within departments as like Individual choice. I will say for people who think that, like, oh, just give them a mask and have them wear the mask all the time, it is not quite that easy.

You know, there are certainly long structure fire operations.

But typically, with a structure fire operation, you get the mask on, you go in, you save the people’s lives who are immediately at risk, and then get out of there. Prevent the fire from moving to other buildings. With Wildland, it is much more of a marathon than a sprint.

You know, I’ll have assignments where I’m outside next to a fire for weeks, you know, and you can’t wear a mask all the time, every day. If nothing else, the filters will go bad, typically. So. I own a respirator.

I was the only person in my station who had one, and I would use it when it was a really intense period of what we call suck and smoke. You know, if you’re really surrounded by fire at all angles, it will just kind of.

The smoke will just kind of sit on the ground, and that can get into your eyes really bad. So some people wear goggles. I personally don’t because I wear glasses. They just wouldn’t work with my face. But it can just. It’ll get in your lungs.

You’ll end up, you know, you get this really thick black snot that you cough out and sneeze out, and your eyes just burn like crazy. Your lungs start to burn, and most people, in truth, just kind of put up with it. I think there’s a few reasons for that.

Part of it is the hassle of dealing with mass.

There is, you know, we try not to say, but there is definitely a factor of trying to, like, look big and strong in the business and trying to feel tough. And, you know, to be fair, what we do is hard, and we feel tough. But I do think some people sacrifice their health for that sake. You know, there are.

There’s a good chunk of firefighters who are there to look cool. I mean, me included, to a certain degree. But that’s not certainly why everyone chooses not to wear a respirator.

The biggest reason people say is that it inhibits their breathing.

Because, again, it’s this really long operative timeline, and you might be out there for days and days, and you need to get as much oxygen as possible in order to be digging line for 16 hours a day. You know, I have friends who have had to deal with shifts that go above 24 hours. That’s definitely not the policy of the forest.

We try to minimize that as much as possible.

But if you’re you know, the first responding group on an incident and you need to put the line in or else homes will be at risk, lives will be at risk. Then you work as long as you can, and that’s hard. And it’s really hard to do in a respirator. Personally, I kept one in the side of my line gear.

That’s the backpack we wear with everything we need. And I pulled it out whenever it was a really intense moment.

But in general, if I was hiking or digging line and the smoke was blowing away from me, I would keep it in my bag because I personally found it it easier to breathe without one in clean air and a lot easier to breathe with one in thick smoke. I would much take the reduced oxygen intake to all of the smoke in my lungs because that really hurt.

Speaker A
00:23:49.250 – 00:24:50.470
Yeah. Holy smokes. I know how hard it can be to breathe in one of those respirators. That’s what I did. You know, summit day on Mount Everest.

It did not feel good. And that was just with pure air and supplemental oxygen. So I’m impressed you did that. I think you also adapted to it to a certain degree.

You and your mom and I were just a couple days ago in Southeast Alaska and in the Pacific coast of Canada, and we had an amazing experience spending an afternoon with members of the Wakwakwa people. And they put on a, you know, in a Long House song and dance show for us. It was quite amazing. And they burned a fire in the Long house.

And I thought the smoke was horrendous. It was very impactful to me. Still a great experience.

But when we got out into the fresh air, your mom and I were just breathing these giant lungfuls of fresh air. And I remember you saying, oh, this is nothing. I’m used to this by now. So that’s not a good thing for me as a parent.

But it is interesting physiologically as a doctor that people can somewhat get used to it. Well, thanks for putting your putting your lungs on the line and I’m personally glad you’re not going to be exposed to that again.

Speaker B
00:24:50.710 – 00:25:47.470
There was a pretty massive New York Times piece about it a few months ago. None of the people I worked with had read it. You know, these are folks living in rural Oregon.

They’re not paying super close attention to the national news system, the majority of them, at least. So it is something that is becoming a bigger deal.

That being said, the policies of the individual agencies regulating that, in my opinion, are not up to where they should be. You know, there’s very little Information given out by regulating agencies about what are the actual risks of lung cancer.

And you know, there are systems to compensate career firefighters who get lung cancer in order to pay for their medical bills. But there are people who slip through the cracks is what I will say.

And I don’t personally believe that enough time is spent during training talking about the actual risk risks of lung cancer.

Speaker A
00:25:47.470 – 00:26:09.030
Amen.

You know, we’ve received questions here at Germ and Worm over time from a number of listeners just asking about what they can do to assess their own risk. They’re looking at a travel destination. It could be that they’re going to a campsite. It could be that they’re going to an Airbnb.

For the listener who’s fire conscious or just fire curious, how can someone decide if their planned vacation is safe from a fire perspective?

Speaker B
00:26:09.190 – 00:29:37.590
Yeah, it’s. There’s a few metrics to keep track of that sort of thing.

If you really want to get into the weeds, you can Google something called the SIT Report, which is the situation report on fire that comes out every single day. And that’ll tell you the predictive forecast for certain regions. It’ll give you info on every major fire going on across the entire country.

This is something we looked at every day at work. I would also recommend an app called WatchDuty, which keeps track of every single fire as well.

And it is a basically just a big map of the United States and you can go around and look at them that will show you full regions that have been evacuated and individual fires, their size, their risk, any recommendations?

It’ll even show like up to the minute reporting from within the fire about what’s going on, what resources are on site, you know, if they have aviation, that kind of thing. In general, there’s no one perfect place to look for someone who’s looking to, to travel. I’d say listen to government officials on this.

This is not an area that I think has been politicized to nearly the degree that say the CDC has and where you have this massive disparity between what the government is saying and what people in the career field are saying. You know, that happens to a degree in fire.

But typically we’re all agreeing about safety and there’s very little push to try and make things less safe. That’s for sure.

I would recommend just googling the area you want to go and then saying fire risk afterwards and seeing because most forest, like if you want to go to a national park, they will have a forecast and everything about.

They’ll have their own system set up to deal with fire and similarly with national forests, everything like that and googling full regions you can do so if you look up like fire, national fire regions and that’ll show you a map of where you might be looking to go and that’ll be like full states and you can google that individual region and they’ll have their own forecast just for say Washington and Oregon and like what parts of the state are dealing with particularly risky events. In truth, you can’t predict fire. Some places are at increased risk.

We thought my forest was going to burn down this year and it didn’t actually have too much bad going on. We dealt with some medium sized fires, but you just can never be sure.

Some years they look like they’re going to be quiet because the amount of rain and then something giant pops up. I would not suggest trying to plan around your vacations around fire too far in advance.

Just be once you’re there, you just have to be paying attention to notifications on your phone from the government and from agencies saying hey, this is an evacuation order. Hey, this is a high risk situation. You know, if there’s a red flag warning, that means you have heightened fire capability at the time.

And listen to those evacuation orders. If people tell you to get out of an area, take their advice. They’re not doing it for any reason other than your safety.

It also makes it a lot easier as firefighters to deal with fire if there is isn’t a major civilian population around. That makes every situation a lot more complex and we have to worry about a lot more.

If people are responsible and evacuate when they need to, we can then have a lot more time and energy to put into putting out the fire, saving as many homes as possible, you know, keeping the natural area preserved.

Speaker A
00:29:37.590 – 00:31:05.080
Okay, that’s really good advice. So let me amplify that again.

A little bit of research before departure through an Internet search to see what the fire risk is deemed to be and forecasting.

But also when you’re there, assuming you find a place that’s not on fire and not felt to be ultra high risk, choose to go ahead with your campsite or your Airbnb etc. The Watch Duty app. So that’s one I wanted to call out again. So Watch Duty is free. I don’t actually don’t know how they make their money.

I’m not sure how that goes, but I have found it to be helpful.

What you do in watch duty is so please consider putting this on your mobile phone, especially if you have service where you’re going to be because it can give you those alerts for the location that you say. By the way, you can also do this for your home. Let’s say you’re away from home, you can look at the wildfire risk place you’ve left.

You can see what’s happening there too. A lot of our listeners who live in California, certain parts of Colorado, even Utah, I mean they’re going to have this on their phone already.

This is actually a part of daily life, at least in the summer season for a lot of listeners. But for many of our listeners it’ll be new.

So I have found Watch Duty to be helpful because I would just dial in where you were because I wanted to get alerts on what was going on where you were living and working. Having said so, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a lot of alerts. I mean when there’s an active fire that you’re watching it, it’s a lot.

I mean there can be all kinds of alerts that come through. So feel free to dial up or down the fire frequency of those alerts. It can be traumatizing, honestly.

But I honestly think it is a good resource and I do recommend.

Speaker B
00:31:05.320 – 00:33:17.860
Yeah, and with that being said, I will say the way the public learns about wildfire is not always the most dependable. Typically, you know, news is sensationalist. They have to be. That’s how they make their money.

They will tell you the worst fire going on in the country at one area and being saying it’s the end of the world. In truth, fires do get very, very bad. But the way they are conveyed to the public, in my opinion can use some work.

The only things that a lot of places look at are total acreage and containment. And those aren’t always the best indicator. A small fire that is maybe only or medium sized, I’ll say that’s only a couple thousand acres.

But in heavy timber and near a small town is a much, much larger risk than maybe a ten thousand, fifty thousand, hundred thousand acre fire that’s out in the middle of nowhere in a giant field, you know, in the prairies. Don’t get me wrong, those fires do still cause a lot of problems. They lead to burn like home loss, occasionally loss of life.

But there’s a lot more to a fire than just how big it is and how much it is contained. Because containment in itself, the reporting around that can be very tricky. It can be.

We are often hesitant to over deliver or over promise on how contained a fire is.

And sometimes I’ve been on Fires where it’s been publicly listed as like 20% and the entire thing is quiet and we’re already doing mop up and I don’t feel there’s a significant risk or you’ll be at something that says it’s 100% contained, but it’s not actually that well contained. And you get one juniper tree lighting up and throwing an ember across the line and then it runs another few thousand acres. It’s a complicated field.

Acreage and containment are important, but I would say do not use them as your holy text for seeing how bad a fire is. Try and find local reporting. Go on to watch DC or go on to the SIT report actually is probably, probably the best place.

And go to that individual fire in the region because again, that suit report shows every fire in the nation that’s over a certain size and look there.

Speaker A
00:33:17.860 – 00:33:33.020
Okay, I love that. So what I’m hearing is be thoughtful about the risk in advance and consider the seasonality.

You know, if someone has a desire to go to a place that’s notorious for fire and it looks like it’s going to be a bad season, maybe pushing it later in the year when things are a little bit wetter.

Speaker B
00:33:33.100 – 00:34:21.120
Yeah. And that being said, not everywhere has the same fire season. So if you live in the south, their fire season is a lot earlier.

Usually their worst months are in the winter and into the spring. Like we send people from my station in Oregon over to Georgia every single year because their worst fire season is that early on.

And then in the Northwest where we get our supermassive fires, that’s usually in the heat of summer. Alaska is kind of a mixed bag. Sometimes it’s the middle summer, it’s often a bit earlier than the Northwest.

And then you have places that are pretty hot year round, like Hawaii, or you deal with some places that have really regional weather phenomena like Los Angeles and you’ll get the winds whipping through the mountains there. And that’s how you have those horrible fires about a year and a half ago which happened in January and December.

Speaker A
00:34:21.120 – 00:35:01.719
Yeah, really important. Thanks for that.

And regardless, sounds like if you’re in a place that even has a modest risk of wildfire, having the WatchDuty app live and locally tuned to your local area. And then of course, as you said, I think it’s really great that you said that.

Obey the recommendations and the requests of the experts, not just to save your life, but to make it easier for everybody else who’s actually trying to save the land and the people who live there. Well, Matthew, this has been super helpful.

I think our listeners appreciate what you’ve done in learning about this a little bit about this process of fighting fires. But I would emphasize, again, firefighting has just been your side hustle. You are a biologist. So what’s next for your career and your life?

Our listeners may be curious.

Speaker B
00:35:01.879 – 00:36:34.810
Yeah, yeah, So I am. I’m pretty much wrapped on fire. I loved my two seasons, and if everything I did was just fighting fire itself, I would probably go back for more.

But at some point, I do have to get on with my career, Unfortunately, I’m looking to take a few years away from school. I love school.

I’m someone who actually really enjoys class and everything, but, you know, I’ve spent a lot of my life there, so I want to get out while I’m young. And I have, you know, I’m never gonna have this little responsibility again. So I’m looking to work abroad for a couple years. I.

My next gig looks like it’s going to be in Suriname doing sea turtle conservation.

So I’ll be working on the beach out there, which is really exciting to me, and doing everything possible to take care of sea turtle nests and hatcheries as sandy beaches in the region are threatened by climate change and by sand mining. So that’s gonna be very exciting. I’m learning everything I can learn about turtles right now. It’s been a kind of a frenzy of research.

You know, I’m also working on taking my honors thesis from college and getting it published. So there’s a bit of work involved in that transfer.

So starting to get back to it now, although I’ve been putting it off, in truth, trying to teach myself how to relax. But, yeah, just a few years away. I would love to work in Southeast Asia.

I’d love to work maybe in Antarctica, just places where I can be outside, make a difference, and also use my head a lot and learn.

Speaker A
00:36:35.200 – 00:37:14.010
Okay. Amazing.

And as somebody who took four years between undergrad and medical school, you know, I totally support this idea of time away from grad school, so I think that’s amazing. And, you know, to our listeners, if you want to learn more about what Matthew was working on, it’s a very interesting topic.

I’m going to put a link to the press release on the Quattrono Prize, so you can look at that in the show notes below.

And if there’s any listeners out there who are looking for a young, brilliant person to join their PhD program, or you’re just looking for a lab tech biology researcher to join the team for a year or two, please reach out to us germanwormmail.com we’d love to hear from you.

Speaker B
00:37:14.010 – 00:37:15.010
Yes, we really would.

Speaker A
00:37:15.010 – 00:37:51.620
Everyone that’s around for episode 122 of Germ and Worm. As always, we welcome your questions on travel, health.

Just send them along or your tips for success. Here’s something you want to have corrected. We’d love to hear from you on that too.

Email is a good way to get us germandworm@gmail.com or just see us online germandworm.com if you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard, please support us, subscribe, rate us favorably on your device, and spread the word with friends, family and on the socials. Those are free ways to support this podcast. I’m Germ.

Speaker B
00:37:51.620 – 00:37:55.080
I’m Little Germ. It’s a big planet. See it in good health.

Speaker A
00:37:55.080 – 00:38:15.000
See you next time.

This podcast is designed to inform, inspire and entertain, but it does not establish a doctor patient relationship and so it should not replace your conversation with a qualified healthcare professional. Please see one before your next adventure.

The opinions you hear in this podcast belong to Dr. Sanford and Dr. Pottinger alone and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the University of Washington or UW Medicine.