On the Burning Edge by Kyle Dickman Read Free Book Online Page B

He’d finalized his second divorce. Crew 7’s superintendent left, and Marsh’s supervisors had decided that his job performance had improved enough for him to take over. The year before he became superintendent, Crew 7 had earned the status of Type 2 Initial Attack Handcrew, which is a certification one tier below hotshot. They were now qualified to fight fires anywhere in the country, but that didn’t guarantee they’d get many opportunities to travel. If the fire risk was high aroundPrescott, Crew 7 would assuredly be kept behind to guard the home front. Hotshots, though, are a nationally controlled resource available to fight the country’s highest-priority blazes regardless of the fire situation at home. Marsh craved for Crew 7 the same freedom and prestige he’d seen on the Globe Hotshots. But he couldn’t get it without the city’s approval.
    Few people in Prescott saw the point, though. If Crew 7 were to become hotshots, they’d be spending less time thinning brush and more time on the front lines of the nation’s biggest fires. City officials, whose approval he needed to start the project, preferred to keep Crew 7 at home to protect Prescott, not the hundreds of other western towns threatened by fires every summer. Let the feds and their bottomless budgets do that.
    Still, against fierce opposition, Marsh persisted. In meetings with his chiefs and city councillors, he argued that hosting a hotshot crew would lend more credibility to Prescott’s already esteemed fire department. Prescott’s department, the oldest in Arizona, dated back to the days of the Earps and counted among its alumni a governor. But there were also financial incentives for making Crew 7 into hotshots. The Wildland Division was funded primarily through grants given by state and federal agencies to towns that proactively prepared for wildfires. Provided they kept creating defensible space around Prescott, Crew 7 could still be funded by grants. But when they went to fire assignments, the city would reap the financial rewards. Every time the men worked a wildfire, the state or federal government—whoever funded the firefight—would pay the city the equivalent of low-cost rent for the crew: $39 per hour, including the men’s wages, but not fuel, equipment, or lodging when they needed it. By allowing Crew 7 to become hotshots, Prescott could continue preparing for future wildfires while at the same time offsetting the cost of hosting a fuels crew, reaping their benefits, and breaking even on the deal.
    After years of battling bureaucracy and politics, Marsh and the fire department finally swayed the city council to approve his request to pursue Crew 7’s hotshot status. Now Marsh faced the much larger task of actually building a hotshot crew, a process that can take decades.First, he needed a roster that included at least six dedicated, experienced, and professional wildland firefighters—a good overhead. He’d also need a medic, a crew member capable of loading twenty firefighters and their gear into a helicopter, a pair of squad bosses to oversee nine crew members, and a captain qualified to step into the superintendent position if Marsh was injured or worse.
    Marsh was hamstrung from the start. Prescott’s fire department paid its Wildland Division a dollar less per hour—$12 for most rookies—than the federal wildland crews did. With twenty other hotshot crews in the Southwest to work for, this limited Marsh’s hiring prospects. A few times, Marsh took a risk on a candidate—hiring former inmates and recovering drug users—only to have him or her relapse in the middle of the season.
    But for all the odds stacked against him, Marsh had one thing to offer that no other hotshot crew in the country could: access to the city’s better-paying and more stable jobs on the red trucks. The Prescott Fire Department permitted the men who proved themselves on Crew 7 to ride along with the city engines, which required more education and