On the surface, cutting brush with a bulldozer may not seem like a big deal to seasoned heavy equipment operators. But as Assistant Fire Chief Derek Alkonis describes it, bulldozer crews are a critical component in the Los Angeles County Fire Department Air and Wildland Division’s wildfire arsenal.
The remanufactured and recertified Caterpillar dozers L.A. County Fire runs tell part of the story. The machines are equipped with manual angle blades but without sophisticated machine control electronics, which allows operators to keep them running under extreme conditions. The glass in the cab is designed to protect the crew from flames, and a charcoal system filters out smoke and toxins before outside air enters the machine’s air conditioning. A two-person cab accommodates the operator and his “swamper” (assistant).
All L.A. County wildland fire dozer operators are journeymen operators who must have accumulated some 5,000 hours of stick time prior to taking the job. That being said, as Acting Senior Firefighting Construction Equipment Operator Darren Beaty describes it, no matter how experienced the operator, you don’t just get on a machine “and go plow fire.”
Jeremy Lawson, Deputy Chief of Training Operations at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire), is equally descriptive. “Even if you’re an experienced operator and you’re sitting in the same dozer you’ve been in multiple times before, operating a bulldozer in a wildfire environment is different.” There’s the fire for one thing and the terrain and fire-specific operating strategies. Operators must be aware of soil conditions and assess the effects of the weight of their equipment on hillsides that haven’t had a dozer on them before. Likewise, soil stability can change where vegetation has burned off.
Cal Fire firefighters, engines, and aircraft respond to an average of more than 5,600 wildland fires each year. To keep its workforce up to speed, the agency maintains a 420-acre training campus in the Sierra Nevada foothills southeast of Sacramento. Its Heavy Fire Equipment Operator (HFEO) Academy is the gold standard for training heavy equipment operators to fight wildfires. This is where Los Angeles County Fire operators come to learn.
The academy has honed its training to a seven-week course that includes three weeks of intense classroom learning and three weeks of hands-on experience, followed by a week for cleanup and equipment maintenance. The course focuses on fire line construction, and modular training components cover such subjects as night dozer operations, emergency entrapment deployment, and winching safety. Outside agencies can bring their own equipment so operators can train on the types of machines they’ll be running on home ground. Trainers are selected from a cadre of Cal Fire HFEOs who have demonstrated instructional capabilities and have the necessary subject matter background. The course is held once a year and varies in size depending on demand. The maximum number of students typically runs to 15, sometimes 20 if there’s a need. The instructor to student ratio is 1–2 instructors per 15–20 students. In the field where students work with the equipment, it’s one instructor per every three students.
“We select trainers based on their ability,” explains Lawson, “but also the geographical locations in which they’ve had experience so that they can share information on the variety of fuels operators are likely to encounter. Plus, their time on the job—we include HFEOs who’ve worked for shorter periods of time to provide insight on what new operators can expect getting up to speed.”
Classroom instruction and hands-on experience alternate as operators learn the basics and apply it on the machines. The campus offers the opportunity to work on varying terrain and operates vegetative management projects that provide the opportunity to practice actual fuel reduction. Students must score 80% on weekly tests. If they fail, they are allowed one retake within a 24-hour period. If they fail the retake, they’re dismissed from the course.
“Everything they’re tested on is directly related to what they have to do on the job,” says Lawson. “And even for experienced operators, passing the exam is not a given. There are specific skill sets that somebody who comes out of the logging industry or highway work may not be familiar with. And because the HFEOs work in extreme terrain and topography, what they do can be very different from other industries that use bulldozers.” Time as well as proficiency are factors in successfully completing the hands-on components of the course because as Lawson points out, on a fire, time is of the essence. If at some point there is an issue related to an individual’s ability to safely operate the equipment, they aren’t allowed to continue.
And once they’re on the job? As L.A. County Fire Training Superintendent Captain Brian Riley describes it, wildland firefighting is a cooperative enterprise that requires that the various resources within the 262-person division—engine companies, hand crews, air support, and dozers—are not only up to speed on their own skills, but are also aware of how other resources operate. This is accomplished by off-season cooperative activities such as maintenance on the county’s motorways, a joint exercise in which heavy equipment personnel get the roads up to speed after winter washouts and hand crews work on trees that need to be trimmed or removed to improve access.
“More than likely, dozer operators won’t be called upon to do chainsaw work,” says Riley, “but when they’re on an incident, there are times they’ll use heavy equipment to fell trees, so they have to be familiar with it.” Riley also notes that while this joint operation has the benefit of bringing crews up to date on how other resources operate, it also familiarizes them with the location of motorways they can utilize when it’s time to fight fire.
“It’s the constant repetition,” says Riley. “Doing the basics over and over because you want to know how to control the little things. You want to know how to get to a fire or how to program your radios without having to put a lot of thought into it. You want it to be second nature so you can concentrate on what’s going on around you.”
The basis of off-season firefighter training is RT-130, the wildland fire safety refresher, which is a standard nation-wide. The course covers firefighting basics such as deploying a fire shelter but is modified annually depending on issues firefighters are likely to face. Felling hazardous trees, for example, is a current topic of interest because of recent droughts and insect infestations. The self-paced online course is followed by job-specific infield drills that focus on requisite manipulative skills. Asked about scoring, Captain Dan Shuford, L.A. County Fire Heavy Equipment Supervisor, said, “This is basic firefighting. You do it until you get 100%.”
Off-season training specific to heavy equipment operators includes projects that give them seat time and help them keep their skills up. This can range from the motorway work to building parking lots. The dozer crews also have internal drills dealing with firefighting tactics. Usually, says Shuford, this takes the form of discussions based on previous fires and documents published on “watch out” situations. “If there’s an issue that has occurred somewhere that involves a dozer, we’ll review it and study it and come up with what we might have done differently to avoid an accident or injury.”
And in another example of mutual training, the dozer crews participate in an annual “live” fire exercise. The spring fire drill assembles resources that would typically be called on to respond to an initial fire dispatch. Dozer crews are involved in the planning and cut contingency lines around the project perimeter. Once the operation is underway, the dozers are on standby in case the fire expands beyond the prescribed boundaries. The live fire exercise gives operators the opportunity to observe how the various resources operate together while they learn about fire behavior under a number of different scenarios.
“The dozer operators get to see the fire behavior over and over,” says Riley. “They have the opportunity to see how it changes based on the terrain and the weather and other variables. That’s a huge asset, given that command instructions to dozer crews can sometimes be vague.”
“Every situation is a little different,” says Shuford. Asked to describe personality traits that are important for wildland dozer operators, he says, “A lot of it is work ethic. You have to be self-driven to continue doing this day after day after day and many hours in a day. You have to also be someone who really likes to be challenged by difficult tasks while knowing that you’ll fail at some of them—and if you do, you have to be able to adapt and get right back in the game and figure out a winning strategy.
“Say you pull up on a fire, unload a dozer, go to work on a ridge just as the fire’s hitting it and the fire jumps the ridge before you get your line cut or it jumps the ridge behind you. Your initial plan has failed. Do you go after that spot fire or back up to the next ridge and start the process over again? You have to be able to adapt and find the next right answer.”
Read more on Los Angeles County Fire Department’s wildland bulldozer operators.
