Thread: Untrained migrants fight fires

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Untrained migrants fight fires
Inexperienced, undocumented hired by private contractors.
By Tom Knudson -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 am PDT Sunday, May 7, 2006
As bright orange embers lofted through the forest, exploding into columns of smoke and flame, Mike Sulffridge and his crew of firefighters began to scramble. Their lives were in danger.
But the reaction of six Latino firefighters working near them could not have been more different. Despite the advancing flames, despite a volley of warning shouts, they did nothing.

"They did not understand English," said Sulffridge, who was hired to battle the wildfire in the Fishlake National Forest in Utah in 2000. "They did not understand what the fire was doing."

Ultimately, the men were rescued. But the fire took a toll. One man was burned badly across his face. "In another few seconds, those guys would have been burned up," Sulffridge said. "They would have died."

Firefighting has always been dangerous. But today, with the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies hiring more private contractors to do the work, a different kind of firefighter is in harm's way: migrant workers who have minimal experience and training, speak little or no English and often are in the country illegally.

Public records offer a glimpse of what crew inspectors have documented: underage workers, counterfeit IDs, falsified training records, a van roll-over, broken and dangerous tools, even a firefighter with only one lung who "went into convulsions ... and was having difficulty breathing," as one federal inspector in Washington put it.

"There's got to be more checks, more accountability and more consequences," said Joe Ferguson, a former Forest Service incident commander who was shocked by problems he encountered involving Latino firefighting crews in 2002.

"The work force in the country is changing - and we have to change with it," Ferguson said. "But that doesn't mean we have to compromise safety in the process."

Fewer than a dozen contractors are responsible for most of the problems. Despite that, they are rehired year after year by the government - frustrating contractors with better safety records.

"There should have been a three strikes and you're out rule adopted 10 years ago," said Nelda Herman, president of GH Ranch L.L.C., an Oregon fire contractor. "We'd be better off today."

In March, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Office of Inspector General sharply criticized the Forest Service for chronic mismanagement of Latino contract crews.

The audit said the Forest Service had failed to ensure that Latino firefighters are properly qualified and trained - or even that they are legal.

"Undocumented workers are a problem on contract firefighting crews," it said.

Forest Service officials say they are committed to solving the problems. But they acknowledge being caught off guard by the rapid growth of the private firefighting sector.

"This is an industry that has blossomed so significantly it was difficult for us to keep pace," said Neal Hitchcock, deputy director of operations for the Forest Service at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise. "We recognize there is a lot of work to do, and we're getting organized to do it."

Nationwide, there are about 5,000 contract firefighters on call during fire season. Most are based in Oregon and roughly 80 percent are Latino. Four thousand or so are overseen by the Oregon Department of Forestry but are often deployed to federal wildfires out of state. The rest are managed directly by the Forest Service.

Much of the industry's growth has been driven by the Forest Service itself, fueled by its reliance on the private sector to do jobs once performed by government and a need to replace agency employees lost to budget cuts and retirement.

"The Forest Service has shrunk so small we just don't have the resources," said Robert Gavenas, a fire crew inspector for the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington.

About 90 companies compete fiercely for the work. Many have drifted into firefighting from reforestation, an industry that has prospered by tapping large pools of migrant workers, some legal but many not - whenever and wherever the sporadic work arises.

What's drawing contractors to firefighting is the chance to earn big money. A 20-man crew of firefighters can bring a contractor $7,000 a day, including overtime. Crew wages make up about $4,800 of that - an average of $15 an hour for a 16-hour day.

"This is a big money item," said Gavenas. "There is an incentive to get your crews on the fire line."

In that rush, corners are cut. Some are spelled out in reports that Gavenas and other federal and state officials prepare, including these excerpts from 2003, 2004 and 2005:

"Lots of tools but most were very beat up and some were unusable ... ." "The company and its crews have been out of compliance in so many ways it is ridiculous ... ." "Victor is only 20 years old which means he started at age 12 ... ." "Arturo went out and purchased a fake INS card and false birth certificate ... ." "Crew had to haul gas and hand tools in van (and) had been getting headaches from the fumes."

Problems also occur on controlled burns, set intentionally to thin forest vegetation. Emilio Morales Donis, a native of Guatemala, said he was injured in such a burn in the Rockies in 2002.

"Estuve trabajando en la linea del fuego," said Morales, speaking last year in the kitchen of his simple cinderblock home in a neighborhood of Guatemala City.

"I was working on a fire line. A log I was lifting slipped. It landed on my wrist, pinning it to the ground," he said. Wrenching his hand free, Morales said he approached his foreman. His wrist was throbbing.

"He told me, 'Hurry up. We have to finish this area,' " Morales recounted. Despite the pain, Morales complied, working one-handed. There was no aspirin, not even a Band-Aid. "In the mountains we didn't even carry a first-aid kit," he said.

Asked last week if he had any training, Morales said no. "We learned on our own," he said. "You figure out how to do the job as time goes by."

Training is mandatory for those contract firefighters who work on wildfires, but the Forest Service doesn't do it. Instead, the job is outsourced to a jumble of individuals and industry groups - and the inspector general audit found some of it substandard.

It cited one 2003 training session where "there was no interpreter for attendees whose English was less than fluent," the audit reported. "Attendees came and went at their own will without any attendance taken."

One instructor has been suspended for falsifying training records by the Oregon Department of Forestry. Another has been suspended while his case is investigated. Training run by contractor-funded industry groups - known as associations - also drew criticism.

"Instructors may be vulnerable to pressure from companies to cut corners," the audit said.

"Oregon has allowed so many different associations to come in that there is no handle on it," said Paul Washburn, chairman of the Pacific Northwest chapter of the National Wildfire Suppression Association, the oldest and largest training association.

"They don't know who's training who," he said. "They don't know what quality of training there is."

"Some (trainers) have manageable classroom sizes - maybe 20 people," Washburn added. "And there are cattle car trainers, where there may be 115 people in the room. They are going through the motions, just pushing them through."

Bill Lafferty, fire program director for the Oregon Department of Forestry, said the agency has sharpened its scrutiny of trainers.

"We've got the capacity now to hold people accountable," he said. "But no doubt about it - there are more improvements to be made."

During their investigation, auditors discovered something that prompted them to open a new investigation: Many contract firefighters are undocumented.

The problem, they said, is born of doctored documents, unscrupulous contractors and a lack of vigilance.

"Neither contractors or firefighting organizations receive routine support from federal immigration authorities," the audit said. "As a result, contractors will continue to hire individuals who are ineligible to work in the U.S."

Undocumented workers are more than a legal problem for the Forest Service. They can compromise safety checks, too.

On the Toolbox Fire in Oregon four summers ago a group of Latino firefighters - fearing for their safety - opened their emergency fire shelters and crawled in.

While the men suffered relatively minor burns and smoke inhalation, the incident triggered a safety probe. But when a Forest Service official tracked them down in camp and asked for identification, three produced multiple Social Security cards, according to former Forest Service fire manager Chuck McElwain, who recently retired from the national forest where the incident occurred.

"Then, in the middle of the night, they took off!" McElwain said. "When the (fire safety) team got ready to do interviews later on, they had scattered to the wind."

Latino contract crews do the grunt work on forest fires. The job involves cutting fire line - the arduous process of clearing a path around a wildfire to contain it and mopping up, firefighter jargon for putting out embers and hot spots, usually with a shovel.

They are deployed more often in the Northwest and Rockies than in California, which has an abundance of state and federal firefighting resources. But when fires rage hot and government resources are tapped, Latino crews can show up anywhere.

That includes the Angeles National Forest, northeast of Los Angeles, where Ron Heinbockel - a Forest Service crew inspector - was working in September 2002.

"I was called down because they were getting inundated with out-of-state crews," he said. "They wanted to get a handle on whether they were getting good, qualified crews."

Heinbockel found 20 Latino crews, all from Oregon, and asked their leaders, the crew bosses and squad bosses, simple questions about fire.

In four cases, the men could not answer. "They got this glassy look on their face," he said. "They just didn't understand me."

But something else caught his attention: paperwork the men carried from the Oregon Department of Forestry certifying they were proficient in English.

"I was in total disagreement on that," he said.

The crews were ordered off the fire - for safety reasons - and sent home by bus. Even so, the contractors that employed them continue to be called out to fires. Just last year, one was cited for again sending crew leaders to fires who couldn't speak English - twice.

The Forest Service's Hitchcock said he is hoping to avoid such problems in the future by working with Oregon officials to develop ways to measure language skills before crews arrive at fires - not afterward.

Such a process is in the works but won't be available this year, Lafferty said. In the meantime, the department is trying something new to weed out problem contractors: best-value contracting.

No longer will companies be deployed to fires simply because they are low bidders. Instead, a range of factors will be examined, including safety and other violations, in awarding contracts, he said.

"That's a big move toward having the ability to either shut them out or encourage them to snap to and get better," Lafferty said.

Such changes can't come soon enough for Ferguson, the ex-Forest Service incident commander, long frustrated by the poor performance of contract crews - and his agency's spotty oversight.

"We're not very good at policing ourselves," he said. "And we're even worse at policing contractors and their personnel."

In 2002, Ferguson was shocked by the inability of one crew to understand instructions on a risky job called a "burn out" - in which fire is set intentionally to starve a larger fire of fuel.

"It was obvious that crew did not comprehend what was going on," he said. "Eventually, we came in and pulled them completely out of the area."

Afterward, Ferguson wrote a letter to Forest Service fire contract managers warning that unless language skills of crews improved, there would be dire consequences.

"I told them that if we didn't get a handle on that," he said, "we were going to get somebody killed."


FOREST SERVICE FIREFIGHTING CONTRACT CREWS
Excerpts from U.S. Department of Agriculture Office of Inspector General, Audit Report No. 08601-42-SF Language: The Forest Service "does not have adequate assurance" that crew leaders can speak English. "Given the seriousness of the matter we issued a management alert to inform the Forest Service of our finding." Undocumented workers: "Contractors, the Forest Service and the Oregon Department of Forestry lack personnel who have been trained to identify such false documents." Training: "Firefighters who have not received adequate preparation to perform their jobs in a safe and proficient manner are being dispatched to fight wildfires." Read the complete report

I do not know how OSHA lets them get away with this. When I tried bringing in a group of legal experienced Ukranian coal mning mechanical engineers in '01 I was told that they could not work underground unless their English was perfect. The reason was not for receiving orders it was explaining any accidents to OSHA. The Ukranians have had to agree to work above ground for second hand dealers unless fluent in English.