
Squeezed into the back-bending cargo area on a fixed-wing plane in July, Haines resident Russell Kennedy palmed an iPad passed off from a colleague. He was among seven men in various stages of repose, speeding towards a column of smoke erupting from the foothills of the Brooks Range in Northwest Alaska. Using his fingers on the screen, Kennedy zoomed in on the map, cocked his head. Squinted. Paused.
Over the roar of the engine, Kennedy mimed to his colleagues what he’s just learned: that the 400-acre wildfire they were chasing threatened land he bought but had never seen. That this, for once, was personal.
While most people run away from fires, it’s Kennedy’s job to parachute into them. He’s a smokejumper in Alaska, an elite group of firefighters that act as first responder to wildfires. As the name suggests, smokejumpers hurl themselves from airplanes into remote areas set ablaze, where they set up camp and suppress or extinguish wildfires for as many as 14 consecutive days.
When Kennedy jumps out of the plane, he does so with 100 pounds of gear, including a Kevlar suit with hockey pads sewn into it, a parachute on his back and a reserve parachute on his front, a bag of food and water between his legs, a tent in one pocket and government-issued pop tarts in another.
“Every fire is all fire. It’s this strange substance that’s always the same – I stole that from Cormack McCarthy, but he said it way better,” Kennedy said, hunched over his English work at the Haines Borough Public Library on a Friday. Fridays are his “homework days.”
Smokejumpers work for the federal government on six-month contracts. During his half-year off, Kennedy is remotely earning his bachelor’s degree in English at the University of Massachusetts.
He’s frequently seen in a black baseball cap embroidered with the specific wings assigned to the smokejumper’s logo, with a Bureau of Land Management crest in the center. To an untrained eye, they look like any wings, but Kennedy promises fellow smokejumpers recognize the distinct arch.
“Fire does its thing regardless of how we feel about it,” he said. “I think it’s an unnatural act to go towards a forest fire, sometimes. Just like anything else in this life, by passing through your fear of it, that’s when you begin to understand it and then begin to know what you can get away with. Those people that are not afraid to take risks are the ones who end up figuring out the game and getting really good at their jobs.”
This past summer, Alaska’s taskforce of 63 jumpers had ample opportunity to hone their skills.
From late April to early September, the all-male team fought 115 separate fires with 156 missions, up from 45 total missions in 2018, and a 10-year average of 81 missions. The smokejumpers base at Fort Wainwright, Fairbanks, set a record in July for the most jumpers on the list at a single time, 206 (with out-of-state jumpers pulled up as “boosters”), since the formation of the crew in 1959. Not incidentally, July was also the hottest month on record in Alaska.
“From a non-scientific basis it seems like the workload is increasing and we’re seeing fires burn in locations that haven’t had as much fire activity in the past,” said base manager and 30-year career smokejumper Bill Cramer.
From Kennedy’s boots-on-the-ground vantage point in his sixth-year smokejumping, there were two irregularities about the 2019 season: duration and burn behavior.
“We jumped large fires well into September, which is unheard of,” he said. “We were really tired and none of us really believed that it was going to keep going.”
Beginning mid-August, the Deshka Landing Fire broke out near Wasilla and didn’t stop until it consumed 1,318 acres, nearly one month later.
“Fire is definitely driven by weather conditions within Alaska,” said National Park Service fire ecologist, Jennifer Barnes. “If you have hotter, drier conditions, you’re going to have more fires. Over the past 15 years, we have seen more frequent large fire years and more area burned.
This year was unusually dry in the southcentral area and there were large fires that burned late into the season.”
Larger fires that scorched more acreage were born from unusual absence of rain in the beginning of August.
“In the mainland part of the state, the rainy season very reliably kicks in on the first of August,” said University of Alaska Fairbanks climate scientist Brian Brettschneider. “This year, that was the case north of the Alaska Range, but south of the Alaska Range that rain was a month late.”
In August, Alaska saw an “uncommonly large number” of burned acreage in the southern Interior because of lack of rainfall, Brettschneider said.
The bulk of forests in Interior Alaska are made up of black spruce, a softwood thats moisture content and chemical composition makes it highly flammable; fire danger that’s exacerbated by deep moss and organic material layers on the forest floor. In the Interior, fire is a natural part of the ecosystem that even aids in reproduction; Heat makes black spruce release seeds for their cones, according to fire ecologist Barnes. “The system is definitely designed to burn,” she said.
However, the surrounding “hardwood” trees such as birch and aspen typically have higher moisture content, making them less flammable-“but if it’s dry enough, they’ll dry out and burn,” Barnes said. This summer, it was dry enough.
“Historically, hardwoods are where we run to when things go bad because we’re safe in there,” Kennedy said. “That did not happen this year. It’s terrifying.”
On the ground, the smokejumpers use chainsaws to cut all vegetation around the circumference of the burn. Then they lay water line and sometimes even start a fire in an effort to starve the blaze, before extinguishing the flames.
When the wind changes and blows a fire back towards them, Kennedy said the jumpers have always run for the hardwoods for protection. At the Mauneluk River fire, the one at the foothills of the Brooks Range, Kennedy and his crew watched in confusion as a hillside, composed in part by hardwoods, burned.
“That was the first time in the season that we were like ‘oh, fire’s carrying into the hardwoods,'” he said. Months later, they saw the same thing at the Deshka Fire on a bigger scale when singed 18-inch old growth birch trees began falling down without warning, twice nearly missing the smokejumpers who combed through the aftermath putting out spot fires.
Kennedy bought property in Haines in 2012, and has been building a cabin on Chilkat Lake ever since. He said his purchase was inspired, in part, by the lack of fire threat in the rainforest climate.
“That is an issue here in Haines, because if we get another couple of summers like we got this summer, then wildfire becomes an issue where historically it has not been,” Kennedy said.
This summer, Haines was subject to nearly a month long burn ban when persistent heat and dry conditions caused a spike in fire index. In June, a house fire at 8.5 Mile Haines Highway spread to four-acre wildfire contained by US Forest Service firefighters after four days.
Fire chief Al Giddings said the Haines Volunteer Fire Department is preparing for another extreme fire season in the coming years. The department will receive a special firetruck adapted to wildland firefighting- it can simultaneously chase fire while pumping out water-this coming spring from the federal government. They will also assemble a Haines Wildland Fire Unit of at least 15 volunteers to receive federal training, he said.
“The possibility of increased fires in the Southeast due to warming temperatures is a fair assumption,” Haines’ state forester Greg Palmieri said. In the Southeast, most fires are caused by people (as opposed to lightning strikes up north), and residents in the coastal areas aren’t as attuned to fire safety, Palmieri said.
“Most people in Southeast Alaska don’t think about defensible space – spaces in the fuel regime around the structure – when they build their homes, but I think it’s very important to be aware of and take into consideration,” Palmieri said.
Defensible space describes the practice of landscaping around a home to reduce available fuel sources, such as dense shrubbery, and reduce the risk of a fire quickly spreading to a home. For more information, or diagrams and illustrations on defensible space, there are free brochures outside of Palmieri’s office in the Gateway Building.
Meanwhile, Kennedy is reevaluating his own property for defensibility in an area he never guessed would burn.
“It was definitely a bonus that I didn’t have to worry about my place burning up while I was up north protecting somebody else’s place,” Kennedy said. “But that’s not true anymore.”