Pop-up cities help house firefighters battling Western wildfires : NPR

Across Western states tent cities are popping up to house, feed and care for thousands of wildland firefighters staffing nearby fires.

AND MARTÍNEZ, GUEST:

In the U.S., tent cities are popping up across western states. They’re fire camps, central hubs that federal agencies set up to meet the needs of wildland firefighters, including feeding hundreds of them 5,000 calories every day. Brody Wilson with member station KVNF takes us inside one of the encampments.

BRODY WILSON, BYLINE: It’s early morning at the County Fairgrounds in Ridgway, Colorado. Today, it’s a temporary town of nearly a thousand people – hundreds of tents, streets of office trailers, showers, laundry, its own security. It’s nearly as big as Ridgway itself. A crew of firefighters crosses the gravel toward breakfast, single file. Nobody ordered them to. It’s how they move on the fire line where your place in line is how the crew keeps count of you.

SHAMARI BAILEY: Right now, we are serving 900 for breakfast (laughter). And that’s almost every day, too.

WILSON: Shamari Bailey (ph) is the head cook. After breakfast, they start making lunch.

BAILEY: One minute would be 900, and then we have to make 400 extra more. We freak out for a minute. But then we just keep going, you know, because someone has to do it.

WILSON: Behind the mess tent, refrigerated semi-trailers and a supply chain that thinks days ahead.

BAILEY: We order in bulk. We order ahead of time. We always stay ahead of the grime, so that way, when the meal comes, we’re prepared to make that meal. So we have seven meals prepared in the reefer unit.

WILSON: The kitchen is just one address on what people in the camp call Main Street, rows of trailers for supply, planning, medical, communications. None of it is improvised. When an incident management team gets the call, the town comes with it. Tyler Nathe is an operations chief here.

TYLER NATHE: We have a standard set of stuff that comes with us on a preorder, essentially. So we like to come and be as self-sufficient as possible so that we’re not putting extra strain on a community when we come in.

WILSON: There are crews here from 30 states. One local crew is an ambulance that includes Reuben Farnsworth.

REUBEN FARNSWORTH: You know, it’s a mobile camp, kind of like the camps they set up for military personnel overseas. They throw it all together in a day or two. There’s showers. There’s a chow hall. Kind of like a little city.

WILSON: He says he hopes everybody has a boring fire. Team leaders here on the Gold Mountain fire rotate out after two weeks, but the camp stays until managers think it’s safe enough to dismantle and likely be sent somewhere else.

For NPR News, I’m Brody Wilson in Ridgway, Colorado.

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