The Life
When not on fire assignments, the crew performs project work such as prescribed burning and fuels reduction.
Living conditions while on assignments can be primitive. Fresh meals, soft beds, and regular showers are not to be expected. Field assignments away from home can last several weeks with daily work shifts averaging 16 hours, but can extend up to 48–64 hours. Sleep deprivation is common, as is routine exposure to dust, smoke, poison oak, extreme weather (both heat and cold) and other environmental hazards.
Hotshot vehicles become a home away from home during the peak of the season when Hotshots may rarely spend more than two consecutive days at their own station. These vehicles, also known as Crew Hauls, Buggies, Crummies, or simply the Box, carry Hotshots along with personal gear, tools, and everything else necessary to make the crew self-sufficient for several days.
Read more about this topic: Interagency Hotshot Crew
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Life! Life! Don’t let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament. It makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Yet come to me in dreams that I may live
My very life again though cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago.”
—Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830–1894)