Fire jumpers

Fire jumpers are rapid deployment and advance units of the fire brigade who jump over the fire area with parachutes in forest and field fires and use the most primitive means to initiate fire fighting . For their own protection, they carry an “igloo” with them, which can be set up in the event of the fire being rolled over and used as a protective building. It withstands temperatures up to 900 ° C.

They operate particularly in the vast forests of the USA ( Smokejumper ) and Canada or the Taiga of Siberia ( Awialessoochrana ). In these regions, the accessibility of ground-based emergency services is only limited or initially not possible at all, so that these units jump from special aircraft as close as possible to the scene of the fire in order to continue on foot from there. Fire fighting is then started with Wildland Tools , which are primarily small hand pumps, spades and saws. The use of helicopters for air landing can only take place up to a certain range, the transport aircraft has a longer range and is cheaper.

Trivia

The American film Die Feuerspringer von Montana with Richard Widmark shows the work of the fire jumpers in action in a semi-documentary manner.
Nicholas Evans ("The Horse Whisperer") has published a book of the same name about the fire jumpers in Montana .
Norman Maclean described the fire and the subsequent catastrophe in the Mann Gulch so precisely that the American organizational psychologist Karl E. Weick used this description for a well-known analysis of sensemaking .

Web links

National Smokejumper Association (USA, English)
photo
documentary

Individual evidence

↑ Richard C. Rothermel (May 1993) Mann Gulch Fire: A Race That Couldn't Be Won ; United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Intermountain Research Station, General Technical Report INT-299;
^ Weick, Karl E. (1993) The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch disaster . Administrative Science Quarterly; Dec 1993; 38, 4; ABI / INFORM Global pg. 628 ( available online (PDF file; 3.14 MB))

[Rothermel93-1] Richard C. Rothermel (May 1993) Mann Gulch Fire: A Race That Couldn't Be Won ; United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Intermountain Research Station, General Technical Report INT-299;

[WeickMannGulch-2] Weick, Karl E. (1993) The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch disaster . Administrative Science Quarterly; Dec 1993; 38, 4; ABI / INFORM Global pg. 628 ( available online (PDF file; 3.14 MB))