Demand for Fire Academy Graduates Grows as California Wildfires Multiply

Graduates of the Rio Hondo College Wildland Fire Academy got off a bus last month at the college’s training facility in Norwalk after a 16-day assignment for the U.S. Forest Service.

The fledgling firefighters battled several forest fires in Southern and Central California, areas which have seen some of the worst fires of the drought-driven wildfire season.

Just six months ago, the graduates sat in the classroom learning the fundamentals of firefighting.

"We taught them about safety being the most important," said Tracy Rickman, head of the academy.

The training served them well as they joined professional crews working a forest fire east of Fresno in August. Trees hundreds of feet tall burned around the graduates.

"We had two scary moments, cheated death twice," said Erick Perete, a spring graduate of the academy's wildland fire program.

"Someone yelled, ‘Tree!’ as we hear it cracking as it’s falling. That’s when everybody just ran away from the tree that was falling. It felt like an earthquake,” he said.

The one-semester program covers classroom lessons in how a fire behaves, firefighting tactics and working as a team. Toward the end of the semester, students practiced in controlled fire situations in nearby forest land, but the training is nothing like real fires, the graduates said.

The U.S. Forest Service called the college to activate a crew for a two-week paid rotation to fight several forest fires that flared this summer. The agency has strained to keep up with the number of large fires impacting the West. So far this year, it has spent $1.2 billion and over half of its fiscal year budget to suppress brush fires.

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