By the time fire season began, the spread of Covid-19 in the U.S. wasn’t slowing. State forestry departments needed to come up with plans to prevent firefighters from becoming infected as they put out blazes.
Normally, when fighting larger fires, firefighters gather at base camps. But eating meals and sharing bathrooms with hundreds of other people create the perfect conditions for the virus that causes Covid-19 to spread. So, firefighters were told to limit contact with people outside their usual crews— small teams that ranged in size from 2 to 20 people. Crews worked together to fight fires but otherwise didn’t interact. At base camps, each crew used a separate bathroom facility and ate prepackaged meals away from the other firefighters. “You were with your crew and no one else,” Ziring says. “They became your family.”
Staying away from others made it less likely that a firefighter would catch the virus or spread it to fellow crew members. In the unlikely event that a firefighter did test positive for the virus, all members of his or her crew would spend two weeks in isolated in quarantine—until they could be sure no one else on their crew had contracted the virus.
The plan was a success. By October, only 6 firefighters out of nearly 4,000 in Oregon had caught the virus—just 0.15 percent, a much lower percentage than the 1.2 percent of Oregon’s general public who contracted the virus as of October 29. “In some ways, it might have been safer to go join a firefighting crew than go out in the general population,” says Gersbach.
Now, as the number of U.S. Covid-19 cases continues to rise, the fires are moving farther east into states like Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. Since late summer, the wildfires have scorched a total of over 4 million acres. And as firefighters continue to work to extinguish these intense blazes, everyone hopes the spread of Covid-19 among firefighters will continue to be kept in check.