Fighting wildfires: A family tradition
Joe Brinkley was at a crossroads in life. He loved fighting fires in the wild – the camaraderie, the intense work, the long days in remote forests. But he had quit and started working at a tire store in Boise for better pay and steady work. He didn’t like it much, but he wasn’t sure he could afford to go back to firefighting to join two of his brothers.
Then, the worst. A wildland crew faced a blaze sparked by lightning near Glenwood Springs, Colorado. A passing cold front sent the flames roaring through South Canyon, overtaking and killing 14 of the firefighters on July 6, 1994. Levi Brinkley, Joe’s triplet brother, was among them. Joe Brinkley was stirred by the firefighters and townspeople who descended on his parents’ home in Oregon to help mourn the loss.
“That’s when everything changed for me. I decided this is what I truly need to do with my life,” Mr. Brinkley recalls. His brother’s sacrifice helped show the way: “I probably wouldn’t have had enough courage to make that decision” otherwise, he adds.
Thousands of paid and volunteer firefighters will leave their homes this summer to combat the wildfires erupting with growing ferocity in a drier, hotter climate. That rough army is often knit by a web of family ties: father and son, mother and daughter, brothers, sisters, cousins. It is a network formed of tradition, pride, and shared family values.
“It’s about DNA. It gets in your blood,” says Steve Hirsch, a lawyer and volunteer firefighter in northwest Kansas. His father started a local fire district in 1963 to help fight prairie fires. “Been around this my entire
