When firefighters are sent to fight wildfires in other states, you might think that’s exactly what they are doing.
But it’s not always the case. They often help doing many other things.
For example, when two Kitsap County firefighters went to Oregon recently, they ended up feeding livestock and protecting homes because the town’s residents had been evacuated.
Lt. Bill Green and Marcus Oliver, an apparatus operator, of Central Kitsap Fire and Rescue were deployed Sept. 8 with other firefighters from Washington as part of a strike team in the town of Westfir, Ore.
The fire, which started Aug. 1 due to a lightning storm paired with dry conditions, was threatening to spread into multiple towns. The fire had already grown to over 50,000 acres when CKFR and other departments in Puget Sound got the request to send reinforcements to the Cedar Creek wildfire.