Name: How to Fight Forest Fires
Uploaded: 2013-12-09T17:15:32.000Z
Duration: 14 min 35 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

MALE SPEAKER: Once you do it, you feel that adrenaline rush,

And you see it put to bed, and do some of the mop up, get it

Once you get a season of that, it's in your blood, and

MALE SPEAKER: While the rest of the country is flipping its

lid over cyber crime, illegal aliens, and mutagenic fuel

gases, the Pacific Northwest still spends its summers

struggling with mankinds first and oldest enemy, fire, In the

last decade, hundreds of thousands of forest fires have

scorched 5.5 million acres of American land.

The average Oregon summer sees 561 wildfires damage 16,000

acres of often pristine forest, causing mind boggling

Last month we travel to Medford, Oregon to team up

with a firefighting crew from Grayback Forestry.

Their job is to amble right up to a roaring blaze and dig a

line around it, to choke the fire to death.

When there isn't a fire going, they cut back and relax by

walking up the side of a 45 degree cliff and clearing out

old underbrush, which provides fuel for these fires.

We're about to go into the forest and tear down trees so

White is private, and the yellow is [INAUDIBLE].

SHANE STANCLIFF: Today the unit we're on now is in Rogue

It changes every different unit usually every week, or

Now you've got to grab oil and stuff for the chainsaws.

We've got to file into this giant box on the back of a

It feels dumb, I mean these guys get up every morning at

this hour, but I feel like physically shaken.

It's probably a healthier way of doing things.

All right, I guess we've got to get in truck right now.

Somewhere around 5:30, 5:45, we'll load up the trucks that

Get everything ready, make sure the tools are in there,

make sure we got enough fuel, and bio oil.

About 6 o'clock we leave the shop, and depending on how

far, usually a half hour to an hour it takes us

CRAIG FRANSISCO: You really get to know the

Everyone's about the same age, and has the same interests.

I mean, we're working outside, so everyone loves the hiking.

If they're not into mountain biking, they're into like ATV

So it's easy to get along with everyone, everyone's down to

Our oxygen tank is usually handkerchief over us.

And if you're smart about it and the smoke's going at you,

you just kind of step aside for a minute and let it pass

Like I said, last year was my first season.

But it's like you're gone, you miss your family, and your

We did a fire here in town, in Roxy Ann's mountain.

Probably a two day night shift is what I did, and

And whoever's like the incident commander of the fire

at the time will kind of tell us what to expect, what to

We don't just show up and just like start running

Usually we'll do the bucket drops with the helicopters.

Dropping water on them, dropping retardant on them to

It's a real kind of slimy, slick kind of wet material

that they'll drop and it gets everything red.

So once the flame does get to it, it slows it down enough to

let us work a little bit more in this area.

And finally once you get the line dug around it, you'll get

the hose down there and you start the perimeter.

Like we're here on the line, and the fire was right here.

We'll just start in 10 feet, and we'll scrape everything

That's like basically our job is to get what we can with the