Fire Light Fire Bright
IHC, Interagency Hotshot Crews, are one of the backbones of wildland firefighting. And largely unknown to the general public prior to the disaster at the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire in which nineteen members of a twenty-person hotshot crew were killed in a burnover.
These teams drive as close to fires as possible and then hike in. Often with minimal support, they are the ground team that directly confronts the blaze. A smokejumper is only called on the worst fires or when there is no other way to reach them; a local fire department isn’t equipped or trained to handle a large wildfire. That’s the gap that the IHCs step into.
They cut a brush-free line with chainsaws and specialized axes called Pulaski (axe on one side, adze on the other—essentially a sharpened hoe). The
