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Wildland Firefighters To Train On Sisters Burn

SISTERS, OR -- A group of wildland firefighter trainees will practice their new skills on a small prescribed burn outside Sisters, Thursday. Kassidy Kern, with the Deschutes National Forest, says the 45 recruits spent the last several days in the classroom and practiced with equipment on Wednesday. 

 

Kern says they're now ready to work on a real fire, "While they have learned, theoretically, about putting in a hose lay, now they’re hooking up hoses to an engine or to a pump that would go into a creek; and making sure that the pump works and that the hoses are all hooked up and they have the right fittings. You know, it’s just one of those things where the rubber is meeting the road." She tells KBND News they'll work on a 28-acre burn a mile southwest of the Edgington Road community, supervised by experienced firefighters. "They’ll be able to see the ends of the unit. It’s a matter of, ‘OK, we’re going to put lines around this, so that it doesn’t go where we don’t want it to go.’ We have our hose lays that are going to be ready, and we’re going to cool off the hotspots on the edges. They’re going to learn all of those things that they need to know, whether it’s a prescribed for, in the case of the season, obviously, a wildfire." If conditions allow, fuels specialists will burn an additional 108 acres near Sisters. 

 
The new firefighters are part of the Central Oregon Fire Management Service and will be ready to respond to incidents this season. Kern says, "They’re both Deschutes National Forest, Ochoco National Forest, but also Prineville BLM recruits. They’re going to be people who are going to be wildland firefighting this summer in Central Oregon, but also across the nation." She says that because these firefighters will be trained in the Forest Service Incident Command system, they could be sent anywhere. "The way that we manage fire is the same, whether you’re in Oregon or Tennessee or Alaska."

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