July 11, 2018

Today we went to Redmond’s air center or Forest Training center we met Mike Gomez and he’s been in the fire management for about 35 years and he and Aaron was talking to all of us about how there are different areas in firefighting not just wildlife firefighting there’s the hotshot crew, smokejumpers base, tanker base, and cache. The hotshot crew is where there’s a total of 10 people and they stick together throughout the season (which is summer), the smokejumpers crew is where they take a plane close to where the fire is and if it was a small fire they would send a stick which is 2 people and if it was a big fire they would send 10 people which is called a 5 stick, after they jump out of the plane the spotter and assistant spotter would drop the stuff they need to stop the fire in parachutes but some would get stuck in trees and they would have to climb the trees to get it out, the tanker base is a plane that has fire retardant it doesn’t stop the fire but it slows it down enough for the smokejumpers and firefighters to do what they can to stop the fire, the Cache is a big part of the firefighting management the equipment they ship out it gets sent back for repairs, they know what’s out on the field and what’s on the shelf , they know how long they have before they need new repairs and how long they have for reshipment for the next fire. They start with the shipping and receiving, they have a kit room where they pack camp kits, chainsaw kits, and pump kits. After the kit room we went to the technician room and they fix the engines or see what they can fix, after that we went outside and if there was an incident with one of the vehicles they would check to see which ones needed to be fixed or which ones are still good, we then got to see how they test the hoses they get back, if they’re good the would butterfly wrap it and if it wasn’t it would have to be disposed immediately we then got a tour in this one building I don’t remember what it was called but they could track where fires where and how it was spreading. We woke up pretty early and we spent the whole day at Redmond Air center and after lunch I was talking to Jonathan Cortez he goes to Heritage University and he’s majoring in business for marketing and I was told by Jessica Black that I should be talking to students majoring in business and so Jonathan was talking to me about how in business there are all kinds of fields and he was describing what the different fields are and so he and Jessica helped me decide that I might be going to college for marketing and accounting so I could maybe open up my own business for carpentry. We left we went to the library in Bend Oregon and stayed until we were finished or caught up with blogs after the library we went to wal-mart to get what we needed and we also got pizza for dinner from dominoes then we went back to camp. Overall it was a well spent day.