2016 SBU grad shares tales of battling Western wildfires
By Cameron Hurst
Scanlan has been on almost 40 fires this season, ranging in size from only a tenth of an acre to over 350,000 acres.
It’s the second week of September and the depth of a wildfire in Sierra National Forest leads United States Forest Service crew members stationed at Coconino National Forest in central Arizona to travel nearly 700 miles west to help contain its spread.
Among those joining the battle against the “Creek Fire” — the largest single fire in California’s history — is 2016 St. Bonaventure graduate Alexa “Lex” Scanlan, a second-generation alumna.
“I remember driving through these communities that have just been completely destroyed,” said Scanlan, whose father, Tom, graduated from SBU in 1989. “It’s one thing to see pictures of it in the media, but to actually be on the streets and see the destruction that has been caused is pretty nuts.”
An international studies and political science major, Scanlan never could have envisioned a life amid the inferno. She’s always loved being outdoors and admired the country’s national forests and parks, but it wasn’t until her return from a grad school experience in Brussels that led her to dedicate a career to them.
“While I was in Brussels, I realized that I loved studying what I had been studying but didn’t want to do the job that went along with it,” she said.
Her mother and stepfather had just moved to Sedona, Arizona.
“I ended up falling in love with the area and being out here completely surrounded by national forests,” she said. “I fell into taking a wildland fire class just to learn about it and I enjoyed it so much, I immediately applied for the Forest Service.”
What she learned was that much of the country’s Western region lives with fire as a natural part of its ecosystem.
“Most people out West live in fire dependent communities where the ecosystem is healthy when there is fire involved,” she said. “For many, many decades our wildland fire policy in the country was to fully suppress any fire that we got at the smallest size … We’ve created very unhealthy forests with a high fuel load so that now when there is fire … it becomes uncontrollable very quickly.”
This is Lex Scanlan’s third year fighting wildland fires with the U.S. Forest Service as a seasonal crew member on a fire engine.
“Fire ecology is not as simple as politicians make it seem,” she added. “There’s so much more education to it.”
Scanlan and her colleagues have dedicated their lives to saving these ecosystems, working, save for this year, full time from April to September. However, the overtime they accumulate accounts for what would be a yearly salary.
“I think I’m currently at 900 hours of overtime between April and now,” she said, noting that a “normal work day” is nothing short of folly.
“If I’m on my own forest and I’m just doing initial tasks on my own district, we’re usually working 10- to 12-hour days,” she said. “If it’s a big fire, you’re probably working 16- to 18-hour days. You have briefings in the morning, you spend your hours on the line either burning or prepping and (then you find) some place comfy to sleep on the ground at night.”
She credits her alma mater for teaching her the importance of community, an ideal she continues to uphold through spending many of her days saving those around her.
“I see wildland firefighting as a community,” she said. “We’re all very different people a lot of times. This job draws in people from all walks of life, but ultimately we have common goals and common desires. Just like our Bonaventure community, that’s what knits us together.”