How I Got Into Wildfire Services

Step One: Passion

When I was five years old, my mom took me to my school gym where they were having a movie afternoon. That day we were watching Bambi. There a point in the movie where the hunters leave a campfire burning and it escapes, then starts to burn down the forest. Bambi and his dad have to run away in order to stay safe from the fire. Watching that I turned to my mother and said “when I grow up, I am going to make sure that never happens again.”

13 years later, my father and I went to visit the university of Waterloo to visit the Dean of Computer Science, where my father was expecting me to go to school, as the Dean was a friend of his and there would be a spot for me. On the return trip, my father asked what I thought. I told him it was very neat, very cool but that I had applied to forestry school and had been accepted, and that I would like to try that first before going to the university.

From the time I was five to the time I was 18, I spent all my free time walking, hiking, camping and fishing in the different conservation areas and provincial parks in southern Ontario. So it wasn’t a big surprise to him that I had applied to forestry school. I found out the day before we went to the university but my mom told me not to tell him until after our trip.

Step Two: Application

In my first year of forestry college, I applied to the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources to be a fire fighter for summer employment, but didn’t receive any call backs. For weeks I went back and forth to the guidance counselors to find a job in wildfire. Then one afternoon, I was called in over the PA system. The college had received a call from Lloyd Millenan, the Manager of Wildfire for the Sudbury District, asking if they had anybody who was interested in fighting fire. They had some new positions opening up for the summer for two prescribed burning crews. He had left a message saying he would call back at 4:00 pm to interview whoever they found. It was my chance.

We did a phone interview for an hour, after which he offered me a position on the crew as the Crew Boss, and asked me to find five more guys that I thought would enjoy the job or who wanted jobs in fire for the summer. That summer I started work in Sudbury and did all my training, and started working on prescribed burns in the Sudbury district. A month into the program the funding was unfortunately pulled, but instead of laying us off each person was added to a wildfire crew.