The firefighters collapse in driveways and fields to steal a moment’s rest. They sleep in their engines, sprawled across fire hoses or slumped over steering wheels. After they spend days hacking dead brush and setting defensive fires across flaming mountains, their 24-hour rest breaks are cut short when a new fire rears up.
In this relentless wildfire season, when fire crews and resources are stretched thin from the foothills of the Rockies to Alaska’s wilderness, the latest enemy confronting firefighters is not flame. It is grinding exhaustion.
“Everybody’s beat,” said Paul Fleckenstein, a battalion chief who spent the past two weeks fighting a wildfire that killed four people and destroyed 1,958 homes and other buildings here in the parched mountains 90 miles north of San Francisco. “There’s nothing left to give.” Mr. Fleckenstein knew he was getting tired when he climbed into his red-striped truck after a full day defending the pine-shaded neighborhoods where the blaze had erupted on the afternoon of Sept. 12. It was 2 a.m., and he was planning to check on nearby crews, but he ended up miles down the road, with no memory of having driven so far. “My body just failed me,” he said, as he drove past the white ash of homes he had tried to save that night. Fighting wildfires has always been draining, dangerous work, but firefighters say they now are being flung from one huge blaze to the next, using the same old axes and scrapers to fight a new species of mega-fires born from years of drought, while dealing with rising temperatures and government policies that filled the woods with tinder.