Randy Brooks' son had a request three years ago: What could his dad do to make wildland firefighting safer?
To Brooks, a professor at the University of Idaho's College of Natural Resources who deals with wildland firefighting, it was more of a command.
His son, Bo Brooks, is a wildland firefighter who a few days earlier during that 2015 fire season fled a wall of flames that killed three of his fellow firefighters in eastern Washington. The result of the conversation was an online survey that drew some 400 firefighters who mostly identified mental and physical fatigue as the primary cause of injuries to firefighters who are often confronted with a changing, dangerous environment.
But a self-selecting online survey is not necessarily representative of what's happening in the field. So Randy Brooks decided to apply some science.