A Bluffton firefighter is back home safe after traveling out West to help battle wildfires.
Tyler Marion of Ridgeland spent 18 days in three different states. He started in Coleville, California battling the Slink fire, then went to Stanley, Idaho for the Trap fire, and ended in Salt Lake City, Utah where the Neffs fire is burning.
Marion worked as a fireline EMT.
Marion has lived in the Lowcountry his whole life and says the fires were unlike anything he’d ever seen before.
“It almost looks like something you’d see in a suspense or possibly a horror movie with everything just blacked in the forest. It gave me a lot of things to research and look up, and ways we can make the department better if we do this again, and ways that I can better myself. Some lessons learned," Marion says.
Marion says, given the opportunity to do this again, he’d go in a heartbeat.