Montana GOP Senate hopeful Tim Sheehy, who made his fortune because the founder and CEO of an aerial firefighting firm that has relied largely on profitable federal contracts, has repeatedly accused wildland firefighters of dragging their ft to place out blazes and “milking” disasters for extra time pay, a HuffPost assessment of his current statements discovered.
In his 2023 e-book “Mudslingers: A True Story of Aerial Firefighting,” Sheehy described a dialogue he had with fellow firefighters throughout a sequence of blazes in Idaho in 2015.
“I was hanging out at the base, shooting the breeze with some other guys, talking about how intense the fires seemed to be, just trying to make conversation and contribute to the cause,” Sheehy wrote. “‘Hopefully we can hammer this thing down quickly and get it under control,’ I said. Most of the other guys nodded solemnly, but one person, a pilot, kind of straightened up and grunted. ‘Well, we don’t want it to go too fast,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of overtime pay to be earned out there! We put it out, it’s back on salary!’”
That dialog led Sheehy — an ex-Navy SEAL who based a Bozeman, Montana-based firefighting firm referred to as Bridger Aerospace in 2014 — to confront what he described as a “troubling undercurrent of complacency, of embracing or at least accepting the status quo because, frankly, there was so much money at stake.”
“I’ve since come to realize that this is not a feeling shared universally, but it does exist, and to deny its existence is to impede the efforts of those who understand the importance of change,” he wrote.
On the time of that 2015 encounter, Sheehy was nonetheless working to get Bridger Aerospace, a startup with a concentrate on utilizing infrared cameras and different surveillance expertise to watch fires, off the bottom.
Whereas Sheehy would go on to make thousands and thousands from the identical pot of federal cash that wildland firefighters depend on, his writings and more moderen public feedback counsel he got here to view many within the discipline as unhealthy actors competing for and finally losing the federal government’s restricted assets.
The 2015 dialog “smacked less of concern or common sense than it did laziness — or, worse, greed,” he wrote in his e-book. “I wouldn’t call it malevolence; anyone who climbs into a plane or picks up a shovel to fight wildfires clearly has a capacity for goodness and a desire to help. That said, even in positions that are demonstrably service-oriented, there is the potential for self-interest, if not outright corruption, leading to a response that is not necessarily in the public’s best interest.”
″If there isn’t any fireplace, there isn’t any cash,” he added. “And the faster that a fire is extinguished, the sooner the money dries up or goes elsewhere. It might seem ridiculous to worry about a shortage of work to keep the wildfire industry busy given the extraordinary expansion of the season in recent years, not to mention the gnawing sense that firefighters will forever be overmatched against nature. But old beliefs and protocols die hard, and clearly there were some in the industry who saw nothing wrong with milking every fire for what it was worth despite the risks and the blurring of ethical boundaries.”
Sheehy echoed that very same sentiment throughout a e-book signing in Huntsville, Alabama in March, months after he launched his bid towards three-term incumbent Democratic Sen. Jon Tester. He advised the gang that his firm’s use of expertise to battle fires extra shortly and successfully was “not received well” inside the broader business.
“There’s a very real dynamic in wildfire that a lot of those people don’t want to put the fire out,” he stated on the occasion, in keeping with a recording obtained by HuffPost. “It’s called ‘let it burn.’ And they don’t want to put the fire out because that’s where they get their overtime, that’s where they get their hazard pay. And for a lot of these folks out there — I don’t mean to cast them in a negative light, but it’s just a fact — they don’t want that fire to be put out, because … they make half their annual income on hazard overtime pay during the summer fires.”
NATALIE BEHRING by way of Getty Photos
For the reason that early Seventies, the U.S. Forest Service has more and more allowed sure wildfires, normally people who begin naturally in distant areas, to proceed burning — not in order that firefighters may rake in extra time pay, however in hopes of slowly reversing the devastating impacts of many years of aggressive fireplace suppression, which has left many forests overloaded with gasoline and extra vulnerable to excessive infernos.
Scientists have come to know the essential function fireplace performs in lots of forest ecosystems, from clearing away useless vegetation to controlling invasive species. However the Forest Service disputes that it has ever had a “let it burn” coverage. And the overwhelming majority of fires — roughly 98% — are nonetheless suppressed earlier than they devour 100 acres.
In his e-book, Sheehy does dive into the complicated set of things driving more and more catastrophic wildfires, together with local weather change and the nation’s lengthy historical past of racing to extinguish each fireplace as shortly as attainable. He describes fireplace suppression as a “double-edged sword” and notes that “putting every single fire out immediately all the time isn’t the answer.” And he sympathizes with wildland fireplace crews, describing them as “highly motivated and skilled individuals who make little more than minimum wage and usually have a passion for both the work and the lifestyle.”
However except for that single remark from an unnamed wildland firefighting pilot in 2015, he provides nothing to again up his declare that a big variety of firefighters are standing round watching fires burn for private monetary acquire.
Sheehy’s marketing campaign didn’t reply to any of HuffPost’s questions on his portrayal of wildland firefighters. As an alternative, in a brief e mail assertion, marketing campaign spokesperson Katie Martin touted Sheehy’s army and enterprise credentials and condemned HuffPost’s reporting on the GOP candidate as “embarrassing.”
Ben McLane is a captain of a Forest Service fireplace crew and a board member of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a nonprofit that advocates for federal firefighters. He advised HuffPost he “respects the heck out of” aerial firefighters and applauded Sheehy for beginning an organization that gives a vital service to communities threatened by fireplace, however condemned Sheehy’s statements about wildland firefighters as “fundamentally flawed.”
“I’ve never seen firefighters let something burn for the sake of keeping the good times going and for monetary reasons,” McLane advised HuffPost. “You’ve got to take into account all you’re sacrificing to be out there.”
“For him to basically accuse firefighters of retreating intentionally — these same people who represent the kind of patriotic attributes in action that he claims to represent in words — is a contradiction that is just hard for me to fathom,” he added.
Sheehy resigned as CEO of Bridger Aerospace in July to concentrate on his Senate bid. Polls present Sheehy main Tester within the race, which many say may finally resolve which occasion controls the Senate subsequent 12 months.
As HuffPost beforehand reported, Sheehy was as soon as outspoken about the necessity to fight international local weather change and supported main local weather initiatives. However since launching his marketing campaign, Sheehy has repeatedly railed towards what he calls the “climate cult” and the “disastrous socialist Green New Deal.”
In the meantime, in public paperwork, Bridger Aerospace has made clear-eyed assessments of the results of worsening local weather change. In its most up-to-date annual report to the Securities and Alternate Fee, Bridger wrote that the “consequences of these climate-driven events may vary widely and could include increased stress on our services due to new patterns of demand, physical damage to our fleet and infrastructure, higher operational costs and an increase in the number [of] requests for our services.”
Fossil fuel-driven local weather change, misguided fireplace suppression insurance policies and elevated growth in forested areas have triggered an an period of megafires that pose a rising menace to many communities. But the wildland firefighters on the entrance traces of this emergency stay woefully underpaid, incomes a base wage of simply $15 per hour whereas going through excessive bodily and psychological well being dangers, as ProPublica not too long ago reported. The surge in extra time pay amongst wildland firefighters is largely on account of a scarcity of individuals keen to do that harmful job, and for a lot of firefighters, extra time pay is the one strategy to make a dwelling wage.
“A lot of the work of Grassroots has been advocating for a livable wage for firefighters, which we still have not attained,” McLane stated. “I don’t think it’s greedy to identify pathways to balance your call to service and adventure with the need to feed your family and wanting to be out on assignment to do that.”
He famous {that a} invoice to hike wildland firefighters’ wages has stalled in Congress. If lawmakers resolve to maneuver the invoice, “that will be a great day, because no longer will we have to face that moral conflict,” he stated.
Sheehy shouldn’t be the primary Montana Republican to accuse wildland firefighters of being lazy and mismanaging infernos.
In July 2006, then-GOP Sen. Conrad Burns famously accosted a crew of extremely educated wildland firefighters, often called hotshots, that had been within the state to assist battle a big fireplace close to the city of Worden. On the Billings, Montana airport, Burns accused the crew of doing a ”piss-poor job” preventing the blaze.
Help Free Journalism
Already contributed? Log in to cover these messages.
In keeping with a state official’s report of the incident, Burns pointed at one specific firefighter and stated, “See that guy over there? He hasn’t done a God-damned thing. … You probably paid that guy $10,000 to sit around. It’s gotta change.”
The state official famous in her report that she “offered to the senator that our firefighters make around $8-$12 per hour and time-and-a-half for overtime. He seemed a little surprised that it wasn’t higher.″
Burns later apologized for his outburst, saying he should have “chosen my words more carefully” and that his criticism “should not have been directed at those who were working hard to put [the fire] out.” A couple of months later, Tester narrowly defeated Burns, a three-term incumbent.
On the 2-year anniversary of Burns’ assault on wildland firefighters, Wildfire At the moment, a publication of Missoula, Montana-based nonprofit Worldwide Affiliation of Wildland Hearth, summarized the incident like this:
“Burns was up for re-election, running against Democrat Jon Tester. Soon, 1,000 ‘Wildland Firefighters for Tester’ bumper stickers appeared. Tester won by about 2000 votes, and the leading political columnist for the Lee Newspaper chain credited the ‘firefighter flap.’ The Democrats took control of the U.S. Senate by a margin of one.”
