Playing With Government-Approved Fire

There are few things in this world more reassuring than a government exercise that promises danger, delivers smoke, and sends everyone home in time for supper.

Out in the hills behind Hidden Valley this week, a fine collection of Reno and Zephyr Cove high school students is being turned loose upon a “Mock Fire,” which is to say a blaze so considerate it burns only on paper and in the imagination, yet still requires a small army of agencies to defeat it. The Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, the Nevada Division of Forestry, and enough uniforms to start a modest parade will all attend to this invisible catastrophe.

The students, drawn from the Academy of Arts, Careers and Technology High School and Whittell High, will do everything but get singed. They’ll cut fire lines, haul hose packs, take part in incident command, and even investigate the cause of a fire that, like many government problems, exists chiefly because they said it does.

Engines will roll, orders shouted, and the whole affair will proceed with the solemn urgency of a real emergency, minus the inconvenience of actual flames.

Now, I am in favor of young people learning a trade, especially one that involves sweat, dirt, and the occasional good decision under pressure. It is a rare curriculum that teaches both how to swing a tool and how to keep your head while everything around you tries to lose its own. If a Republic must depend on anything, it may as well be citizens who know which end of a shovel goes into the ground and which way fire tends to run when the wind gets contrary.

Still, there is something deliciously American about assembling six agencies, a university partnership, and a battalion of future firefighters to chase a fire that has agreed, in advance, not to misbehave. It is a favorite dream: order imposed on chaos, only here the chaos has signed a waiver and promised to be home by dusk.

Brock Uhlig of the U.S. Wildland Fire Service says the program is “important” as wildfire threats grow, and he is quite right. Fire has a way of ignoring press releases and budgets alike. Jennifer Diamond adds that the training offers a “rare and valuable opportunity” to experience wildfire response in the field.

Also true, though I suspect the real value comes later, when the smoke is real, the hillside is less cooperative. And the only thing between a bad day and a worse one is whether these students remember what they practiced when it was safe to forget.

By the end of the exercise, faux flames will get snuffed and reports written, and the hills will look much as they did before the government declared war upon them. The students will leave with a little more knowledge, a little more confidence, and perhaps a quiet suspicion that real fires are less polite.

And that is the whole point. A nation can afford to rehearse disaster, but it cannot afford to be surprised by it, so if we must play with fire, we may as well raise a generation that knows it is not a game.