By Joseph B. Frazier
The Associated Press
AUMSVILLE, Oregon — Rosario Franco and many in his family have fought wildfires across the western United States for years. His brother and cousin are both firefighters. His father is a contractor for fire crews.
Across the country, a growing number of Hispanics are taking on the hot, dangerous and dirty work because the demand is high in season and it usually pays better than farm work.
Many — nobody knows how many — are undocumented, a problem Franco claims does not concern him.
“I think our crews are legal,” he said at his home in this Willamette Valley town. “My job is to do my job and that’s what I do.”
Nevertheless, it is clear Hispanics dominate many wildland fire crews.
Debby Miley, executive director of the National Wildfire Suppression Association, an umbrella organization for fire crew contractors, said 75 percent of the contract crews in the United States come from the Pacific Northwest.
And Oregon Department of Forestry spokesman Rod Nichols said about 85 percent of the crews in states of Washington and Oregon are Hispanic. His office administers firefighting contracts with private companies for the two states.
It is not the same everywhere. The South Dakota-based International Association of Wildland Fires says the Hispanic percentage in Northwest crews is generally considered to be well above the national average; the Forest Service region covering California and Hawaii is under a federal consent decree to bring its Hispanic participation in fire crews up to about 31.5 percent, from about 10 percent now.
In Oregon, Nichols said, the Forestry Department tries to run a legal operation — “but at the same time we worry about the possibility of losing all those crews” if an immigration crackdown scoops up big numbers of undocumented firefighters.
While there usually are enough firefighters, Nichols said, there are problems in bad years such as 2002, when National Guard troops and crews from Canada and Australia were needed.
The Pew Hispanic Center estimates about half of the 300,000 or so Hispanics in Oregon are undocumented. If that percentage applies to the crews, an immigration crackdown could sideline thousands of firefighters.
Miley said government agencies are expected to monitor contractors under their control but that contractors and employees are too numerous to keep perfect track. She also said some smaller operators knowingly hire illegal immigrants and take advantage of them, and that can undercut legitimate contractors.
The U.S. Forest Service inspector general has launched an effort to identify illegal immigrants who are working for contract crews.
“We do not have sufficient information to estimate the amount of undocumented workers on contract firefighting crews,” the inspector general’s office said in a March audit of the contract crew system.
The report said firefighting contractors don’t get “routine support from federal immigration authorities in the detection of falsified or counterfeit immigration and/or identification documents.”
Employers need only ask for basic documents such as a Social Security card or a “green card” work permit. If they look real, that’s enough pending later verification. But pristine laptop-generated fakes are easily and cheaply available.
Federal verification of a Social Security number can take months, but that too is changing. Jim Walker, Oregon Department of Forestry training manager, said his office will begin this year using Web sites that can quickly verify a Social Security number.
There’s no estimate yet on how many will come up dirty through the faster verification.
Aside from the legal status of immigrants, firefighting raises another important issue: language. Firefighters in dangerous situations must be able to understand instantly the orders and warnings they receive from commanders.
National standards require the crew boss and the three squad leaders on each 20-man crew to speak sufficient English and the language of the crew.
But the audit found no guarantee that non-English-speaking crew supervisors can talk to incident coordinators who oversee firefighting strategy, and there is no standard language assessment for crew members.
The region is boosting efforts for firefighters who need bilingual skills. Clackamas Community College in Oregon City is launching a program for Hispanic firefighters and to certify that crew bosses can communicate with both coordinators and their crews.
Such certification will be mandatory in 2007 in Oregon, Washington and a small sliver of western Idaho.
Tom Laugle, who directs wildland firefighting programs at the college, sees the certification program as an integral part of standardizing training now often done by contractors’ groups. He said he has been told to expect up to 2,500 students and certification candidates.
Bilingual vocabulary and more will be available online, so candidates can arrive better prepared, and the standard firefighters’ pocket guide is being translated into Spanish.
Laugle said the program is still being polished but likely will eventually be a model for others.
“If you do it right you can save one or two lives on the fire line,” he said. “You can never prove it but you’ve got to believe it.”
Laugle chafes at the recent emphasis on illegal immigrants, noting that the program began long before the issue arose and that the program will have no ties with immigration authorities. He said he would close it down if that happened.
He recalled the 2002 B&B Fire near vacation communities in Central Oregon.
“There were million-dollar homes in there,” he said. “I don’t think one of those owners cared if there were illegal firefighters on that fire line.”
Laugle said he wonders how far immigration authorities will press it.
“If one of those housing areas burns,” he said, “and it is traceable to the fact that hundreds of Hispanic firefighters have been let go ... wow!”