Colorado Condensate

Incendiary Imbeciles #4

Lots of wildland fire workers enjoy being a part of the virtuous fire cycle and pridefully protect human structures. But many times unknown circumstances compromise their safety. 

From the air, we got a good look of the millions of years old interplay of wildland fires’ creative destruction and promise of rebirth, renewal and vibrant growth on this landscape of piñon, juniper, and sagebrush. We also saw the encroaching fossil fuel infrastructure that sprawled as gigantic spider webs of pipelines binding derelict carcasses of rusting storage tanks and decaying pump jacks. 

On the ground, we gathered our tools and headed to the point where the fire immediately threatened a huge storage tank, maybe 10 yards in diameter. It leaked rusty, oily grease in several places. We had been told not to worry about the storage tank because it was only half full, which seemed more dangerous to us. We started digging our fire line in an area some distance from that tank because it seemed mostly devoid of vegetation and could be a good anchor spot and a safety zone. It appeared easy to burn-out with a fusee, so we could retreat if the fire blew up and threatened us. 

The whole area reeked of foul, malodorous fossil fuel odors. I left our crew to get information from a man standing near a fossil gas company’s truck. When I arrived, he mentioned that he enjoyed seeing us parachute in but he considered parachuting way too dangerous. Anyway, he said his company’s usual response to wildfires consisted of just doing nothing because there existed a serious chance of severe explosions. He added sardonically that maybe his company’s corporate managers would make more money on the insurance claim than they ever would from the fossil gas in this area. 

Well, I told him, we were here now and assigned to suppress this wildfire, so could he please point out places that might be particularly dangerous. He said that he mostly worried about the condensate pit, where our crew had dug a line in what looked like a good safety zone. It didn’t look like a pit. Apparently the company stretched a small pipeline away from the storage tank to allow the condensing chemicals from the fossil gas to drip out onto the soil. And they called it the “condensate pit.” He said if any embers or fire got into that “pit” the volatile gases could cause the whole area to blow up in a gigantic, hellacious explosion. 

So I scrambled back to where we started our fireline in our potential safety zone and told them to get the hell out of there. Some crew members, perhaps with a sense of loyalty to protect human infrastructure against natural wildfire, lingered to put out incoming embers as we retreated.

We had excellent radio communication on that fire, but confused people didn't communicate well. We shouldn’t have been assigned to suppress the wildfire there. And later, a BLM fire truck arrived, the madder-than-a-hornet driver jumped out, angry that we had “poached” this fire in his jurisdiction. 

I wondered what relationship existed between the fossil fuel company and wildland fire protection. Perhaps the fossil fuel company remained responsible for wildfires near them and some obscure written decree declared firefighters weren’t supposed to be anywhere near fossil fuel infrastructure. But I suspect if such an agreement existed, mid-level, government fire protection command ignored it for a variety of reasons. 

Perhaps they wanted to do a favor for the fossil fuel companies because they felt indebted to the jobs and the money that these companies brought in. Perhaps, they didn’t want bad media reports of how wildland firefighters had stood by and let the fire consume this infrastructure. 

Barry Lewis/Getty Images

At any rate, industrial fossil fuel infrastructure appeared to be a bigger blight on the landscape, than millennia of wildfires. For all the fire protection and other subsidies tossed at fossil fuel companies, it would’ve been cheaper to employ people as Wildfire Rangers and wildland fire managers to creatively interact with this eternal interplay of necessary destruction of the grateful old and the thankful regeneration of the new. 

This reminds me of an old joke that emphasizes the exaggerated dangers of parachute jumpingand the common underestimated dangers of fossil fuel infrastructure: A man on his firstparachute jump exits a plane and attempts to pull his ripcord, but nothing happens. So, as hehurtles towards Earth, he sees a man rising from Earth up towards him. The parachuter shoutsdown to the upward bound man, “Hey, do you know anything about parachutes?” The man, nowabove the parachuter, shouts down, “No, do you know anything about gas stoves?”