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FIRE
IN THE SOUL: BMFA Chief Don Whittemore
Driving down Linden, we are on our way to
a luncheon interview when the portable communications radio squawks. It is
a medical alarm from Boulder
Heights. The Boulder Mountain Fire
Authority (BMFA) Chief responds immediately, notifies the dispatcher of his
location, sticks a red flashing light on the roof and we are off.
A young boy in rural Connecticut, a
fourth generation Yankee, dreams of manning a fire lookout tower with his
dog, deep in the evergreen forests of the mountain West. Life, as always,
takes unexpected turns and detours, but the dream persists and today that
young boy, Don Whittemore, is the full time Chief of BMFA, responsible for
safeguarding our homes and keeping watch over all these acres of dry
Ponderosas.
 Of solid, sensible Yankee stock, Don grew
up on a poultry and dairy farm started by his great-great-grandfather near
Middlebury, Connecticut. Most of his family still lives there. His
siblings went to sensible colleges and followed sensible careers. But Don
was different. There was always, in him, a tension between doing the
expected, conventional thing and following a more adventurous path. Thus he
chose Hampshire College,
where talented students are free to shape their own course of learning.
After college, he parlayed his
computer skills in the early days of the PC into a job managing the
inception and growth of the IBM clone-making division of a giant European
company. A sensible job. But after a few years the excitement of a
start-up was gone and the tension pulled the other way. He quit the job on
Friday, went wind surfing on Saturday, met the Vice President of an
international company manufacturing sailboards, and joined as manager for
the fledgling U.S. division. Sales tripled in just under two years. But by
now this was becoming another conventional job: time to move on.
And there was always the interest in
fire. In fire-fighting there was, to him, a sense of adventure and romance,
a mystique that would not let go. He says, "fire was always in my
subconscious." In his early twenties, he got his CPR certification and
became a volunteer with the local fire department. But he had not yet
combined fire with a career. An enduring interest in the environment sent
him back to college, to Yale, where he earned a Master's degree in Natural
Resources Policy Management and Law. This led to his first job in the West,
as executive director of a non-profit doing Forest Service policy work in
Bozeman,
Montana. Taking over an organization with
one half-time paid position he built it into a six person operation in two
years. By then the major challenges were over. When friends from Yale
visited Bozeman and proposed starting a business in Boulder, he accepted.
The business was ECOS, an environmental communications company, that among
other things created the interpretive signs at the Denver Zoo and the large
color displays along the Boulder Creek Trail.
Don moved to Boulder
Heights
and joined the volunteer fire department at the bottom of the totem pole.
In 1994 he responded to his first wildland fire. It was a small fire, about
an acre, ignited by lightning, off Old Stage Road. The crew were digging a
fire line, a small airplane tanker was buzzing and dropping fire retardant.
There was action and excitement and the joy of working hard as part of a
dedicated group. The Forest Service was helping the local crew. One hour
later word came that 50 people were trapped by the South Canyon Fire near
Glenwood Springs. Fourteen people would die in that fire, one of the worst
tragedies in wildfire fighting history. The Forest Service personnel
immediately pulled out and rushed to help their stricken colleagues. The
camaraderie and desire to take care of their own made a deep impression. It
was his first wildland fire, but Don was hooked: "That was just the best
thing ever."
Finally he decided to "do fire full
time" and signed up with the National Park Service as a prescribed fire
specialist. His father had a hard time understanding why someone with a
good degree and business experience would work long hours in primitive
conditions, away from home for seven months of the year, for $9 an hour.
His siblings’ reaction was more direct; they thought he was crazy!
But to Don, it was Nirvana. He was part
of a pioneering group bringing state-of-the-art technology to the Park
Service, providing the detailed local observations that were vital for the
development of fire prediction algorithms. Eventually his father would
understand, somewhat, how Don's experience with computers, the environment,
business, and his passion for fires all came together in the country's wild
lands.
The work was not without risk. In
Bandolier National Park, New Mexico, he was part of a crew charged with
doing a 1200 acre prescribed burn in one day. They were setting fire along a
trail that dog-legged along a canyon edge with greater than a 1000 foot
drop. They were bringing fire to the interior, away from the canyon. Big
wind shifts periodically pushed the fire ahead of them and then turned it
toward them, forty foot walls of flame. The only way to beat it was to put
down more fire between them and the high flames and try to race ahead.
Running down the trail, the more fires they set, the more intense the larger
fire became. Heat and flames and people running forward and loading up from
five gallon cans of fuel on the canyon edge. It was, he says, the scariest
scene. They survived "by the skin of their teeth."
For two years, he was with the Park
Service, traveling to Florida,
the Carolinas and all over the West. It was a hard lifestyle. There were
times when the crew went twenty days without telephone access. It created
an intense bond between the crew members and Don still keeps in regular
contact with them. It was "as close as you can get" to childhood dreams.
However, there were other concerns.
His marriage was failing, in part because of the long periods away from
home. It was an impossible job for raising a family. So he quit and moved
back to Boulder, joining the Boulder
Heights
fire department as assistant chief. Then the
Boulder
Heights
and Pine
Brook
Hills departments merged and he became the first full time fire chief of the
new Boulder Mountain Fire Authority.
He has been chief for one and a half
years now and there is a sense that this job brings together all his
experience, his passion for fire work, and his family life in one harmonious
whole. Merging the two departments has presented some of the challenges of
a start-up, his business experience comes in handy in preparing budgets and
other administrative work, and he is still working with fire. It is a
service job, helping people and community, for him always a preference. He
is newly married. His bride, Lauren, is on the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group
and has qualified search and rescue dogs. When the beeper goes off at 2
a.m., it is question of finding out whose beeper went off.
The next big task Don sees is in
reducing the fire danger in the district through fire mitigation and
thinning our unnaturally dense forests. In terms of fire hazard, he says,
"this is as scary a place as there is in the country."
We have turned onto Lee Hill Road and
are negotiating the steep tight turns as the road weaves towards
Boulder
Heights. The radio squawks again. The medical alarm was false. We slow
down, turn around at a side road, and drive back to Boulder. We pull into a
parking lot off Iris and walk towards the restaurant.
"Good place," he says, "a lot of fire
fighters eat here." This Yankee, who long ago dreamed of guarding western
forests, is home.
From
The Pine Brook Press, Autumn, 2000 |
