Porter Kling and Jeff Markley, both fire wardens with Tiadaghton Forest Firefighters Association, said they were among those who left Sunday from Hepburnville after being dispatched the day before to assist in controlling the blaze. The cause of which remains under investigation by the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. A large portion of the fire that singed at least 557 acres and potentially threatened nearby residences was on state gamelands.

“We arrived in about 2 ½ hours, got briefed at 8 a.m. and got assigned to help construct a fire line,” Kling said.

There were 12 firefighters, eight of those being members of Tiadaghton’s crew. The others assigned were Endless Mountains Wildfire Crew and Cedar Mountain Wildfire Crew.

“Our firefighter duties were to fell trees with our crews with our chainsaws,” Kling said.

“We were not personally on the line of active fire because we were a couple of acres away,” he said.

“We were constructing a line to hold the fire so we could burn it,” Markley said of what amounted to rigorous work. The elevation of the hillside was 700 feet.

Once briefed at incident command the crew heads in to clean out leaves, using hand tools to dig down to the bare soil, Markley said. The crew dug down to three feet wide. Any snags, where the fire was going to burn or catch sparks, were taken down, cut and taken away so they were not going across the line and starting everything else on fire, he said.

Outdoor conditions were hot, dry and windy.

“Rocky terrain was giving us a big issue,” Markley said.

The crew said they worked uphill on the mountainside with urgency as where they were digging was only a couple hundred yards from homes.

The team dug the line to protect the structures on the south side from catching on fire.

That was done until about 4 p.m. and then the crew went back to complete a fire line along with DCNR officials and lit a fire to counteract the main fire. That is a process known as a back burn.

“There were many houses nearby,” Markley said. He guessed between 30 and 40 homes.

He said he did not believe there were many volunteer fire companies available to help because their members were on fire structure protection duty when the crew showed up.

If these forest firefighters did not respond it would have strained resources of the local volunteer firefighters.

“It is hard work and everybody takes a beating there doing it,” Markley said.

The structural and wildland firefighter requires a lot of training.

Wildland firefighting is extremely intense. It can require hiking up and plenty of manual labor once at the scene.

To be able to do this kind of physical task requires training.

For the crew to go out of district, they have to do what is known as a pack test.

The pack test’s moderate part requires the firefighter to have the ability to finish two miles carrying 25 pounds in 30 minutes. To go out of state, the arduous pack test is 45 pounds, for three miles in 45 minutes.

The equipment taken on this fire included about five chainsaws, backpack leaf blowers and an assortment of hand tools.

The hand tools include fire rakes and rogue hoes, the big brother of a standard garden hoe, and enable the firefighter to dig into the rocks, get down into the roots and cut the roots and get down some place into the duff that is 10 to 12 inches deep.

“You have got to get that all off of there,” Markley said.

A brush truck with water was taken and was not utilized for the fire.

The worst part of the job is the rocks. “You don’t know if the fire is going through the rocks, underneath to the other side,” Markley said.

“When we did a back burn coming down the mountain, we had a hose lay and I instructed the guys once the fire got 5 to 10 feet into what they were burning to wet the line down so they were not taking the chance of going through the rocks,” he said.

Markley took a photograph of his daughter, who was among the crew wetting down the fire underneath the rocks.

“There were 2,000 feet of hose used on the second day to hold the burnout back burn operation,” Kling added.

A lot of challenges were the amount of rocks and all of the dead trees along with the wind and heat.

Moreover, the crew does not have self-contained breathing apparatuses. The air is breathed without the air supply. They are breathing everything that is burning.

Granted, in this fire, the crews did not eat a lot of smoke on what they were doing.

“I’m sure some other people did,” Markley said.

The crew are volunteers but have jobs. Out of the eight people, two of them are full-time college students at Pennsylvania College of Technology majoring in forestry.

Kling said he got interested in wildland firefighting learning his father Todd was doing it before he was born.

“He was deployed with the state to go out to fires,” Kling said.

Markley said he joined the fire company and worked in the woods with his father Keith and “decided I wanted to do wildland.”

“We had our own logging operation. I worked in the woods most of my life and decided if I am going to fight fire I will do it out here.”

These days, the crew said they can use support.

“We are self-funded and rely on donations and fundraising we can do,” Kling said.

“We need the community support and if anybody wants to join up they can get a hold of us,” Markley said.

Any financial or material donations are greatly appreciated and the association can be reached on its Facebook site or donations can go directly to the following address: Tiadaghton Forest Firefighters Association (TFFA) PO Box 5091, South Williamsport, PA 17702.

Throughout the year, DCNR and Bureau of Forestry appreciate the association and what they do in responding to wildland fires and in their educational community outreach.

“They give us training and if they have prescribed burns we assist them in preparing or helping with the burn,” Kling said.

DCNR has not listed a cause for this fire. It ranks in the state as one of the larger ones but at the same time not as devastating because no harm was inflicted or lives lost.

The crew was at the Crystal Lake Fire in Pennsylvania last year, a fire that burned more than 2,000 acres.

Kling has been in the association for five years and Markley has been with the association three years and for several other years with other crews.

The Task Force 83 is in the district and if they go out of the district it is Tiadaghton Forest Firefighters Association.

The history of the wildland firefighters crew here goes back to when it formed in the 1960s. By 2001, the crew combined a couple of different crews with a similar interest and due to manpower shortages they combined into the Tiadaghton Forest Firefighters Association, which comprises volunteer firefighters and fire wardens and the different crews.

The association was larger but is starting to slim down again and that is why the regional support with other crews is necessary due to the manpower shortage.

“Our primary job is to provide aid to DCNR or any other agency that needs the team for assisting in wildfire suppression,” Kling and Markley noted. “We do fire prevention work and community relations, too.”