Kerry Crivello: Fighting California’s Fires

purpose are worth the danger. I'm Kim Azzarelli, and this is Seneca's one hundred Women to Hear. We're bringing you one hundred of the world's most inspiring and history making women. You need to hear now. Carrie Crivello is at the front lines during a record year for California wildfires. To date, more than four million acres have been burned. Smoke often fills the sky in the Los Angeles area, where nine thousand people have been told to evacuate. There aren't too

many firefighters like Carry. She's the mother of a six year old son in a profession that's ent mail. In fact, she was the only woman in her graduating class of firefighters. Her job is physically and emotionally demanding, and she's often working twenty four hour days, if not longer. Why did she do it? Listen and learn why. Carrie Crivello is one of Seneca's one hundred Women to Hear. Thanks so much for joining me today, Thanks for having me. So, Carrie,

tell us a little bit about what you do. So, I'm a firefighter and a paramedic for the City of Los Angeles UM SO, as a municipal department for a big city like this, we cover every type of emergency you can imagine, and being in California where brush fires are a huge thing, of course, we also go out and we help with brush fires. Sometimes they're within the city and that's something we're going to pull all our resources immediately out and do our best to control the fire.

Sometimes they're larger fires somewhere else in the county or even somewhere else in the state, and then we pull our resources in what we call a mutual aid and we pack up and head out to go help um wherever we can. On a day to day basis, we're more more than anything, we're doing medical calls in the city working as a paramedic, whether I'm on a fire engine or a fire truck or on an ambulance, the majority of the nival one calls we get in the

city are actually for medical emergencies. How bad are the fires in California and how dangerous is it for those fighting them? Yeah, We've actually had a string of tough years for fires in California. UM, this year it's been

particularly bad. We had a really dry winter, so the brush, especially that the grasses in the shrubbery dried out really early this year, and that kind of fuel leads to the types of fires we're seeing with this massive amount of acreage that's spreading really quickly, that's really difficult for firefighters to get a hold of in the initial phases

of the fire. UM. On top of that, it seemed like sort of a perfect storm of factors all came together right around Labor Day when there were some storms with lightning and also a ton of heat waves all

in a row. Um, which creates sort of a situation where the fuels, like I'm talking to you know, the shrubs, the grasses not only are they dry to start out, but overnight the temperatures aren't cooling, there's no moisture coming back into the fuels, so any small thing can spark it off, whether it's lightning or whether it's started an accidental start from some campers or some even unfortunately intentional

starts sometimes by arsonists. And these fires have just been spreading extremely rapidly, and when they all sort of kicked off simultaneously throughout the state, it became more challenging for us to manage as firefighters because our resources are spread

more thin throughout the state. So we share resources like the super scuber airplanes and the water dropping helicopters, and those are often leased or shared between different fire departments and agencies, and we're just spread really thin and having to rely on national resources which take a little longer to get here. So when you're fighting these fires, what is a day like? I understand you work shifts, sometimes longer. Yeah,

we normally work twenty four shifts. So in the city, when we come to work, become at six one morning and don't go home until six o'clock the next morning, and that's our standards. So we're all pretty used to that. When we get out on a brush fire, um initially we're usually going to be sent out for a minimum of thirty six sometimes even forty eight hours before you get a break, so you may be actively fighting fire

without sleep for multiple nights in a row. Um, you may not even get your first meal or food for sometimes twelve to six eighteen hours into the fire before you're able to get a break, just to have something to eat, um, so that can be really challenging. We we've all are as prepared as we possibly can be. Every day on the fire engine, we have with us

a bag. We call it our go bag, so we all always have some stuff with us, some screened water, chapstick, um, everyone has a couple of little snacks, whether it's like beef jerky or trail mix or protein bar, is something that you can have so that in the event we do get sent out, we can get by with what we have just in our little pack for the first twenty four hours and maybe a dry t shirt or

some clean socks to throw on. And then it's not really until these fires develop into a bigger incident, so maybe forty eight hours in or sometimes even longer than that, when they establish a full base camp, and that's at

that point we're going to have resources we need. They'll have trailers with showers, they'll have food for us, and they'll be able to meet our needs and have enough personnel and resources so that you can take your engine and your company down off the hill for a little bit, get some food, sometimes, get a nap, sometimes a few hours of sleep, and let somebody else come and take over the work you are doing so we can sort of basically it becomes shifts then and then those are

typically either twelve hour work periods or sometimes twenty four hour work periods, and then you'll get a rest period between. Wow. Incredible, Well it sounds like obviously very difficult, dangerous work. Why do you do it? Um? What motivates you to keep going? You know, I feel really lucky to have the job I have. I love it. Um. Every day we go to work is something different. It's not like I know I'm going to go in and have a meeting and write a paper or submit a draft of something. It's

every single day you show up and who knows. You could be in the middle of breakfast and have the biggest fire of your career. You could be in the shower and get sent to a shooting. You could we just anything could happen at any moment, and there's some fun to that, some element of excitement and adrenaline and and just fun of the unpredictability of it. But I think the biggest thing is the camaraderie we get from it.

It's like being on a team. I was on sports teams in my whole life, and then this is sort of just a continuation of that. We show up to work and we each have a different position we're riding that day, whether it's driving the fire engine to being the captain on the engine, or riding as a firefighter on the seat on the left or the seat on the right, and knowing exactly where you sit is going

to dictate what you do. So if on Monday, I'm riding in the seat on the left as a firefighter, I know exactly what I'm gonna do when we show up on a fire on Tuesday, I'm riding in the seat on the right. Instead of pulling a nozzle to the fire, I'm going to be connecting to the hydrant, or I'm gonna be grabbing one tool instead of another.

So it's almost like a choreographic dance. We all know exactly what needs to happen, and obviously that requires a ton of training, but there's something so satisfying when we actually get out. We have that moment we need to perform, and everyone does exactly what they're supposed to do and it all comes together in sort of this like perfect process.

Of course, nothing is ever perfect. Something always is going to go wrong, but it's about adapting, overcoming, and then in the end when we solve the problem, whether it's putting out a fire or getting pulses back in a cardiac arrest, or figuring out a way to cut into a car that has been smashed and we're having to perform extrication to get a patient out, whatever it might be, it's a experience of working together with your teammates or coworkers and then coming out with this common goal that's

just like, ultimately so satisfying. I think that's really what keeps all of us coming back. Sounds amazing, sounds like such purpose driven work, and I could see why, um, why you get up and we're so lucky you get up and do that every day and we appreciate it. What are the challenges of being one of the few female firefighters, especially doing this, you know, very intense physical work. Yeah. You know, I've been really lucky in that I live and work in the city of l A, which is

pretty forward thinking city. Um. And there were some really strong women who came before me who were truly the trailblazers who really like cut the path, and we're the first women in the fire department improved that women could

do it. Of course, we get tested. Every new firefighter gets tested, and everybody is expected to meet the standards and perform the same exact tasks, whether it's lifting a ladder, pulling a hose line, cutting through a roof with an axe, the kinds of things that are truly really physically demanding. And I think the guys, once you prove that, the guy's respect the females on the job equally. There's no I've never had any experience where anyone held it against

me that I was a female. I've always felt like I was welcomed in and treated with respect and treated like I was just one of the guys. UM. I think the biggest challenge females face is just the physical limitations, and that's mostly just based on size and strength, And of course there are guys who are also small or maybe not as strong as others, but just overall, females are typically stronger and typically I'm sorry, typically smaller and

typically not as strong as the guys. And when you're asked to wear the same equipment and performed the same job, it's just naturally going to be more challenging. So two pound ladder. For me to put up a two hundred pound ladder while I'm wearing eighty pounds of gear, it's going to be a lot more challenging than it is for the two fifty pound guy who's also wearing the same amount of gear and putting up the same weight ladder.

But it doesn't mean it's not possible. It just means it's going to require a little more strength from me than it would from him. So what made you get into this latin work? You know, I kind of came at it from a very different side than most people. I would say most firefighters. It's sort of something they wanted since they were little, whether they were a little kid growing up. Of course, kids typically idolized a little bit the firefighters. Police look up to us, see us,

wave at us, all that. Of course I did that like any normal kid, But I didn't grow up wanting to be a firefighter. I went to college. I thought I was going to be a doctor. I ended up going to grad school for psychology. I was planning to be a psychologist, totally on a different path. Had been working on an ambulance just to pay for my grad school and really fell in love with it. I fell in love with running nine one calls helping people as an e m T. And then I went to paramedic

school liked that even more. And then when I was working as a paramedic, I was running the calls alongside the fire department, and I was having to sit outside the fire and wait for them to bring a patient out to me, or sit at the top of the cliff while they went down and performed a rescue on a hiker and brought the hiker back to me. And that was it. It was like I didn't want to be sitting there waiting. I wanted to be doing everything. I wanted to be participating and having fun with them.

So I decided to become a firefighter. And it's really competitive, it's really challenging. Um the process is really hard and can sometimes be uh disheartening. It takes a lot of work and often a lot of years and a lot of tries before you actually get hired with a fire department, but it's definitely worth it in the end. UM really happy to be doing what I'm doing, happy to be getting up and going to work every day. And there

aren't very many people who can say that. So it took me a little while to get there, but I finally figured out what I really enjoyed doing, and I'm happy that I was able to do it. Senecas one hundred women to hear will be back after the short break. What has been the most difficult moment you've experienced during these fires and how did you get past it? Yeah, you know, I think, UM, the classic answer to that would be any of the moments where all of a sudden,

the fire kind of turns and turns towards you. UM, whether you're fighting brush fire or structure fire, that moment where all of a sudden you feel like vulnerable, you feel the fire coming up at you. I've the distinct memory from a summer ago UM fighting fire, trying to

defend a structure. The brush fire was coming up the hill towards us, and then one of the structures one of the homes to the side of our the home we were defending, took off, and then the home to the other side of the one we were defending took off, and all of a sudden, you're you look up and you realize you're surrounded by fire. Um, the air's really smoky.

We're not breathing off of a tank like we wouldn't a structure fire, So on these brush fires, you're sort of coughing, choking through the smoke, trying to put some water, trying to defend the home that we were there protecting, um, and then ultimately having to make the judgment call that for our safety we had to retreat, we had to leave.

So you're there doing everything you can, putting yourself in a situation where you're physically really uncomfortable, you're tired, your head, or it's you've been out there for twelve fourteen hours already, you're coughing, breathing in smoke, just trying to get a breath of air, pulling your shirt over your face, trying to find some way to get a good breath as you're trying to defend this house, and then ultimately having to say for our safety, you know we can't. We'll

risk a whole lot. If there's a somebody we can save, we'll do a decent amount. If there's a structure we can save, But at some point, no matter what, we have to pull out for our own safety. So that's a moment that definitely comes into my head. But when you ask that question initially, I think, really the biggest challenge for me isn't so much the specific moments on the fire. That's what we're chained to do, that's what we signed up for, and we all know what we're doing.

We take the risks, we do our very best to stay safe, and of course we have scary moments. We have to take a deep breath, gather yourself and make an appropriate decision, whether it's continuing to fight or to back out, or whatever it is you need to do.

But I think sort of a different answer, that's really the most challenging thing for me, and I think for a lot of the guys and girls I work with, is just figuring out how to balance such an intense and demanding job and then having a normal life too, and trying to come home from four days where you're risking your life fighting fires and come back home and be a normal parent and normal husband, wife, brother, sister, just to function in a normal world where people are

really stressed out about something that, relative to what you've just seen, seems so mundane and so not important. But you still have to interact and be a part of the normal world as well. I was just thinking about that as you were talking and you were describing your work. I was thinking, Wow, what we deal with and the things that are sort of pressures in everyday life must seem pretty ridiculous when you hear about them. I was thinking that exact thought. So how do you how do

you do that? I mean, you must be relatively good actress as well, or you have to learn to learn to be you know, learned to be empathetic because people are standing obviously not in your shoes, but I can

understand how it could be hard. Yeah, of course, And there's I have a six year old, so I don't know if how familiar I was six year old, But sometimes very small things become very big deals when you're a six year old, and it's sometimes I have to remind myself, Okay, like he's really upset that we're out

of his favorite snack. But that in that moment, that's his emergency, even though I'm thinking, like, come on, kid, you don't know what the six year old I just saw yesterday who had to deal with a family member getting severely injured in front of him, or the things that we we see that other kids e variance. You know, I'm lucky. My kid is lucky. He has a good life and he hasn't had to deal with that. So for him, maybe the fact that we're out of Goldfish

is a really big deal. But so of course we have to transition well, and sometimes it can be challenging, and I think we all depend on our families and try to communicate with them and teach them to be as understanding as they can that when we Sometimes we come home from a really rough shift, maybe we had a something really stressful happen at work. Maybe I just told a mother that her son died, and then I have to come home and be a mom to my

own son. Sometimes it's a lot, and you have to find coping mechanisms um and you have to have people you can rely on. So I have family, and I'll sometimes say to my mom, Hey, I need to go take a walk, I need you to watch my son. I need a little time just to calm down and clear my mind and be ready to then switch into the role of being a mom and being able to be there for him. So I think part of it is just recognizing when you are tapped out, when you

do need a break or you need some help. It sounds like you know, with your ocasional background to your super well prepared UM I mean to make those transitions. I mean, how how have you found other people coping? What are the coping mechanisms that people use in these situations? Yeah, A lot of the A lot of it is actually just depending on the camaraderie we have at the station. So while of course the department has resources for us.

We have psychologists, we have UM liaisons, peer support groups that will actually come out to your station after a particularly stressful incident to do a debriefing, and all of that. That's all there for us. But I find more often than not that the guys really just want to all sit around the kitchen table, have a cup of coffee

and vent to each other. There's sort of a the experience we have is really hard for outside people to understand, so it'd be hard for me to come home and tell one of my friends the details about what I saw at work, because it would either be traumatic to them or they just wouldn't understand it or wouldn't exactly know how to respond in a way that I needed. And so we really depend on each other for that.

So we'll come back anytime there's a stressful call. People always seem to gather in the kitchen, sit around the table and talk and talk about what I saw, what did you see? What did we do right, what did we do wrong? And most of the time it's like we did everything we could. That was just a bad situation, and this is the outcome. And and there's rarely a time where people are blaming themselves or getting really down

on themselves or anything like that. It's usually just just benting together, experiencing that camaraderie and support from each other. And then of course, if it's something beyond that, then we absolutely will use the resources that are there for us. So, in this period of COVID, how has the job changed and what has been your experience as a frontline worker

during this period. Yeah, so this has been a really tough year for us over here because we started with COVID and then we went right into UM the BLM and the riots that went along with that, which hit our city pretty hard, and then right now into one of the worst brush seasons we've ever had. So it's been a a long year for the firefighters. The COVID.

When it first started, we were um sort of just scrambling to keep up with the demands and scrambling to try to figure out how we could keep ourselves safe as there was I'm sure everyone experienced, but lots of different information that didn't always line up coming in. So we were having our protocols constantly being adjusted as information was coming in so that we could keep ourselves safe UM.

Primary goal being that we are not bringing anything home to our families of course, UM and sort of seemed like we got. We took a little bit, but we got. We got on top of it, and we had all the necessary equipment in gear and we were doing our best to take care of all the patients while keeping ourselves safe. And we were very lucky as a department. The number of people who got COVID UM wasn't super high. Unfortunately, we did have one fire rider pass away from it.

But for the most part. We were able to keep it in check within our department, just using good practices with sanitation and UM cleaning everything every day, multiple times around the station, cleaning the resources, wearing appropriate pps. I think the biggest challenges any department is going to face is just all of us. So there's thirty firefighters in the city of l A. All of us go home and interact with different people. The people we interact with

off duty are also interacting with different people. And then we're bringing all of that to the station. And we lived together, we cooked together, we sleep in the same room. There's really social distancing is not possible. Really. Of course, we did our best, but there's just no way when you have eighteen guys living in the station together that you're not going to be sharing a space. And so the biggest concern was just if and when one person at the station got it, how to keep it from

running through all the guys at the station. Wow, well, I mean it's incredible. I have a We talked to some other folks who are UM intensive care doctors also, and it's just so hard to predict what could happen. So um, the fact that you live together, and as you said, your people, and the multiplier effect is pretty real. So obviously you must face some fear in your work. How do you overcome that fear? I mean, how do you train yourself? How do you train your mind? Um?

I think the the biggest thing that helps me deal with the fear is that the knowledge that we do our very best to be safe in every situation. So of course we take risks. We absolutely take risk. Everyone who is a first responder at all takes risk just because we don't know what we're getting ourselves into on a daily basis. Um, But we train extremely hard from the time you're a brand new firefighter all the way up until you're and you promote into a captain or

chief rank. Our primary goals always safety across the board. So if we ever feel unsafe, we ever feel like we're being threatened by a patient or threatened by somebody on the street or anything like that, or safety is always our first priority. And I think just knowing that I work with good people, I work with people who are well trained, they know what they're doing, they're watching out for me, I'm watching out for them, sort of provides the best sense of security one could possibly have.

Of course, there are elements that we just can't control. Um, we don't know what's on fire inside of building. If somebody's house catches on fire, it spreads to their garage. Who knows what people keep in their garage. We don't know if something's going to explode. We don't know if, um, if somebody wants to hurt us. Like, there's things that

we just can't control. But I think for me, the things that we can control we do, and the things we can't it's not really worth stressing over because there's nothing I can do other than doing my best to keep a head on a swivel and hoping everybody around me is also doing the same, and hoping we'll catch any signs of danger before it progresses to a point where we wouldn't be able to recover from it. Um. But we have a high risk job and that's sort

of something that we accept when we take the job. Wow, Carrie, it's so so incredible to talk to you, super inspiring and obviously your work makes everything that we do possible. So thank you for joining us. Thank you so much. That is incredibly difficult, dangerous and crucial work, and thank goodness, there are people like Carrie Caravella worth doing it. Here are some of the points I took away from the conversation. First,

women are ready to handle any job. As Carrie says, we may have to work harder than a two pound man does to accomplish the same physical task, but with determination, it can be done. Second, never underestimate the importance of role models. As a young woman in a mostly male profession, Carrie took inspiration from the groundbreakers who came before her

and proved that women belong in the fire department. Finally, a sense of purpose can keep us going even in the toughest situations, despite twenty four hour days, if not longer, and choking smoke. Kerry and her fellow firefighters love what they do. As Carrie says, it's the shared experience, the ability to work together towards an important goal that keeps her coming back. Tune in Tuesday to learn about our next featured woman and discover why she's one of Seneca's

one hundred Women to Hear. Seneca's one hundred Women to Hear is a collaboration between the Seneca Women Podcast Network and I Heart Radio, with support from founding partner PNG. If you like what you heard on the show, rate and review it on Apple Podcasts. We hope you'll join us for our next episode of one hundred Women to Hear, where we can all listen, learn and get inspired. Have a great day.