 Firefighters working near the border not only have to deal with the problems associated with fires but they also have to deal with illegal immigration, drug smuggling and the fire starts related to these issues. Let's first look at how firefighters are impacted by illegal immigrants and the people who smuggle them, known as coyotes. Well, I think somehow there needs to be a realization of what really the issues are. I've briefed lots of fire teams. We have lots of fires on the Sierra Vista Ranger District. A good deal of them are caused by undocumented immigrants and smugglers. So we have a lot of fire teams come in and we have a lot of people from other states as well as the northern part of this state that have really not any real clue of what kind of environment they're dealing with. You know, you get into everything from a poor immigrant farm worker that's walking across trying to get a job to a heavy-duty felon, and you get everything in between and so it's one of those environments that's definitely very unpredictable and so it's hard to prepare people for that kind of thing. We go in with the caution that there are people out there that may be in harm's way or they may want to cause problems for us and so just keep that in mind all the time that we're going into a situation that's different than being 100 miles north. Generally, if you're hiking to a fire sometimes, you'll walk right into them. You'll possibly be using trails that they created by using them. Also, just driving down the road, they'll be walking down right down a main highway. We had one burn that was in fairly steep country. As we were holding, sitting and monitoring the following day after our major ignition day, we had everybody kind of out on high points and we all had binoculars and we were just watching groups get carried up by the truckload to the Seven Wire International Fence and they'd just find a shade tree and wait until night and as soon as night came, they were just right through the burn which fortunately for us the burn was still cool. It was cool by that point but it doesn't phase them. You would think that you see smoke and flame that okay, well let's go around this way and if they go around this way, they're off into another coyotes or cartels territory. It doesn't present an obstacle to them which is flabbergasting to me. One of the concerns that we always have is you don't know what the people inside the units, the burn units, you don't know what they're thinking or what their motivation is for being here and a confrontation can be fairly minor and not something that you would normally worry about and more often than not it's just people looking for help or trying to get out of the way but you don't know that and that lack of information creates a little bit of tension and the communication barrier elevates that to a new level. Now let's listen to how drug smuggling can create dangerous situations for firefighters. Some fires that they've had here they have actually found drug loads right within the fire. We know that if there were drugs there there would be a lot of drug traffickers there and so that always puts the land management agencies who have fire crews out there on edge they could come up on some of these groups that are armed and then their fire safety could be in jeopardy. And we get a lot of dope and the fire should be finding empty gunny sags and one of the fires we found 400 pounds and then the year before that we found another 800 pounds and then on the ridge fire it was 120 pounds. The fires that we've had we've had large quantities of marijuana actually in the fire some of it may be burned some of it may be unburned but the smugglers for the most part won't leave that material if they think there's any chance that they can recover any of it and so you know that once you find that you're more than likely going to have armed smugglers eyeballing you every minute if you don't find it all they're going to be right back in there to get it. You know if you were left out there by yourself and they outnumbered you it's a real good chance that they're going to come and claim their load. We had a fire three years ago where we worked the fire all night which is something we don't do very often here anymore unless we can keep enforcement with them all night we just can't afford to leave them out. We have worked the fire all night went back in the next day and 100 yards off our fire line was an AK-47 and a burlap bag so it's just a whole different world down here right now and it's very very difficult for people in the agency to understand how really different it is. Now let's hear how firefighters have an increased chance of encountering illegal immigrants and drug smugglers because of the fires they start along the border. On every other fire that I've been in other forests you know you get to a fire and you look for the point of origin say a campfire or a cigarette or something and once you've found that you flag it off and you know your head's in the dirt and you're digging line and you can you know tune everything out but what the fire is doing where your line's going and you know strategizing but here you have to do all of that and then look behind you and look in the fire and make sure that you don't have a group in the perimeter of the fire or coming behind you. It's just an added piece of baggage that you have to deal with when you're doing an initial attack on this forest. The first thing that people think about I would suspect when they're fighting a wildfire is their own personal safety as it relates to the fire itself and you know what you would expect in terms of the fire behavior or what not and probably the first thing we have to think about is our own personal safety in relation to you know why did that fire start. It's personal safety but from a different standpoint. We typically get a few fires that are usually warming fires that some of the groups will leave as they come through so some are warming fires, some are cooking fires during the wintertime after it starts getting cold we usually get those type fires. If you look at a lot of these ignition points it's sternocans that have been used to heat up meals and then just thrown in the grass. They're focused in on a survival kind of mode and they want food and they want heat and then they move on. They don't understand the idea of extinguishing a fire before you leave. Some of the fires that we've had started in the past are signal fires by injured undocumented immigrants and then that kind of throws a whole new set of circumstances into your fire. Very close to where we are right now we had a fire and what had happened was that an illegal immigrant had gotten into dehydration and cramps and was in a very stressed type of a situation and so some of the people that were with him just lit the grass on fire and said don't worry somebody will come along to help you shortly. They had left him because he couldn't continue with the rest of the group and so they just wanted him to be found so that he didn't die but each individual case is different so you never know what you're really going to walk into. We had a report of a wildfire went out there, started initial tacking it and just down the road was another report and then just this way there was another report and what we finally learned that they were was destruction fires. You know a lot of fire over here everybody goes running over here Border Patrol follows along and then this group is coming through and then they light a fire. You know if somebody's out there starting fires to direct our activities they're not liable to be concerned about our safety so I would say it's a big problem and it's an evolving problem and probably getting bigger as time goes on.