Lieutenant Paul Ostroy faced what was left of the 2000 block of Anderson Drive and thought of the families who lived there before the Marshall fire destroyed it.
“We drove up the walking path as flames were hitting the homes. We set up down here knowing it was coming this direction,” the former wildland firefighter said. “As I walked back along this sidewalk, one home caught fire and then the next one caught fire and then the next one caught.”
He says he did his best, but that doesn’t ease the responsibility he feels for the loss.
Ostroy agreed to share his Marshall fire experience to help make sense of an event that was beyond anyone’s training or imagination.
“You can plan as much as you can for something like this but things deviate without us being able to control it. That’s when you hit the breaking point,” he said.
A month after Colorado’s most destructive wildfire, Boulder County’s Mountain View Fire Protection District’s first responders have not left the hamster’s wheel. They answer highway accident calls, heart attacks and numerous hikers stuck on the mountain. People still need help, so the worst day of these first responders’ professional lives is fading into memory.
This is exactly what Deputy Division of Operations Chief Sterling Folden does not want. “You start to forget. You put it on the back burner. You keep working,” Folden said.
He is sitting in the conference room where his firefighters gathered for coffee talk therapy with peer counselors while the Marshall fire was still smoldering. Counseling protocol advises team leaders to get their first responders talking within 48 hours of an event before they change their minds.
“You can’t be in denial,” Folden said. “This was real. There were blocks of homes burning. It’s like a splinter that’s too deep to dig out. So it’s just going to sit there and get infected until it comes back to the surface.”
Folden said in the last five years Mountain View Fire Protection District has recognized mental health is just as important for its 200 employees as lifting weights and navigating climbing walls.
“Physical and mental go hand in hand. One helps the other. It’s becoming part of the fabric of the fire department,” he said.
The fire protection district uses peer counselors who double as firefighters and it also brings in a counseling group called Building Warriors, whose 20 staff counselors serve 18 fire stations. Building Warriors was founded by Kelli Gilchrist, a third generation first responder, a Denver firefighter, DFD’s Mental Wellness Coordinator — and a Columbine survivor.
Twenty-two years ago on April 20, 1999, Gilchrist left her math class at Columbine High School when the fire alarm went off. Outside, standing on a tiny baseball field in Clement Park, she heard gunshots.
“I thought I was going to die that day,” she said. Though she and her sister fled the shooting physically unharmed, there was no escaping the mental trauma.
After some “not so great” therapy, she became a licensed professional counselor and eventually specialized in the unexplored desert of first responder behavioral health, to heal the minds of people who “see the absolute worst pieces of humanity and are expected to move on.”
She says she worries more about accumulating traumatic events that add up for first responders than she does the huge tragedies like Columbine or the Marshall fire. “There’s a collection of really sh—- incidents and they don’t know what to do with them.”
It wasn’t until after 9/11 that the mental health of firefighters became a national movement, and it wasn’t until 2010 when a concerned firefighter from Chicago decided to start gathering statistics. Jeff Dill runs the Firefighter Behavioral Health Alliance out of Las Vegas.
“The peer support team was non-existent,” he told The Gazette. “No one thought about it.”
Dill says a problem particular to firefighters is the fact that their mental health is woven in with their do-gooder hero identity. “Everyone loves a firefighter. The public expects us to save them during the worst times of their lives. It’s difficult to be held to that standard 24/7.”
Marshall fire fallout
Between 2014 and 2020, more firefighters died from suicide than they did from fighting fires and responding to emergencies. Since 2000, 1,703 firefighters across the country have taken their own lives; of those, 50 were Colorado casualties, according to the Firefighter Behavioral Health Alliance.
Alarmingly, those numbers are probably higher. Not all suicides are reported. Dave Foster, president of both the Denver Firefighters’ IAFF Local 858 and the state firefighters’ union, knows of three Denver firefighters who took their own lives in the last 18 months. He’s worried about the fallout from the Marshall fire.
“As we watched it on TV, we were on an international conference call. The next day we were on the phone with every firefighter who is a member of the union asking if they still had their homes.”
Foster said the good news is that firefighter mental health is now discussed openly in the firehouses. The bad news is that firefighters still make life-ending decisions.
“How do we stop the suicides? That’s the hardest part,” said Foster, who says COVID has made things worse. “Add in the pandemic, isolation and fear of bringing the virus home. All we know is that we have to show up at the firehouse.”
Since 2020, line-of-duty firefighter deaths have now caught up with death by suicide mostly because there are so many men and women who have died after being infected on the job. Of the 140 on-duty firefighter deaths across the country in 2020, 78 were due to COVID.
Beyond the front lines
When Chief Folden’s firefighters walked in from 12 to 14 hours of grueling Marshall fire duty, they were shell-shocked.
“They were wild-eyed because they’d been up all night, taking it all in,” Folden said. “This is something we’d never dealt with.”
Folden had experienced his own thousand-yard stare as he sat in his firefighter vehicle after saving a family.
“He had just pulled four people from a fire,” said Division Chief of EMS PJ Johnson, who happened to drive by Folden that night. “His eyes were red. The windows of his Chevy Suburban were blown out from the wind and heat.”
When he returned to the fire station, Folden pulled chairs up to Firehouse No. 5’s familiar table and called his peer counselors to get to work, while feelings were raw.
“Before, we were taught ‘No, you put that away. You compartmentalize it. It’s just the job.'”
Firefighter and peer counselor Beau Clark put on his listening cap, even though he also had been out for almost 17 hours. “It was tough. I live pretty close to where evacuations were happening. I really wanted to get back home. I was torn.”
But Clark knew helping the helpers was bigger than him.
“Firefighters are reluctant to do talk therapy, so we created a setting where they felt safe,” Clark said. “We sent clinicians to each firehouse to create the space for these crews to talk about what they went through. We reminded them of unhealthy behavior — for instance, alcohol — and offered follow-up.”
Chief Johnson, just in from managing crews, decided not to participate.
“We’ve come a long way, but I don’t get anything out of the formal debrief,” he told The Gazette.
He said the old therapy method, referred to as Critical Incident Stress Debrief, didn’t ever work well for him.
“It felt like an interrogation,” said Johnson as his buddies warmed up chili for lunch in Mountain View’s Firehouse No. 7. Johnson prefers talking about his experiences on his own time, a practice he calls “storytelling.” He acknowledged the Marshall fire is on his mind every day. “The decisions and actions we made. Houses you saved and those residences you lost.”
Gilchrist says one of the most important components to Building Warriors is respecting people like PJ Johnson, who don’t feel comfortable in a setting designed for discussion.
“Everybody copes differently. Self-awareness is one of the biggest pieces. We advocate knowing and doing what works for you,” Gilchrist said.
A pre-requisite for Building Warriors’ counselors is they must have a personal connection to the first responder community, another piece of the mental health puzzle which Gilchrist feels is a more inviting approach than sending in therapists who don’t know the lay of First Responder-Land.
For instance, Building Warriors’ counselor Emily Johnson is not a firefighter, but her husband is.
“It used to be that vulnerability meant weakness,” she said. “The culture is changing. That’s part of why we do what we do. It takes courage and strength to ask for help, not weakness.”
The main goal is saving lives. Two citizens died in the Marshall fire. Gilchrist and Foster’s aim as counselors is to prevent casualties years from now, from firefighters who didn’t get the splinter out.
“I hope we are making it okay for them,” Gilchrist said.
2000 Andrew Drive
Chief Folden can see across Coalton Road to the rubble of the 2000 block of Andrew Drive from Station 5’s conference room window.
“We did a good job of saving lives,” he said. “I think we would have a very different mental health picture if we had lost dozens of people.”
People thank him every day.
“People have said ‘What you did was heroic,'” Folden said. Reflecting on the more than 1,000 homes that were burned, he said, “It doesn’t seem that way.”
Lt. Ostroy agreed. “You’ve got the badge. If you’re a leader you should have thick skin. You are expected to be a big bad Mamma Jamma.”
The rubble of the neighborhood is now covered with snow. Useless mailboxes and abandoned toys line neighborhoods at Superior’s southern residential edge. Ostroy’s wife, Andrea, tells him about the people who lost their homes because she sees them through her job with Boulder County’s Disaster Assistance Center. He doesn’t know if it’s easier or harder to move on if you know these things.
“This one was too close to home. These are our taxpayers,” he said.
Six years ago, Ostroy was out on the Sugarloaf fire as a wildland firefighter when the flames crept within 700 feet of his home. Two years later, he decided to switch to fighting structure fires, but the Marshall fire became the worst of both worlds.
“We did what we could. We knew we were going to lose a few houses to save a lot,” he said. “But at some point you wish you could have done more.”