BREAKING: Tim Sheehy Accused Wildland Firefighters of “Milking” Fires to Boost Overtime Pay

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Sunday, October 20, 2024

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New reporting from HuffPost reveals Sheehy accused wildland firefighters of “laziness,” “greed,” and “milking every fire” to get more overtime pay

Comments echo similarly damning remarks made by former Montana Senator Conrad Burns who was forced to apologize during his losing 2006 campaign
 

Helena, MT – Breaking new reporting from HuffPost reveals that Tim Sheehy repeatedly disparaged wildland firefighters, accusing them of “laziness,” “greed,” and “milking every fire” in order to rack up more overtime pay. 

HuffPost notes that “Sheehy is not the first Montana Republican to accuse wildland firefighters of being lazy and mismanaging infernos” – former Montana Senator Conrad Burns made similarly offensive remarks which he was forced to apologize for during his losing 2006 campaign. 

Sheehy’s offensive comments about the brave men and women who keep Montana communities safe are just the latest in a series of insulting remarksand scandals that call into question whether Montanans can trust him.

Read more here: 

HuffPost: Montana GOP Senate Hopeful Accused Firefighters Of 'Milking' Infernos For Extra Pay
By Chris D’Angelo
October 19, 2024

• Montana GOP Senate hopeful Tim Sheehy, who made his fortune as the founder and CEO of an aerial firefighting company that has relied largely on lucrative federal contracts, has repeatedly accused wildland firefighters of dragging their feet to put out blazes and “milking” disasters for overtime pay, a HuffPost review of his recent statements found.

• In his 2023 book “Mudslingers: A True Story of Aerial Firefighting,” Sheehy described a discussion he had with fellow firefighters during a series of blazes in Idaho in 2015. “I was hanging out at the base, shooting the breeze with some other guys, talking about how intense the fires seemed to be, just trying to make conversation and contribute to the cause,” Sheehy wrote. “‘Hopefully we can hammer this thing down quickly and get it under control,’ I said. Most of the other guys nodded solemnly, but one person, a pilot, kind of straightened up and grunted. ‘Well, we don’t want it to go too fast,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of overtime pay to be earned out there! We put it out, it’s back on salary!’”

• That conversation led Sheehy — an ex-Navy SEAL who founded a Bozeman, Montana-based firefighting company called Bridger Aerospace in 2014 — to confront what he described as a “troubling undercurrent of complacency, of embracing or at least accepting the status quo because, frankly, there was so much money at stake.”

• While Sheehy would go on to make millions from the same pot of federal money that wildland firefighters rely on, his writings and more recent public comments suggest he came to view many in the field as bad actors competing for and ultimately wasting the government’s limited resources.

• The 2015 conversation “smacked less of concern or common sense than it did laziness — or, worse, greed,” he wrote in his book.

• ″If there is no fire, there is no money,” he added. “And the faster that a fire is extinguished, the sooner the money dries up or goes elsewhere. It might seem ridiculous to worry about a shortage of work to keep the wildfire industry busy given the extraordinary expansion of the season in recent years, not to mention the gnawing sense that firefighters will forever be overmatched against nature. But old beliefs and protocols die hard, and clearly there were some in the industry who saw nothing wrong with milking every fire for what it was worth despite the risks and the blurring of ethical boundaries.”

• Sheehy echoed that same sentiment during a book signing in Huntsville, Alabama in March, months after he launched his bid against three-term incumbent Democratic Sen. Jon Tester. He told the crowd that his company’s use of technology to fight fires more quickly and effectively was “not received well” within the broader industry.

• “There’s a very real dynamic in wildfire that a lot of those people don’t want to put the fire out,” he said at the event, according to a recording obtained by HuffPost. “It’s called ‘let it burn.’ And they don’t want to put the fire out because that’s where they get their overtime, that’s where they get their hazard pay. And for a lot of these folks out there — I don’t mean to cast them in a negative light, but it’s just a fact — they don’t want that fire to be put out, because ... they make half their annual income on hazard overtime pay during the summer fires.”

• Sheehy’s campaign did not respond to any of HuffPost’s questions about his portrayal of wildland firefighters.

• Ben McLane is a captain of a Forest Service fire crew and a board member of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a nonprofit that advocates for federal firefighters. He [...] condemned Sheehy’s statements about wildland firefighters as “fundamentally flawed.”

• “I’ve never seen firefighters let something burn for the sake of keeping the good times going and for monetary reasons,” McLane told HuffPost. “You’ve got to take into account all you’re sacrificing to be out there.”

• “For him to basically accuse firefighters of retreating intentionally — these same people who represent the kind of patriotic attributes in action that he claims to represent in words — is a contradiction that is just hard for me to fathom,” he added.

• Sheehy is not the first Montana Republican to accuse wildland firefighters of being lazy and mismanaging infernos.

• In July 2006, then-GOP Sen. Conrad Burns famously accosted a crew of highly trained wildland firefighters, known as hotshots, that were in the state to help battle a large fire near the town of Worden. At the Billings, Montana airport, Burns accused the crew of doing a ”piss-poor job” fighting the blaze.

• According to a state official’s report of the incident, Burns pointed at one particular firefighter and said, “See that guy over there? He hasn’t done a God-damned thing. … You probably paid that guy $10,000 to sit around. It’s gotta change.”

• Burns later apologized for his outburst, saying he should have “chosen my words more carefully” and that his criticism “should not have been directed at those who were working hard to put [the fire] out.” A few months later, Tester narrowly defeated Burns, a three-term incumbent.

• On the 2-year anniversary of Burns’ attack on wildland firefighters, Wildfire Today, a publication of Missoula, Montana-based nonprofit International Association of Wildland Fire, summarized the incident like this: “Burns was up for re-election, running against Democrat Jon Tester. Soon, 1,000 ‘Wildland Firefighters for Tester’ bumper stickers appeared. Tester won by about 2000 votes, and the leading political columnist for the Lee Newspaper chain credited the ‘firefighter flap.’ The Democrats took control of the U.S. Senate by a margin of one.”

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