![]() On September 11, 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom held a press conference in Oroville, at the site of the North Complex Fire-a series of fires in Northern California that had burned for the previous four weeks straight. Last fall, she called me from Los Angeles County jail. I stopped right before the summer season started.” We’d maintain upkeep of their facilities, brush clearance, chip a lot of stuff. “We covered the area from the Santa Monica Mountains to Ventura. “Basically, it was the same thing we did in camp,” Tapia told me. Tapia lived with her parents, got a job at a Samsung call center, bought a car, and volunteered on a wildland crew through the Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Conservation Authority. Still, in her first three months out of prison, she stayed clean. She says she was told that funding for those support services wasn’t available. ![]() For roughly 15 years, she had been dealing with meth addiction and clinical depression. When Tapia was released in November 2017, she asked her parole officer whether there were any state-provided services to help former inmates with addiction or mental-health issues. She knew she couldn’t apply to Cal Fire or a municipal crew, because they don’t hire people with criminal records, but she hoped she could apply what she had learned. Tapia, a single mother, told me that she couldn’t wait to see her daughter and that she wanted to pursue a career in forestry when she got out. But then there’s that adrenaline because you’re cutting.” She was a “second saw” during her first season, which meant she was third in the crew line and used a chainsaw to remove brush and potential kindling for the fire. She described what being on the front line felt like: “You just feel zapped it drains you. “We just put in a line to make sure that the fire didn’t jump again.” “But it was only three acres-by the time we got up there, there were no flames.” She seemed disappointed. Her crew had just gotten back from an hour-long hike near Bautista Canyon the day before, they had been called out to the Palomar Divide to help contain a controlled burn that the Forest Service had started. She had long brown hair and was about 5 foot 4. We stood in the saw shed, where she was cleaning and arranging tools. She’d already worked two fire seasons in collaboration with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection in the middle of an extreme drought. Tapia was a swamper-a crew leader who relayed instructions from her captain and foreman to 12 other women on the fire line. ![]() When I first met Alisha Tapia, in 2017, she was incarcerated in Puerta la Cruz, an all-female fire camp north of San Diego.
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