Days Creek, Ore.– Stacy Graham is suited up from head to toe. In the yellow and green Friday evening.”I kind of enjoy this kind of work it’s all I’ve ever done.”
He looks like every other firefighter working the Stouts Creek Fire, but and orange stripe on his pants makes him different from the rest.
“We pretty much keep to ourselves the south fork crews. We pretty much go together as a team.”
Graham is a prison inmate at the South Fork Forest camp, near Tillamook. NBC5 got an exclusive look at what life is like for an inmate working wildfires.
Graham’s serving five years for getting into a fight with his brother.”Even if it’s your brother or anyone else don’t let anyone push your buttons. I’m in control of my own emotions,” said Graham.
But just four months before he’s released from prison Graham is working the firelines at night for a third season.
“In other insititutions you’re just indoors in a barbed wire fence and behind bars and here there’s freedom.”
Graham is just one of more than 100 inmates who work and live here at the stouts creek fire camp. It’s part of a partnership with the Oregon Department of Forestry that started 60 years ago.
“It’s important for these guys to be in this program because it provides them job training,” said Lieutenant Justin Wylie, a Correctional Officer at South Fork. He said the inmates at the Stouts Creek fire Camp run the food service, help clean up, and even work the actual fire like Graham.
“Every inmate’s job is equally important. Every job that these inmates do is important to operate these camps.”
He said inmates get 40 hours of certified training before they come to camp.And they each get $6.00 a day and get additional pay for their job by a point system.
All of it saving ODF a lot of cash.
“Roughly 1/5 the cost of a normal contact crew,” said Joe Touchston, a Public Information officer with ODF.
It’s a normal day for Graham, who’se been a logger since 1988 and is originally from Canyonville.
“We get to get out and work and eat better food plus we’re fighting fires.”
Lt. Wylie said there are 60 inmates at the camp from South Fork. And said they’ll stay until they are needed.
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