<p>Emonds works on an improved entrenching tool, which he calls a “Troop Tool."</p>

This is beyond anything firefighters have known, says Thomas Troop Emonds. Our future is faster, hotter, more deadly firestorms, and even coordinated attacks by terrorists: small aircraft laying out thousands of fire starts.

These are the dragons, the results of global warming and world politics. Troop Emonds has been working on new ways to slay them. He is in a position to know how to do it; he has made 526 smokejumps from the Cascades to the Appalachians, parachuting into areas to combat wildfires. After 25 years of service as a smokejumper and Fire Management Officer, it became clear to Emonds that firefighters needed new tools, and homeowners needed new tactics to protect their dwellings.

Emonds has been thinking about forest fires and how to fight them for a long time. At the age of 10 he saw Red Skies of Montana, in which Richard Widmark plays a smokejumper. I decided I wanted to be a smokejumper right then, he says. It looked like a macho thing, and I thought maybe the chicks would like it, or something. In the eighth grade he began fighting forest fires as a volunteer.

In college, Emonds majored in forestry but ran out of money. He took two years off to earn tuition by fighting fires in the deciduous forests of the Appalachians and Ozarks. He then traveled to Austria, where he worked as a forester. Emonds loved the job, but he wasnt making enough money to return to college, so he hitchhiked to Australia. After a seasons experience fighting fires there, he applied for a job at the U.S. Forest Service Siskiyou Smokejumper Base in Cave Junction.

They thought I was an Aussie or a New Zealander; they hired me because I sounded like a character, he says. They were right; he still sounds like a character.

Immediately after college, the Army ordered Emonds to report for a physical. He took the unusual step of avoiding the draft by joining the Marines, because they allowed him time to finish the firefighting season before sending him to Vietnam. From 1968 through 1970 Emonds served as an infantry officer, rifle platoon commander, and rifle company commander. He formed a special reaction force to bail out infantry units in dire contact with enemy forces and started jungle fires as a weapon of war.

Emonds, as you have probably gathered, is a risk taker, and with retirement he took another kind of risk: He went into business, something he knew nothing about. He bought a building in Nehalem and put a name on the building: Dragonslayers, Inc. Emonds then set about improving the tools available to wilderness firefighters.

The basic tools of firefighting, such as the Pulaski (a combination axe and adze) and the McLeod (combination rake and hoe) had not changed in almost a century. Firefighters, told the fire labs for years they wanted simple things, like wider grub-hoe blades on Pulaskis and Pulaskis that dont break so easily, Edmonds says, but nothing happened. Emonds got a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to do the job.

From his own experience, Emonds knew what firefighters wanted. And what he created may be the finest such tools in the world, ergonomically designed for both ease of transport and use, with interchangeable handles, and built to last.

His tools did not meet with immediate acceptance. Firefighters are supplied with tools by their agencies, and Dragonslayer tools are not cheap. Also, according to Emonds, bureaucratic inertia played a role. Then the elite Bureau of Land Management Smokejumpers began buying Dragonslayer tools, and other firefighters took notice.

The increasing number and intensity of wildfires have created a problem for those who have chosen, as Emonds says, to live in the fuels. In a major fire, it is no longer possible to send crews and equipment to defend every home (he cites the experience of the 2011 fire season in Texas, in which 4,000 homes were lost).

Every homeowner, Emonds says, has to become a fire manager, and he teaches people land management skills. Emonds explains that, Natural fuels are managed. They are thinned and pruned … Three circular control lines go around what is to be protected. These enable the homeowner to burn all the fuels up to these cleared areas, forming blacklines where no combustible fuels remain between the house and the fire. In addition to providing training, Emonds sells Dragon Wizz Wheels that graphically show where to lay the escape fire.

Wildfires are going to become more numerous and more hazardous; we cant change that. What we can do, says Troop Emonds, is adopt a military defensive way of looking at fighting fires … Shape the battle space to always be ready to receive and preside over an enemy attack.