Severely burned firefighter will work again

SEATTLE -- A 21-year-old firefighter whose hands were severely burned during a wildfire that killed four others plans to return to the job.

"You have to get on with your life," Jason Emhoff said at a news conference Thursday, a week after he was released from the hospital.

The Forest Service firefighter was hospitalized for nine weeks after the Thirty Mile Fire in a federally designated 8,500-acre research natural area.

Emhoff was only a few yards away from four crew members who died on a rocky slope in their emergency fire shelters July 10.

He was among 10 firefighters and two campers who survived the inferno when it blasted through the narrow Chewuch River Canyon in the northern Cascade Range.

Emhoff's hands are still splinted with special burn gloves, and his legs, abdomen, neck and face are scarred.

He was not wearing work gloves, and the heat seared his hands as he tried to take cover in an aluminimum-and-fiberglass emergency fire shelter.

"The heat was like being in an oven with the door shut," Emhoff said.

Burned to bone

His left hand was burned nearly to the bone, the skin came off and the nerves were destroyed.

"When you have third-degree burns, there is no pain because there's nothing left," he said. "It's all gone."

Doctors tucked his left hand under a flap of skin on his abdomen to let fat and blood cells attach themselves to the exposed tendons on his hand. Then they grafted skin onto his fingers.

After six to nine months of therapy, Emhoff should be able to do everything he did before the burns, including golfing and skiing, said Dr. David Heimbach, director of Harborview Medical Center's burn unit.

His mother, Jeanne Emhoff, who was at the news conference, sighed when her son said he'd return to firefighting. She said she wants to find a way to keep better track of him.

"I'll have to give him a pager or something," she said.