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Noelle Bahnmiller was scheduled to be off work. But as a favor, she agreed to take another firefighter’s shift. It was early August, in the middle of a brutal fire season that already seemed endless. Lightning sparked the tinder-dry, remote wilderness in Mendocino County and Bahnmiller, then a captain at Cal Fire and her engine crew were dispatched to lay firehose across a ridgeline.

But a few hours later, her radio crackled with urgent voices: The fire blew up. It burned its way to the tops of the trees, creating a crown fire, the most feared and volatile wildfire.

With flames shooting 250 high or more – akin to a blazing, 23-story building – crown fires start on the ground and use small trees and lower limbs as ladders to catapult into the treetops. From that commanding height, embers are carried aloft on fire-created convection winds, sparking new blazes miles from the firefront.

Such monster fires move at an astounding pace. Firefighters can only watch helplessly as the fire in front of them flies overhead and sparks new fires behind them. Whack-a-mole doesn’t even begin to describe the problem.

In practice, it would be rare for firefighters to directly attack flames shooting that high; instead, they are supposed to get out of their way. So when she heard that the fire was in the crown, she knew, “You can’t fight that. You don’t want to be there.”

Feeling the wind shift, and hearing the radio reports, Bahnmiller got an eerie feeling on the back of her neck. She knew what was coming, so she raced back to her two crewmen.

The trio hunkered down in their fire engine in a designated safe zone and prepared to defend themselves against advancing flames, a few miles away but roaring out in all directions. More than 12,000 acres were ablaze.

Bahnmiller’s counterpart on another engine was a longtime friend, and he and his crew were trapped on a ridge, surrounded by fire. She kept in contact with him all night on her phone, texting jokes. As trees exploded into flames, Bahnmiller thought about what she would say to her friend’s wife should he not make it. It was a long vigil.

“I laid in the back of the engine, kept seeing the pictures of the crown fire in my head,” she recalls. “I could hear the fire. They always say it sounds like a freight train and it really does, it’s so loud. I could not sleep. I kept thinking of my friends who were trapped. I believed at that time that I was watching the fire kill my friends.”

At 4 a.m., she finally climbed out of the engine and began what would become her months-long daily ritual with post-traumatic stress: After a sleepless night, she greeted the day and threw up.

Bahnmiller, who was 47 at the time, had been fighting fires for eight years at Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting agency, when she first felt the horrors burrow deep into her, beyond her grasp.

That summer, “things started coming off the hook,” Bahnmiller said. “The game changed. And it keeps changing.”

Bahnmiller worked the Lodge fire for another week after that long night trapped in her engine with her crew. Later she would learn that all of the burned firefighters survived, as did her friend’s crew, who took refuge in their besieged engine, its paint bubbled and blistered in the heat.

Capt. Noelle Bahnmiller’s post-traumatic stress was first triggered by the Lodge Lighting Complex fire, which was ignited by a lightning strike in Mendocino County wilderness on July 30, 2014. It quickly raged out of control, turning into a dangerous crown fire.

Even after she left that fire, it never left her.

Back in the station, and at home, she grappled with recurring nightmares and troubling, intrusive thoughts. Whenever she saw trees, she hallucinated that flames were shooting out of them.

For four months, she was all but sleepless and throwing up every day, turning into a semi-functioning zombie. Bahnmiller developed an irrational belief that if she went to sleep her fire crew would die. Sleep was not a relief, but a portal to something worse. She was unable — then unwilling — to sleep, lest nightmares engulf her.

The Lodge fire wasn’t just on her mind, it utterly occupied her mind. It set her on a path so dark that she eventually considered suicide.

“I was very preoccupied with the fire, but at the same time I was trying to shove it away,” she said. “It felt very acute to me, especially when I would try to rest. These pictures would come rushing into my mind.”

Experts say her experience is a common example of trauma that leads to post-traumatic stress disorder and suicides among wildland firefighters: Like many, she suffered no physical injury but she battled an out-of-control fire, magnifying the sense of helplessness and anxiety that firefighters find particularly stressful.

Bahnmiller was raised to not give in to pain or fear, or even acknowledge it. Her father was a naval officer attached to a Marine Corps unit at Camp Pendleton. Stoicism, service and success were all family bywords, part of what she calls her “Dad-mythology.”

When she hit 30, she spent months riding her motorcycle around the country. After witnessing a pregnant woman roll her car in Maine and wishing she had the training to help her, Bahnmiller thought it was about time that she devoted herself to serving the public.

“I was raised to do my duty,” she said.

She became certified as a paramedic and worked for a private ambulance company and in a hospital trauma ward. She entered Cal Fire’s basic academy and was a rapidly rising star, graduating second in her class from the officer academy. She’s now a battalion chief.

Women make up only 6% of Cal Fire’s firefighting corps.

Now 54, Bahnmiller often talks about resilience: Like when you’re facing your worst demons, when you fear you’ll never recover your balance, you somehow find a way to stand again. Like when steel becomes stronger after it passes through fire.

“I thought I had to fix this because firefighters solve problems. We don’t have problems that we can’t fix,” she said. “I didn’t tell anybody that I was having this constant feeling like I was still standing on top of that ridge, watching the crown fire burn those people, and not being able to stop it.

But Bahnmiller hid her pain from her boyfriend, a federal firefighter who is now her husband, who remembers her acting outwardly normal after the Lodge fire and during the months afterward. She hid it from her friends and colleagues, too, suffering in silence and isolating herself as much as she could.

“Even though I had a wonderful life at the time, I became secretly suicidal because I couldn’t make it stop,” Bahnmiller said. I had this feeling of powerlessness. They train us to be in charge. To be decisive. Take action.

“I decided at some point, the only way to fix it was to kill myself. I became obsessed with this idea that to make these pictures stop, I just had to go away.”

Four months after the Lodge fire, Cal Fire peer support officer Steve Diaz was in Bahnmiller’s station, following up on phone conversations they were having about someone she thought needed counseling.

His job was to explain the agency’s support services, which are voluntary and confidential. But to Bahnmiller’s surprise, he spoke directly to her and said, “Call this number if you ever need help.”

She was deeply in denial and not receptive to the message. “He’s telling me about this program, and I’m thinking, ‘That’s nice,’ “ she said. “I asked him, ‘Why are you telling me about this place?’ He said, ‘Noelle, I think you might like to go there.’”

She was offended, thinking, “I’m fine. That’s not a place for me. I’m good.”

Bahnmiller’s life was unraveling. She isolated herself and stopped meeting friends for coffee. She began to load up on work, taking all the overtime offered.

One day, months after the fire, a longtime colleague said, “What’s going on with you? You are not yourself.” She told him only that she had not been sleeping.

She left work intending to shoot herself, too. “I was driving to my boyfriend’s house to kill myself,” she says. “I felt trapped. I didn’t know there were other ways out. I decided the only way to fix it was to kill myself.”

Instead, for reasons she still doesn’t understand, Bahnmiller pulled over, reached into her uniform pocket, dug out the helpline number, and called.

Bahnmiller agreed to attend a “trauma camp” for a week of intensive therapy.

The camp, in Napa County, is operated by therapists with extensive experience in the trauma inherent in high-risk professions such as firefighting and policing. Cal Fire pays for the program.

The clinicians diagnosed Bahnmiller with acute post-traumatic stress. She attended group and individual therapy, yoga, and meditation classes, and learned calming breathing techniques. A clinician also guided her through a realistic reenactment of a traumatic event as a way to reprogram how her mind processes trauma.

This combination of approaches can have a powerful therapeutic effect. “It was like a shedding. I left completely altered. I felt free. I wasn’t frozen on that ridgetop. It gave me my life back,” she said.

She eventually opened up to her husband, who was shocked by the severity of her depression and pain.

Six years later, Bahnmiller fell prey to another traumatic event. It was August 2020 and she was a heavy equipment boss, leading a bulldozer crew on the Carmel Fire in Monterey County. She was directing two bulldozer operators cutting fire lines, when she stepped out of her truck and sunk her boots into an underground yellow jacket nest.

Bahnmiller is dangerously allergic to many insect stings. She packs EpiPens and powerful antihistamines in a small insulated lunch bag, decorated with a sparkly unicorn.

Within seconds of stepping on the nest, yellowjackets swarmed Bahnmiller, covering her clothes and crawling up her neck. She heard a “tink, tink” as wasps caromed off the inside of her helmet. Her body was nearly completely covered with stinging insects. The men told her she looked as if she were wearing yellowjacket pants.

The crewmen did everything they could to save Bahnmiller, picking yellowjackets from her hair and clothes, all the while being stung multiple times themselves.

Bahnmiller knew she was racing the clock. Yellowjackets had encircled her throat and as her airway swelled, she gasped for breath.

Using hand signals, Bahnmiller directed one of the crewmen to put an oxygen mask on her. She managed to stab an EpiPen into her thigh, but it was too little, too late, she thought.

As she lay blinking in and out of consciousness, Bahnmiller felt in her uniform pocket and discovered a second EpiPen, but she didn’t have the strength to use it.

The helicopter set down and a young firefighter jumped out and raced toward her. She clutched the EpiPen in her hand, reaching out to him.

“I can’t…” she croaked.

The young man took the device from her, “I can,” he said.

Bahnmiller was airlifted to a hospital. As she recovered, her mind fixated on the yellow jacket attack that nearly killed her. She had difficulty sleeping and had nightmares of being swarmed by stinging insects.

Her PTSD came back, but this time Bahnmiller recognized what was happening and got help, calling a psychologist right away. She attended another weeklong trauma camp.

“I talked about it from the very beginning, talked about my feelings. I didn’t isolate and made sure to be with people.”

Bahnmiller now works as a counselor in Cal Fire’s behavioral health program and as statewide coordinator of its addiction and substance abuse program, engaged in the nonstop work of helping her colleagues survive trauma as she did.

Things are slowly getting better, for her and others at Cal Fire, she said. The culture is changing.

“It’s different now. People are getting help; we’ve got each others’ back. I’ve had a second chance at living. I’m going to make it count.”

If you are having suicidal thoughts, you can get help from the National Suicide Pevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/

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