To honor our Firefighters as we continue with our Fire Station Contest, every week until the contest ends we will be blogging about what makes firefighters so awesome! So how do they put out those dangerous infernos? There are a number of ways they do the job, actually. For starters, Firefighters use a tool called a Pulaski. It’s a combination of an axe and a hoe used to dig a fireline. Firelines are a strip of land where all the brush and debris have been cleared to rob a wildfire of its fuel. They also use hotshots and smoke jumpers to clear a large path in a big circle around the fire so the blaze is contained in a ring of dirt. When the fire reaches this area, it runs out of fuel and pretty much starves to death. If the fire is too large, however, planes and helicopters fly over the area, dropping water and special chemicals that smother the flames. The chemicals are of course fire retardant, but it is also a bright pink and is called sky jello.