Montana GOP Senate Hopeful Accused Firefighters Of 'Milking' Infernos For Extra Pay

Tim Sheehy, who made his fortune in aerial firefighting, has argued that "a lot" of wildland firefighters want to let infernos burn in order to rack up overtime pay.

Montana GOP Senate hopeful Tim Sheehy, who made his fortune as the founder and CEO of an aerial firefighting company that has relied largely on lucrative federal contracts, has repeatedly accused wildland firefighters of dragging their feet to put out blazes and “milking” disasters for overtime pay, a HuffPost review of his recent statements found.

In his 2023 book “Mudslingers: A True Story of Aerial Firefighting,” Sheehy described a discussion he had with fellow firefighters during a series of blazes in Idaho in 2015.

“I was hanging out at the base, shooting the breeze with some other guys, talking about how intense the fires seemed to be, just trying to make conversation and contribute to the cause,” Sheehy wrote. “‘Hopefully we can hammer this thing down quickly and get it under control,’ I said. Most of the other guys nodded solemnly, but one person, a pilot, kind of straightened up and grunted. ‘Well, we don’t want it to go too fast,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of overtime pay to be earned out there! We put it out, it’s back on salary!’”

That conversation led Sheehy — an ex-Navy SEAL who founded a Bozeman, Montana-based firefighting company called Bridger Aerospace in 2014 — to confront what he described as a “troubling undercurrent of complacency, of embracing or at least accepting the status quo because, frankly, there was so much money at stake.”

“I’ve since come to realize that this is not a feeling shared universally, but it does exist, and to deny its existence is to impede the efforts of those who understand the importance of change,” he wrote.