It's forest fire season in Kentucky.

Some firefighters on the front lines are actually forestry students at the University of Kentucky.

Through a partnership with the Kentucky Department of Forestry.

The UK fire cats are, as they are called or paid emergency firefighters getting hands on experience while protecting our state's forests.

The Fire Cats program started back in 2014, and I think it started just because we wanted to get our students with more hands on, you know, experience with dealing with fire suppression here in Kentucky.

So students are paid through the Kentucky Division of Forestry, and generally they work on the weekends whenever the conditions are right for fire, like low humidity and low precipitation.

And things are dry enough for there to be a chance of fire.

And we'll go down to the Division of Forestry office down in London, Kentucky, and will be on call in case there is a fire on the weekends.

And we also have other opportunities.

Like a couple of weeks ago, we were on a prescribed fire out at Robinson Forest, which is owned by UK.

And that was a great experience.

I learned a lot about how fire works.

It's one thing to learn in the classroom and another to see it in person.

How fire moves, how it reacts to wind, how it's like its own living thing.

You know, it's like a it's like a creature in it.

It's just so mesmerizing to see how it works out in the woods.

We'll get sent out either with leaf blowers or rakes, or a combination of the two or various other tools that are needed.

And the name of the game is clearing away things that could burn to stop the fire from progressing any further, and so oftentimes will go usually not directly up against the fire's edge.

Oftentimes we'll just call us indirect attack.

And so we'll just make a big box around it and headed off there.

Leather gloves are crucial.

Anything that's, polyester or any kind of plastic will just melt right away.

Pretty much.

Because we're dealing with a lot of, hot logs.

Hot sticks, hot dirt, hot rocks.

Everything's hot.

The most important thing is situational awareness.

Knowing what's going on and where.

Because if you don't know that, then it's really easy to get yourself into a bad situation.

Even a low consequence situation can turn bad pretty quickly if you don't know what's going on.

I drawn the fire cats because I came into forestry wanting to go into a career in fire.

I was really drawn to the whole wildland firefighting thing, but I didn't want to go in kind of just as an entry level.

I wanted to really learn a lot about the way force work and the way fireworks within our forest, and how we can use it to better our forests.

It's the kind of work where everybody wants to do the really hard jobs.

And so it's a work environment like I've never seen before, where everybody is really engaged and really wants to be there.

I just love that it's tremendously beneficial.

It's fire suppression and using fire as a management tool, to manage our forests is critically important, right?

And so having this type of hands on experience for our students not only helps them, manage our forests and prevent fires here in Kentucky, but also gives them the experience in case they wanted to go out to the western United States and fight fires, they'll have this, this, this coursework and this, and this training that can really help them find, find good employment.

The program continues to gain interest this year.

18 students are on the Fire Cats team.