The bathrooms in Ben McLane’s barracks haven’t worked for the last three years. It’s just one of several “embarrassing” problems with the living quarters offered by the US government to the federal fire captain’s poorly paid crew. Along with having to rely on portable toilets, this season his firefighters have also had to grapple with bed bugs and rodent infestations.
Issues like these are common in the dilapidated and aging facilities that federal land management agencies rent out to many of their workers across the US. It’s a problem felt particularly by federal firefighters, who get by on incomes as low as $15 an hour.
