there are 3 primary types of wildfire hand crews

[Peteri Szerlagi]

please correct me if I am wrong

hand crew - firefighters who beat wildfires to death with shovels and
axes and pulaskis and chainsaws and weedwackers and leaf blowers and
rakes and hoes and drip torches

hotshots - cohesive crew of 20 people - this is their primary job for
the summer - they travel all around the usa - via plane and via crew
carrier trucks

type 2 agency crew - fire militia - this is the foresters and forest
technicians of the federal and state level natural resources agencies
- firefighting is a 2ndary duty for them - they might be fulltime
yearrround employees (office jockeys) - but they only serve as
firefighting handcrew members when their crew is activated to respond
to a major fire - or maybe to a local fire as initial attack forces
(on the first day of the fire)

type 2 administrative hires - this is a crew of oncall folks - they
are not regularly employed on any wildfire agency - possibly many of
the Indian crews fall in this category - they only get activated when
multi major wildfires are underway across the USA - on the other hand
- PA and ME state forestry have oncall firefighters for engine crews
iirc - so that is a variation on this theme

some prisons have inmate hand crews - but apparently they are being
phased out - calfire used to have maybe 50 of them - now maybe there
are 20 - nevada and washington also have them iirc - maybe MT also -
but these are state level crews - typically they do not go to fires
out of state - maybe