Wildfire Selfies: The New Trend

Posting a #ootd selfie, which means “Outfit Of the Day,” is no longer going to cut it across social media these days. The latest selfie trend will totally heat up your Instagram feed, and it’s called the wildfire selfie, as reported by Vocativ.

This year there has been a terrible increase of wildfires in the U.S., and along with it, there have been a number of firefighters that have posted photos onto social media while on the job. There are Instagram feeds popping up that are dedicated to sharing photos of firefighters and encouraging them to hashtag their photos in order to find them and repost those photos. Hashtags, including #wildland_firefighters, #wildfirefirefighters, #firefighters_daily, can be found with a number of photos of firefighters posing in front of trees and burning forests, along with flames from wildfires all around them.

Being a firefighter is a high-risk job, and the question of safety has brought concern from the U.S. Forest Service. The possibility of banning firefighters from carrying phones with them, with the thought that it could be a distraction from the task at hand, has been bandied about. However, the reward that these heroes have brought to social media by putting the public in their line of sight in a safe way, to show the public what they’ve endured, is being called worth it by some who appreciate the wildfire selfie.

However, opponents point to the danger of something happening in the split second it takes to pose for a wildfire selfie and take and upload that wildfire selfie, which could cost a firefighter his or her life. During this year’s wildfire season along the West Coast states, there have been 13 firefighters killed while fighting wildfires, as reported by Fox News.

Tim Bergon of the San Marcos Fire Department may have the right idea. He posted a wildfire selfie, but not until safely away from the flames and on a well deserved break, in order to let his wife know he was doing ok, as reported by CBS 8. The wildfire selfie photo went viral after Monica Calles, owner of Plan 9 Alehouse, posted it to the restaurant’s Facebook and Twitter pages. The wildfire selfie photo got more than 30,000 likes on Facebook, with comments thanking all the wildfire firefighters out there for all that they do.

The fans of these wildfire selfie photos are simply celebrating the long hours of hard work that wildfire firefighters put in, in order to keep communities safe. That part seems to be harmless. But this raises the question: What will be the next selfie trend after wildfire selfies?

[Image via Twitter]