(TNS) - Melissa Morgado began 2018 trying to solve an arithmetic problem: How many nights did she and her firefighter husband spend apart because of work in the previous year?

He was gone for the hot summer months, of course, and again for most of October, and then 19 more days in December when deadly fires broke out on the Central Coast.

Her tally hit 249 nights, the most she and her husband spent apart in his 14 years at Cal Fire.

“I don’t like the term ‘fire season’ anymore. It’s a fire year,” said Morgado, 33, who wrote about their long separations in a popular blog post called “A Year in the Life of a Cal Fire Wife.”

The stress on her home and thousands of other firefighter families in California is another sign of the state’s “new normal” of severe, drawn-out wildfires that begin earlier in the year and run almost to the end of it.

Those expansive fires are leading emergency agencies to change their tactics, and they’re also prompting firefighters and their families to rethink how they manage the strains of long months in harm’s way.

Alarming reports of suicides, substance abuse and domestic violence persuaded Cal Fire Director Ken Pimlott to pour resources into firefighter support services.

Read more