IRVINE — An SUV screeches to a halt. The woman inside smiles and honks in support, and loud cheers follow. Megaphone in hand, a pink-clad middle-aged woman — her 4-year-old daughter by her side — leads a chant, “Don’t hate, reinstate. Honk for Desiree.”
Residents are intrigued by the excitement as a teenage boy calls out from across the street to ask what the protest is about. “A helicopter pilot was fired for being a woman,” a protester yells back. Demonstrating in front of the Orange County Fire Authority (OCFA) headquarters on September 23, people wave signs that read: “Let Her Fly.”
Desiree Horton isn’t just a pilot. She is a firefighting pilot. As a woman, her presence was a novelty, and not just in Orange County. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, less than 7 percent of the 100,000 or so licensed commercial pilots in the United States are women. Just a fraction of them are licensed commercial helicopter pilots.
Horton has fought against such statistics her entire career, starting as a relief firefighting pilot for the United States Forest Service, where she worked from 2005 to 2013. Next, she moved to Cal Fire, fighting blazes out of San Bernardino for seven years.
When she was hired by the Orange County Fire Authority in 2019 , Horton was the first female pilot since its founding in 1995.
She was on a one-year probationary track, after which she would become a permanent hire. But before that could happen, she was let go — without the required evaluation flight — and with the declaration that she couldn’t be trained to fly with night vision goggles. Horton maintains that she was treated unfairly because of her gender.
Horton earned her pilot's license at 21 and has flown for traffic watch, news telecopters, police operations, wildland firefighting, and medical and organ transport — working nearly three decades as a helicopter pilot. (Wikimedia Commons)
Jenna Rangel, Haeggquist & Eck attorney, filed a sexual discrimination lawsuit on Horton’s behalf against the Orange County Fire Authority in May.
Announcing her decision to pursue legal action, at a Zoom press conference in June, Horton said, “It was such an honor and a privilege to serve Orange County as a first responder but OCFA didn’t see it that way. I was set up to fail. It was clear to me that women weren’t wanted at OCFA.”
According to the legal complaint, Horton’s supervisor, Chief Fire Pilot Jack Matiasevich, “unfairly and discriminatorily scrutinized her, held her to unfair and higher standards than her male counterparts, deprived her of training opportunities and the quality and consistency of training offered to male fire pilots, and forced her to work in a hostile environment in which Ms. Horton was undermined, disrespected, disparaged and treated unequally.”
The crux of the wrongful termination argument is that she was not trained for the night-flying that she was deemed “untrainable” for.
According to Horton’s court complaint, there were other problems, such as her male colleagues using the women’s bathroom — as a form of hazing — and urinating all over the toilet seat and floor. They also allegedly left unflushed feces in the toilet. Colleagues also claimed she did not legitimately pass her flight exam and would berate her for asking questions during training flights.
“To be treated unfairly and not be given the chance to succeed just because she's a woman,” Rangel argued on her client’s behalf, “that can't be allowed, and it has to be addressed.”
The Fire Authority denied such allegations in its legal response. When contacted for an interview, a spokesperson said that the Fire Authority cannot comment on ongoing litigation.
Supporters of Horton are rejecting the stereotypical image of firefighters and demanding change at the Fire Authority. Click here to download the video.
A resident of Huntington Beach, she applied for a job at her home county’s fire department five times, between 2013 and 2018, and was rejected every time. In 2019, after a change in top management, Horton got her chance.
Rebecca Ninburg, a fire commissioner for the City of Los Angeles, is one of the experienced women protesting for Horton.
“It is 2021. The fact that we’re dealing with this level of blatant gender discrimination is abhorrent. It’s tragic but it’s also really empowering to see how many people are coming together to right this wrong and demand action,” said Ninburg, adding that social media helped connect a large number of women in the fire service as well as other underserved minority groups.
“Chief, it falls on your shoulders”
An hour after the protest, Horton’s supporters join the OCFA Board of Directors’ regular meeting inside the building. Soon after, the clerk opens up the floor to the public. Fifteen men and women take turns addressing the board. Each speaker is allotted 3 minutes.
The 25-member board that governs the Fire Authority holds its regular meeting. At the meeting, protestors are optimistic that the board heard their plea. (Dua Anjum)
Captain Tony Hardy of San Diego Fire-Rescue comes up to the podium and says, “I actually came up in the department with Fire Chief Brian Fennessy and now he’s up here with you, and let me tell you something — he got rid of a few employees. It happened to be women and two of them were black. Then he comes up here and he gets rid of another woman, Desiree Horton.”
Fennessy became Chief of the Orange County Fire Authority in 2018. Before taking on this role, he worked at San Diego Fire-Rescue Department since 1990, and as chief of the department since 2015.
In a subsequent interview, Hardy said about Fennessy, “He got rid of Jennifer Bailes. He was assistant chief at the time. And they fired her, you know, a few weeks before she got off probation. I mean, this is the same thing that happened with Desiree.”
The board meeting continues after the speeches, but Hardy’s words hang in the air.
“Chief, it falls on your shoulders. So lead, it ain’t that hard. You can do it, Chief.”
As protestors get ready to demonstrate at the Fire Authority headquarters on Sept. 23, the energy is palpable. (Dua Anjum)
Bathroom politics
Horton was lucky to be assigned a station with a designated women’s restroom. Fire Captain Lauren Andrade, an advocate for women in the fire service, conducted an internal survey and found that in Orange County, 17 out of 77 fire stations do not have restrooms and shower facilities reserved specifically for women.
Stephanie Wade, a former Marine infantry officer and trans woman, says, “I know women firefighters work in those houses and they come and do a four-day shift and there's no bathroom set aside for them.”
There’s a reason: cost. But Wade explains how restroom access is a major health and safety issue for firefighters. “They come back from a fire and they’re covered in Creosote and you know, all the toxic goo that comes from a fire — the stuff that means that firefighters are four times more likely to die of cancer in their lifetimes.”
Female firefighters, Wade notes, “don’t get to shower and take that stuff off their bodies until they can go into a dirty shower that every other man in the fire station has used.”
Wade adds that in some stations men give women the privacy to use the shared shower rooms first after a fire, but that it is equally dangerous — whoever is exposed to toxic chemicals for longer is at risk.
Similarly, fire stations have also lacked lactation rooms.
Going back to work three and a half weeks after giving birth, Andrade couldn’t find a place to pump milk. She had to use one of the multi-user restrooms — there were none designated for women.
Soon after, Andrade began advocating for designated lactation rooms and women’s restrooms in all stations across Orange County. As one of the few women to be in a command position at the Fire Authority, she felt it fell to her to try to change things. “I brought in the ACLU because I knew that ... I needed legal support for them to take me seriously,” said Andrade.
“OCFA authorized the building and designation of lactation rooms and women’s restrooms in every fire station in the county, and I served as the auditor, ” Andrade noted her role guiding the change, in writing for the American Civil Liberties Union.
Another problem is ill-fitting uniforms. Andrade said that most fire stations don’t make the proper uniforms accessible for women so they have to wear oversized men’s uniforms when heading out to suppress fires.
“They're not made to fit a woman's body, you know, your breasts, your hips — it’s just a different fit,” Andrade said this can be a big safety issue as, “gloves are really important too and if they're too big, is it difficult to grip a chainsaw, you know? And if you don't have the right fitting equipment, it makes, you know, normal things very difficult.”
“We support each other”
When Desiree Horton was hired by the Orange County Fire Authority, Andrade was thrilled.
A year later, after Horton was “released” from her probation and began to fight to get her job back, Andrade joined that struggle.
“Katie Becker, who was an L.A. city firefighter, decided to go public with her story about how she was harassed and discriminated against in L.A. City Fire. I was connecting with Katie Becker a lot as well as Desiree Horton, who was having kind of these same struggles. And we were all just trying to come together for support,” Andrade said.
Recently, Andrade founded a non-profit advocacy group called Equity on Fire — a coalition of firefighters, civil rights leaders, and grassroots community organizers — working to address discrimination within the fire service. They have organized protests and highlighted discrimination.
“Because we are so underrepresented, it's really important that we support each other,” Andrade said.
Horton works part-time in Kern County where she is doing rescue flights with night vision goggles, the very thing was declared “untrainable” for. After four training flights on the new job, she was certified.
Andrade said she reached out to the chief pilot at Kern County to ask how Horton was doing, “He calls me, he goes, ‘I don’t know what they’re talking about, about her being ‘untrainable.’’ He said it took minimal training. ‘She is a very intuitive fire pilot.’”
In the case of Desiree Horton v. Orange County Fire Authority, the judge has set a trial date for September 26, 2022.
“After what I went through, I knew I needed to tell my story,” said Horton at the June press conference over Zoom. She did so, she said, “Not just for me, but for every woman who came before me and who will come after me.”
