Elsewhere in the West, 29 large active fires have burned more than 265,000 acres in 10 states, according to a federal monitor.
It’s tempting to say that wildfire season has arrived, but there is no “season” anymore; wildfires occur year-round. Yet many of those who fight them are still employed for only part of the year by the federal government, a script that’s as outdated as the core procedures that guide the work of forest managers and firefighters on the front lines.
Let’s stipulate that wildfires are part of the ecosystem in the western United States. They are nature’s way of clearing the forest floor and nourishing the soil. But after decades of misguided policy that pushed for extinguishing fires at first spark, combined with a warming, drier climate, wildfires have grown catastrophically in size, intensity and complexity.
Last year alone, wildfires burned more than 10 million acres, or nearly 13.5 percent of all the land burned over the past decade, taking lives and livelihoods along the way.
The record-breaking drought gripping much of the West multiplies the danger. One fire-zone manager in Arizona likened the dead juniper trees covering tens of thousands of parched acres to gasoline.
At a wildfire preparedness event last month, Brian Rhodes, deputy fire director for the U.S. Forest Service, said, “It’s not a matter of if” a certain slice of land in California will burn, but “a matter of when.”
Given the inevitability — and devastation — of wildfires, why have we not changed the way we fight them?
In 2014, I took the courses required to become a wildland firefighter, part of the research for a book on the 19 firefighters killed during the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona, the deadliest in the United States in nearly a century. I was struck by the youth of my classmates, mostly men in their early 20s, and their eagerness to do such dangerous and grueling work — 16-hour days, for up to 14 days straight — in exchange for so little money.
The starting salary for an entry-level firefighter employed by the federal government — a GS-3, in bureaucratic parlance — is $13.45 per hour, or less than the pay to work a Chick-fil-A drive-through window here in Arizona.
Of the approximately 15,000 federal wildland firefighters (states and municipalities also have crews), several thousand are seasonal employees whose part-time status doesn’t entitle them to the usual benefits and protections given to urban firefighters. For a decent payout, they depend on overtime and hazard pay, so they operate under an absurd premise: Fight fire while hoping for more fires.
They also battle through exhaustion and worry, and carry the guilt of having survived when others died or lost everything they owned. Many struggle with substance abuse, depression and suicide.
“I have driven a good friend to rehab. I have held on to a firearm for another friend who was afraid they would use it on themselves, and I have escorted the body of a fallen firefighter home to their family,” Riva Duncan, who retired in December after 31 years with the Forest Service, said during an April hearing of the House National Resources Committee.
Duncan is executive secretary of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a group formed in 2019 by current and former federal wildland firefighters to push for better pay and comprehensive health coverage for firefighters, and for changes in the way public lands are cared for.
One of their key proposals is to rethink the use of full-time federal firefighters. Traditionally, these workers divided the year between fire prevention — tasks that include managing planned fires in cooler months to clean the forest floor of dead and dried branches and leaves — and then suppression during the warmer months. The problem is that with fires burning year-round, Duncan’s group says, it makes more sense to hire more full-time firefighters, with some dedicated to prevention and others to suppression.
This two-front approach would make it easier to tame overgrown forests and, with that, give fires less “fuel,” as vegetation is known in the business, to burn.
Homeowners also have to do their part. With more and more Americans building houses close to fire-prone wildlands, it’s unrealistic to expect firefighters to save structures when lives are at stake. Those of us who live on the edges of forests can help by building vegetation-free zones between the wildlands and our homes. But the essential thing is to be ready to flee and leave it all behind when a wildfire is barreling your way. That’s necessary to save your own life and to save firefighters from risking their lives to rescue you.
Read more:
"Opinion" - Google News
June 14, 2021 at 09:13PM
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Here’s why the old playbook for fighting wildfires doesn’t work anymore - The Washington Post
"Opinion" - Google News
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