U.S. firefighters on climate frontline face 'broken' health system
From 2017 to 2020, 2,500 work-related injuries or illnesses were reported on average each year by the roughly 10,000-strong U.S. Forest Service wildland firefighting force – the nation's biggest wildland force, a database provided to the Thomson Reuters Foundation showed.
"Our occupation is very risky, with high consequences ... We have to make sure we're taking care of people," said Kelly Martin, president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a group lobbying for better workplace protections.
Too often, that is not the case, she said.
What it’s like to fight a megafire
In 2017, Timothy Ingalsbee, the executive director of the organization Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, published an article in the International Journal of Wildland Fire in which he argued that firefighters know that large fires will defy suppression until weather conditions change or fuels run out. Steve Pyne, a historian and a former wildland firefighter, asked me, “Why are firefighters there at all? That’s the fundamental question.” Putting out too many fires contributes to the creation of even bigger blazes: fire ecologists call this the “fire paradox.” Today’s wildland firefighters are trapped within it.
Wildfire, drought provisions in infrastructure bill bring new funding to old ideas on Western Slope
Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, told Energy & Environment News that other portions of the infrastructure bill reflect a legacy of misguided wildland firefighting tactics, citing a provision in the bill which calls for $500 million in creating fuel breaks, areas near communities in the wildland interface which have been cleared of vegetation to contain a fire. “But fuel breaks have proven ineffective in wildlands, because embers can travel so far on the wind,” Ingalsbee told E&E News, citing the 2017 Eagle Creek Fire in Oregon that jumped the Columbia River.
California burning: A special edition on wildfires — Debate rages amid smoke and flames: How do we stay safe?
Our ‘California Burning’ series originally ran in Fall 2020. It was recently awarded First Place by the National Newspaper Association for Investigative Reporting. We are reprinting the series in the next several weeks, because issues covered in this reporting still pose threats to our Mountain Communities. We also have many new residents who have settled here in the past year who may benefit from understanding these urgent issues.
Opinion: Don’t clearcut in fire-adapted, mature forests
Additionally, according to Dr. Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology (FUSEE) and senior wildland fire ecologist certified by the Association for Fire Ecology, “Studies show that forests that have been degraded by past commercial logging, livestock grazing, or fire suppression typically burn more severely than native forests that have not been subjected to these past land abuses and are more resilient to fire.”
Inside the massive and costly fight to contain the Dixie Fire
Timothy Ingalsbee, who co-founded Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, a group that pushes for stronger land management practices, has argued that over the long term many of the tactics employed by emergency crews hurt forest land, which benefits from periodic controlled fires.
“We’re fighting fires under the worst conditions rather than lighting fires under the best conditions,” Mr. Ingalsbee added. “There are 10,000 firefighters on the line in California, trying to keep people safe. What would those 10,000 be able to do to apply fire in the winter or spring to yield the best ecological effects — and a very different set of costs?”
Impact of forest thinning on wildfires creates divisions
Firefighters and numerous studies credit intensive forest thinning projects with helping save communities like those recently threatened near Lake Tahoe in California and Nevada, but dissent from some environmental advocacy groups is roiling the scientific community.
While most scientific studies find such forest management is a valuable tool, environmental advocates say data from recent gigantic wildfires support their long-running assertion that efforts to slow wildfires have instead accelerated their spread.
The argument is fueling an already passionate debate.
It has led to a flurry of citations of dueling scientific studies and has fed competing claims that the science may be skewed by ideology.
‘A fire age is upon us’
Over the past decade, the U.S. fire community has developed a national cohesive strategy for wildland fire. It has three components: create fire-adapted communities, create fire-resilient landscapes, and develop a workforce capable of implementing these goals. To that triad, I would add: begin work to contain climate change. The national strategy is pretty much a master plan for living with fire. If we wait until we tackle climate change before we mitigate the risk of fire in towns and countrysides, we will suffer lots of losses, some irreversible. If we only focus on mitigation, climate change will eventually overwhelm our efforts. We need all of it all at once.
The Pyrocene is not just a metaphor: Whatever we decide to call it, a fire age is upon us. Our fire behavior made the problem and will have to unmake it.
As wildfires become more intense, we’re dumping more retardants. What’s the impact on wildlife?
As bigger, more intense fires push into the wildland-urban interface and fire crews battle to protect towns and agricultural areas, new questions are emerging about what happens when aerial wildfire retardants become a larger part of the chemical cocktail in wildfire smoke.
We’re dumping loads of retardant chemicals to fight wildfires. What does it mean for wildlife?
Tim Ingalsbee, a fire ecologist and former wildland firefighter, directs the nonprofit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, & Ecology and believes, like Stahl, that state and federal fire agencies should be more restrained and targeted in their use of retardant.
"The price of just one air tanker load of retardant can fund so many more workers [on the ground]," he told EHN. "They're much more flexible and nimble and versatile than that air tanker, which has one single function."
Why Everything We Know About Wildfires May Be Wrong
Ponder the title “fire rangers.” That’s what Timothy Ingalsbee, the executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, wants to substitute, universally, for the word that happens to be the first one in his organization’s name—a title he now considers overly militaristic. “It’s a very different mission, different identity now,” he says.
Worsening California blazes prompt new calls for innovations to fight fires smarter
“The technology for monitoring, mapping, and modeling wildfires is like a technological renaissance,” he added. “What we have as a problem is under-utilization of all this investment in technology for fire management.”
“We still are in this kind of war-on-wildfires paradigm, still seeing fire as an enemy to attack, extinguish or eliminate,” he said. “And this technology really has the ability to shift our paradigm, so we see fire more as I dare say ally, or at least a tool, for managing ecosystems in ways that really better protect communities and also sustain the ecosystem services that we all rely on.”
Fighting fire with fire. As climate change continues making wildfires worse, how do we learn to live with fire?
The Forest Service also has been slow to embrace another kind of good fire that experts say the West desperately needs: managed wildfires, in which fires are allowed to burn in a controlled manner to reduce overgrowth. To protect the future of the land and people – especially with climate change making forests drier and hotter – the Forest Service needs to embrace the idea of good fire.
The racist removal of Native Americans in California is often missing from wildfire discussions, experts say
Climate change is a driving factor of California wildfires, but so is a build-up of excess fuels. That’s often attributed to a century of fire suppression dating back to the era of the Great Fire of 1910.
But what experts say is often missing from this conversation is the racist removal of Native American people from California. Along with their physical beings, the knowledge of taking care of the land was also removed resulting in overgrown forests, experts say.
As California burns, anger and pointed questions for caretaker of its vast forests
Oftentimes, keeping fire crews away from a new fire is “the right call from the standpoint of firefighter safety,” said Ingalsbee, head of an Oregon-based group called Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics & Ecology. What’s more, trying to put out every fire at once can be unrealistic, he said. “Sending crews to attack all fires in all places ... spreads the resources thin,” Ingalsbee said.
Our wildfire breaking point. We’ve lost the war and must rethink how to protect our communities
A hundred years waging war on fire and criminalizing its use gave us broken ecosystems and communities on the brink. We won many battles, but with climate change as an ally, fire won the war. It’s over, and as long as we refuse to surrender, fire will keep up its siege until every last mountain town and green tree burn to ash
Lake Tahoe wildfire seemed controllable, then it wasn't
“Mother Nature is calling the cards on our hubris that we can conquer and control wildfires during these extreme conditions," said Timothy Ingalsbee, a former federal firefighter who now heads Oregon-based Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, which advocates for working with wildfires instead of reflexively putting them out.
How one town put politics aside to save itself from fire. Timber Wars tore this town apart. Wildfire prevention brought it back together.
The Forest Service — no longer able to conduct the business of managing timber sales as usual — focused instead on building access roads for firefighters and thinning trees deemed a wildfire threat. “It was almost presto-chango,” said Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of the nonprofit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. “All of a sudden the Forest Service, instead of doing timber extraction, was all about tinder reduction.”
Can ‘active forest management’ really reduce wildfire risk?
Mitigating wildfire impacts by reducing home losses is one area where scientists and politicians find common ground. Programs like FireWise USA, which helps individuals and communities protect against structure loss by assessing ignition potential and working with property owners to decrease it, enjoy widespread support in both policy and research circles. But when it comes to active forest management, the farther from a community a proposed logging, thinning or burning project is, the more controversial it becomes.
Lightning, wildfire, and bureaucracy: The Woods Creek story
Mike Beasley, a retired National Forest chief from California who co-founded an organization called Foresters (sic) United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, began posting on Aug. 8 on the Helena Lewis and Clark National Forest web page, calling the Needle Fire “an arson fire,” asking, “Why was it so important to eliminate records of this fire?” and saying, “A lot of folks would like to know what happened on the Galt Ranch.”