Wildland fire agencies work to create 'better work-life balance' as fire seasons grow longer
Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in late 2021, which funds $8.25 billion for wildland fire management around the country. A considerable amount of that money is designated for federal wildland firefighter pay increases and will turn many seasonal jobs into full-time positions for the longer fire seasons.
NIFC spokesperson Jessica Gardetto said the goal is to help improve their way of life, while also recruiting and retaining more wildland firefighters.
Gardetto said federal agencies will not begin to see the staffing effects of law until next fire season because they do most of their hiring in the fall which was around the same time Congress passed the law. She said leadership does believe the law will certainly entice new and former wildland firefighters to join crews in 2023.
Oregon faces firefighter shortage as it looks toward wildfire season
This year's fire season could be a challenging one for crews in Oregon. They're dealing with a firefighter shortage and a delayed pay raise. Sen. Ron Wyden visited Southern Oregon Tuesday to get an update on this year's fire season from state fire officials. Wyden has been pressuring the Biden administration to speed up a promised pay increase for wildland firefighters. Congress approved $600 million last year to raise firefighter pay, but that’s been delayed by over a month.
Oregon wildfires offer new clues on forest management
In the Pacific Northwest, land managers should focus on fire-resistant construction and fire suppression, not big forest management projects, a research paper on the Labor Day 2020 fires said.
Ecologists say federal wildfire plans are dangerously out of step with climate change
"Seems astounding," fire ecologist Timothy Ingalsbee tells NPR's Here and Now. "Never again should we have the excuse that we failed to include climate conditions and climate data in our fire management actions. That's just the era we live in," says the former Forest Service wildland firefighter who now directs the group Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. "I can understand why people are upset. It sounds like the 'dog ate my homework' kind of excuse,' he says.
Author: Flawed fire policies hurt Pecos River forests
In the 1970s and ’80s, forest officials resisted conducting prescribed burns and letting natural fires run their course but began embracing this type of fire management in the 1990s, said Tom Ribe, public lands advocate and author of a book that takes a critical look at the 2000 Cerro Grande Fire.
Some similar missteps were made with both the Cerro Grande and Hermits Peak fires, Ribe said. Crews felt pressed to complete the burns despite dry conditions and the risk of erratic spring winds, especially on sloping terrain, he said.
As U.S. tests new fire retardant, critics push other methods
Andy Stahl, executive director of the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, and Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, both said that the ammonium-phosphates-based retardant is essentially a fertilizer that can boost invasive plants and is potentially responsible for some algae blooms in lakes or reservoirs when it washes downstream. They said the magnesium-chloride-based retardant is essentially a salt that will inhibit plant growth where it falls, possibly harming threatened species.
Check out the wildfire risk at your Oregon property. Building codes and other requirements may depend on it.
That broader approach is exactly what Tim Ingalsbee would like to see happen. The executive director of the Eugene-based advocacy group Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, he says the definition of fire risks within the interface will give property owners with a low-risk classification a false sense of security.
“They’re talking about zones and not the actual conditions of individual properties,” he said. “It’s not a bad thing as a sensitizing exercise, but all of us have to get prepared regardless of what color the map is where our properties reside. It’s about the home ignition zone.”
Ralph Bloemers, an environmental lawyer who is the director of fire safe communities for Green Oregon, agrees that “regardless of where you are on the map, hardening homes and business is the most durable, cost-effective and fire-safe step you can take.”
Even the ‘Good Fires’ Can Now Turn Disastrous
But Pyne is most focused on what he calls “working with wildfires”: a more open and fluid approach that treats those that begin with an accidental or natural ignition almost like prescribed burns by guiding them toward useful spread. “I wish the agencies were a little more forthright about this” — that some remote fires can just be left to burn, he said. “It’s legal, it’s legitimate. But it can also seem evasive, a little sub rosa,” especially against a backdrop of growing fire anxiety across the West, driven not just by the fires themselves but the smoke they produce. “People get hay fever in the spring,” Pyne said. “Well, you may be dealing with smoke fever in the fall.”
Forest Service failed to account for climate change in setting New Mexico's largest wildfire
A new report by the U.S. Forest Service finds that the agency didn't account for the ways climate change has altered the conditions and the landscape when it set a prescribed burn in the national forest in April. That blaze quickly grew out of control and became the Hermit's Creek fire that then merged with the nearby Calf Canyon fire, which has torched more than 341,000 acres. That's an area larger than the city of Los Angeles.
Host Peter O'Dowd talks with Timothy Inglasbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology.
Forest Service says it failed to account for climate change in New Mexico blaze
Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director with Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, said authorities “can no longer manage fire according to the calendar date” and should incorporate climate data more thoroughly into their models. He also said firefighters need to intensify prescribed burns when weather conditions are favorable. He warned that halting prescribed burns for three months could have consequences later this summer. “Areas that should have burned under controlled conditions will burn under extreme conditions,” he said.
Cal Fire fumbles key responsibilities to prevent catastrophic wildfires despite historic budget
Cal Fire has publicly signaled a commitment to rebalancing its priorities. But a monthslong investigation by The California Newsroom, a public media collaboration, found that the department continues to fumble key responsibilities related to forest management and wildfire mitigation.
Wildland firefighters win pay rise - but is it enough?
Tom Ribe is the Co-founder of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology (FUSEE) and a retired wildland firefighter. He said firefighter pay and working conditions are so bad now, this rise may not change much. “I don’t think it’s enough,” Ribe said. “They need to be able to survive. They need to not be living in their cars when they are off the fires.”
Trial by fire: The trauma of fighting California’s wildfires
As California’s wildfires intensify and burn year-round, its firefighters suffer from the increasing strain of post-traumatic stress. Decisions made while struggling with lack of sleep, long hours and stress could endanger not just the crews, but the public, too. What is the state doing to respond? Overwhelmingly, California’s firefighters and mental-health experts say, “Not nearly enough.” Cal Fire has been slow to address PTSD and suicides among its ranks, and firefighters routinely encounter problems getting workers’ comp insurance to cover their care.
Crowning fury: Anger toward the Forest Service has been smoldering for a century. Raging wildfires brought it roaring to life.
Like so many in the devastation zone, she squarely places the blame on the USFS, not only for starting a prescribed burn in the windy month of April — when gusts reached 70 miles per hour — but for a century of conflict with rural communities. Known locally as La Floresta, the USFS is often seen as a feudal lord, a faraway government entity that has accumulated vast holdings with little idea of how to properly steward them or enough funds to do the job.
Indigenous knowledge reveals history of fire-prone California forest
Combining multiple lines of evidence, Knight and her team show that the tree density in this region of Klamath Mountains started to increase as the area was colonized, partly because the European settlers prevented Indigenous peoples from practising cultural burning. In the twentieth century, total fire suppression became a standard management practice, and fires of any kind were extinguished or prevented — although controlled burns are currently used in forest management. The team reports that in some areas, the tree density is higher than it has been for thousands of years, owing in part to fire suppression.
Human-triggered California wildfires more severe than natural blazes
Human-caused wildfires in California are more ferocious than blazes sparked by lightning, a team led by scientists from the University of California, Irvine reported recently in the journal Nature Communications. The research could help scientists better understand fire severity and how likely a blaze is to kill trees and inflict long-term damage on an ecosystem in its path.
Can we replace fire with mechanical thinning in Southwest Colorado?
The spate of burn-induced wildfires led Forest Service Chief Randy Moore to suspend the agency’s prescribed fire operations to conduct a 90-day review of its protocols and practices.
Yet, amid renewed awareness of the risks of prescribed fire, forest ecologists and biologists say fire serves an irreplaceable role in Southwest Colorado’s mixed conifer and ponderosa pine forests, and that limiting the use of fire would do more harm than good.
Fires spread as firefighters plead for pay raise promised last year
Federal firefighters still haven’t received a pay boost approved last year. It’s not known which employees will get the money once it is implemented. In some high-risk areas, the U.S. Forest Service has only half the staff it needs.
Meanwhile, the number of acres burned as of Wednesday was 112 percent higher than the 10-year average, according to the government’s wild land fire outlook. Drought, heat and wind are creating additional fire hazards.
Forest Service barely, sorta met burn requirements before Hermits Peak fire, plan shows.
Author Tom Ribe, a longtime wildland firefighter, has said it was “extremely risky” to light a fire on a windy April day and that the forecasted winds and humidity should have given a burn boss pause. He and other experts, however, said wind and relative humidity are just two of many factors a burn boss considers when they approve a burn.
4 Investigates: The prescribed burns that started the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire
“They are professionals, and I respect that very much, but obviously it was a risky thing to do given the dryness of this year,” said Tom Ribe, a fire scholar.
Ribe worked for the National Park Service for years doing prescribed burns in California and in New Mexico. He lived in New Mexico for most of his life and even wrote a book on the 2000 prescribed burn that turned into the Cerro Grande wildfire near Los Alamos. “I can’t imagine that the place was, as we call, ‘in prescription,’ which means that the conditions were right to do this,” Ribe said.