FireWatch PART 3: A Guide to Agency-Community Communication and Collaboration in Wildfire Management
Along with an upsurge in wildfire activity across the U.S. has been a rapid escalation in risks to firefighters, costs to taxpayers, and environmental impacts on public lands from fire suppression activities. Climate change, suburban sprawl, and excess fuel loads resulting from past fire exclusion have all changed the fire environment in ways that make conventional suppression tools and techniques less effective. Risks to firefighters have increased, yet opportunities to reduce future risk are often ignored. America has long since passed the point of diminishing returns: spending more and more money on fire suppression is resulting in less effective protection of homes and communities from wildfire damage.
The mounting risks, costs, and impacts of suppression actions are, paradoxically, a result of society’s misguided combative relationship with wildland fire. The dominance of fire management by suppression, and its militaristic framing as fire fighting, accounts for much of the problem. Wildfire suppression operations on public lands are developed without informed public involvement or environmental analysis, and decisions to fully and aggressively suppress wildfires often run afoul of the best available fire ecology science and economic rationality. Indeed, most citizens are silent spectators during wildfire incidents, and what little they learn about suppression actions are what they read or watch in the news media, which too often glorifies firefighting and uncritically relays the official spin of agency spokespersons. Consequently, firefighting actions often escape critical analysis or external oversight, leading to a systemic lack of agency transparency and accountability. That must change.
For many reasons, agencies must become more selective and strategic with their use of suppression resources, so that protection efforts are concentrated on homes and communities, where fire is absolutely unwanted. Use of fire to meet ecological objectives should be emphasized in uninhabited wildlands, where more fire is desperately needed. Concerned citizens and rural communities must get more actively involved in monitoring fire suppression operations not just to prevent bad things from happening, but also to help promote best practices in land stewardship. The new paradigm of Ecological Fire Management strives to maximize the ecological benefits of burning while mitigating the risks to firefighters, minimizing the costs to taxpayers, and avoiding the environmental damage caused by aggressive suppression actions. Informed citizens and local communities should be able to communicate with agencies, share their knowledge of local values-at-risk, and collaborate with managers in setting priorities for suppression efforts.
Wildland firefighters need your support.
Wildland firefighters always seek to optimize their “situational awareness.” This applies to citizen watchdogs, as well. When they learn how to gain access to unmediated sources of wildfire suppression information and documents, critically analyze the data, and communicate their concerns to agency officials, they can become assets in helping fire managers make better decisions in wildfire responses. Wildland firefighters and the public they serve stand to benefit from increased public understanding and involvement in wildfire management, and will gain much from greater agency transparency and accountability of suppression operations on public lands. Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology (FUSEE) offers FireWatch: A Citizen’s Guide to Wildfire Suppression Monitoring to help environmental reporters, forest conservation groups, taxpayer watchdogs, and other concerned citizens learn how to monitor wildfire events and suppression operations occurring on public lands. The FireWatch Guide will provide people with step-by-step instructions and advice needed to access documents and analyze data on suppression operations. FireWatch: A Citizen’s Guide to Wildfire Suppression Monitoring.
The FireWatch Guide Series is divided into three parts.
FireWatch Guide Part One: A Guide to Online Wildfire Information Gathering
Part One details how to access web-based information sources in order to learn where wildfires are located, where they might be spreading, and what kinds of suppression resources have been dispatched to manage the fires. Reporters and local citizens can access these information sources on their own in real-time, and thus avoid being dependent on agency spokespersons to disclose information or being dependent on the news media, which often involves delays between when events are happening and the time that news stories get printed or broadcast.
FireWatch Guide Part Two: A Guide to Wildfire Suppression Monitoring
Part Two Operations Documents and Data discusses how to access hardcopy suppression documents and analyze the data in them to understand suppression operations on recent past fires. In some cases, these documents will require a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, so tips on how to navigate the FOIA process are also provided.
Part Three provides tips for citizens and groups to communicate their concerns with agency officials and fire managers. The ideal time to do this is well before a wildfire ignites by establishing collaborative relationships of knowledge-sharing that will be mutually-beneficial if and when a wildfire ignites in a given area.
Together, the series of three FireWatch Guides will educate and empower people to become citizen “fire watchers” providing vital citizen input and public oversight to the agencies to help wildland firefighters do their jobs more safely, ethically, and ecologically.