Locked down and unequal: The looming shortage of firefighting crews in California

California Dept. of Corrections inmate firefighters attend chapel at the Intermountain Conservation Camp. Source: California Dept. of Corrections & Rehabilitation

No amount of airtanker-delivered retardant or helicopter bucket work, alone, will contain a wildland fire.  That is done by constructing secure handlines, sometimes using natural and manmade barriers, around the entirety of the fire.  The water and retardant can aid the effort at great cost, but the business end of a shovel or Pulaski is still fundamental to any wildland fire suppression operation.  The chainsaws, fuel canisters, and water pumps carried for miles into the backcountry by crews are crucial, as well. Today, in an era of climate-enhanced wildfires, COVID-19 threatens to hobble this critical firefighting resource.

Wildland firefighting relies heavily on 20-person handcrews that work together constructing fireline through rough vegetated terrain.  The work, being particularly arduous and requiring much time away from friends and family, has recruited fewer and fewer willing participants with changing employee expectations in federal land management agencies.  Unable to raise “militia” crews of employees by decree of a Forest Supervisor or Park Superintendent, as in the past, most crews now are already organized Type 2 or Type 1 “hotshot” crews, and the unspoken truth is today – in any given fire season – Federal land management agencies simply can’t field the number of crews they could in the 1950s and 1960s at the height of the timber logging bonanza.  Hundreds, if not thousands, of orders for handcrews processed at the National Interagency Communications Center (NICC) go unfilled each year, so fires are prioritized according to risk to life and property, and remote fires have to make do without crews.

In California 17-person inmate crews, all considered Type 1 crews, are under the joint direction of the California Dept. of Corrections and CALFIRE.  They work out of Conservation Camps and are comprised of non-violent offenders, the kind of offenders one might want to release in the face of growing prison COVID-19 hotspots.  And of course, as is true for the entire prison population, the crews are disproportionately disadvantaged people of color, both men and women, often making only $1 per hour for riskier work than CALFIRE jobs on engines or helicopters that pay well above minimum wage with generous benefits.

COVID-19 has ripped the scab off the wound of inequality that had just barely started to heal after the Great Recession just a decade ago.  Republicans had been picking at this scar since FDR’s day when the robber barons of the Gilded Age bent the knee to populist rage. Now, the wound is infected and pustulant.  Important recent works by economists like Piketty and other social scientists have firmly established a connection between inequality and social cohesion, social tension, and unrest. With inequality increasing after each passing crisis, the wheels of government, finance and industry appear completely captured by those who are already wealthy and powerful.

Over 1,400 inmates and employees at San Quentin Prison have tested positive for COVID-19. Six on death row have died of the disease.  A growing public health crisis in the Bay Area, itself, transfers from San Quentin are responsible for COVID-19 being introduced into the Susanville prison population and the Conservation Camp of firefighters there.  In Northern California last week, during the run-up to the 4th of July holiday, only 30 of 77 inmate crews were available in Northern California.  That’s 800 fewer wildland firefighters available to dig lines, put in hoselays, and save homes and communities.  Less important objectives, like protecting private timber land, will simply have to take a back seat.  Timber companies regularly complain of insufficiently aggressive firefighting on far-flung timber plantations surrounded by few other values at risk.  Wildland firefighters, like other frontline workers in the COVID-19 crisis are ‘essential’ but not expendable.  Much ink has been spilled of late pondering the economic worth of a human life, but some would argue that’s incalculable.

Things look equally bleak among the ranks of free federal wildland firefighters, who may be forced to work fighting fires at National Preparedness Levels 4 & 5, even if they had a known contact with another COVID-19 positive individual, so long as they are asymptomatic.  A source familiar with the anticipated shortages of firefighters explained the two types of contact. “Close” contact implies someone being less than 10 feet away for greater than 10 minutes in the company of a confirmed case, contrasted with a “casual” contact, which is anything briefer or more distant.  A ‘close’ contact would normally require a mandatory quarantine period, but that may be negotiable in times of great need.  “If we stood down every module to quarantine that had a ‘casual’ contact, entire stations would be unavailable,” said the fire manager familiar with the process.  The firefighters are eager to work and make money, as are so many in this economy. Those who are most needed, are themselves, the most in economic need and are more likely to be exposed to COVID-19.  Unable to strike for lack of a viable union or the simple need to keep food on the table, America’s finest are least compensated, even forced to work as slaves with perverse incentives for the State to keep a prisoner incarcerated for use in disaster relief.  It is one of the more notable examples of post-Colonial disaster capitalism at work in Trump’s America, where people of color are portrayed as dangerous drug dealers and rapists to be incarcerated and enslaved, while the entitled place the lower classes and people of color in harm’s way for the privilege of social isolation from disease.

This summer all the fire agencies are doubling down on the failed policy of full suppression.  Fire exclusion is known to be impossible and destructive over the long term, merely transferring risk to the future, but this summer politicians fear public health concerns associated with evacuation centers and smoke exposure to the citizenry within the context of a global COVID-19 pandemic.  Fire is a vital and restorative force in western forests.  Despite firefighters’ best efforts, a small percentage of fires will still escape containment efforts, creating smoke impacts.  Rather than asking firefighters to take on additional risk, by exposing them to potential COVID-19 contagion and smoke inhalation at every wildfire, consider the benefits of allowing some backcountry fires to burn where values at risk are few.  This will be the de facto outcome of triage and scarce resource allocation, anyway, despite the pleas from the timber industry to protect their tree farms.  Timber companies already have their own equipment and fire personnel.  If they feel their plantation, worth a few thousand dollars investment per acre at best, is worth risking a life, let it be their employee.   There is increasing evidence that growing trees to become older with occasional wildfires is more carbon neutral or positive, compared to the carbon losses of roadbuilding, logging and industrial tree planting. Scarce firefighting resources must focus on protecting human communities at the edge of the wildland urban interface (WUI), rather than fighting fire in wilderness and roadless areas that need fire to protect those remote communities of biodiversity.

So this summer, you might ask yourself - How many lives brought you your 4th of July dinner, your trivial Amazon Prime purchase, or protection from a bit of smoke?