气候变化领域集成服务门户

The National Interagency Fire Center last week raised the nation’s “preparedness level” to 4, indicating more than half of the country’s firefighting resources are already committed.

“We’re always doing more with less,” said one smokejumper — a highly trained firefighter who parachutes into remote blazes. The 13-year veteran of the Forest Service spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for his job.

During last summer’s deadly blazes, he would request backup only to find that 10 other fire managers also needed help. Many firefighters worked more than 1,000 hours of overtime.

The strain is untenable.

“My body is just beat up,” he said. “I feel probably 10 years older than I am. But the mental part is even crazier: Almost everyone I know on fire knows someone who has committed suicide, or has had to talk a friend off the ledge.”

His federal colleagues are leaving the government to work for utilities or state agencies such as CalFire, which offers double the starting salary. Almost a third of California’s 49 federal hotshot crews — elite groups that battle the hottest parts of forest fires — are so short-staffed that they will not be able to activate as a full unit, the smokejumper said.

Grassroots Wildland Firefighters estimates 20 percent of permanent firefighting positions at the Forest Service are unfilled.

Even if these open positions are backfilled by seasonal hires, Martin said, the temporary employees won’t be as knowledgeable or experienced as the firefighters they replace.

Severe heat and drought are the hallmarks of a changing West

Forest Service spokesman John Haynes said the agency does not track the number of unfilled positions and declined to comment on the specific shortages reported by the smokejumper and Martin. Haynes said the Forest Service has about 10,000 full-time and seasonal firefighters working across the country this year, similar to years past.

At his meeting Wednesday, Biden called wages for federal firefighters “unacceptable” and announced he would be issuing bonuses that effectively raise their minimum salary to $15 an hour. He also said the government would be training National Guard members to provide “surge capacity” this fire season and would offer retention incentives to convert seasonal firefighters into full-time employees.

In addition, the draft infrastructure bill proposed by a bipartisan group of senators last week would increase the base salary for most federal firefighters by $20,000 a year.

“It’s a step in the right direction,” Martin said, but improving pay is just the start. Grassroots Wildland Firefighters advocates the creation of a National Fire Service with an expanded workforce and full-time benefits, including mental health services.

In addition, the country has to shift away from the “war on fire” mentality, Martin said — taking fewer risks with firefighters and spending more time preparing the landscape to reduce the chance of catastrophe when fires inevitably occur.

The need for more fire in Western forests compared with those elsewhere isn’t new. Since the 1970s, scientists have known that the West’s “fire-adapted” ecosystems depend on periodic fire to clear out debris and remove ailing vegetation.

The increase in fire risk wrought by human-caused warming only underscores that need. A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found human-caused climate change was drying out fuels and increasing the number of days in which forests were at high risk of fire. As a result, the scientists concluded, twice as much forest burned between 1984 and 2015 as would have under normal conditions.

The shortsighted practice of stopping all fire, experts say, is no longer an option.