Local News: National forests thin on senior staff, especially SB Forest

Local News: National forests thin on senior staff, especially SB Forest | fire, forest, service:

July 4, 2007 - 2:52PM

National forests thin on senior staff, especially SB Forest

ASSOCIATED PRESS

SAN DIEGO — Weeks into a capricious fire season that has already burned parts of Catalina Island, Los Angeles and Lake Tahoe, swaths of California’s flammable national forests are protected some days by nothing more than luck.

The hardest-hit areas include the Angeles and San Bernardino National Forests, where only 60 to 70 percent of engines are being regularly staffed because there are too few qualified supervisors to go around, said Mike Dietrich, acting deputy director of fire and aviation for the Forest Service’s Region 5, which encompasses all of California.

Those forests border on heavily populated urban areas, potentially raising the risk to people living nearby.

On any given day, about 40 out of 271 U.S. Forest Service engines in the state remain in firehouses rather than on routine patrol, idled by a shortage of supervisors as the combined effects of sustained drought, last winter’s freeze and a searing heat wave send fire danger levels into “extreme” territory.

The cuts are one effect of an exodus of highly trained mid- and upper-level firefighters from the career ranks of the service, leaving 13 percent of the agency’s 3,600 full-time positions in the state vacant.

Some firefighters fear those gaps could strain the ability of federal fire crews to respond quickly to fires, leading to more out-of-control blazes in what promises to be a tough fire season.

“When you start leaving holes in your organization so that on a given high-danger day you can’t provide coverage you’ve set yourself up for trouble,” said John Marker, a retired former Forest Service district ranger on the Sequoia National Forest.

Nationally, fire planners from all five federal agencies that handle firefighting are dealing with the departure of a generation of top managers hired during a firefighting expansion in the late 1970s, leaving behind too few career firefighters qualified to run engines, oversee forests or command large fire operations.

As forests from the Mexico border to Canada reassign engine crews, top-level teams working for other agencies are simply hiring recent retirees. Of 50 people working on one Nevada-based National Park Service squad, 10 are due to retire in the next two years, and a handful have come out of retirement as emergency hires this season.

California has been hit harder than other states, because the high cost of living has deterred recruits from moving here, while state and local agencies are replacing baby boomers as they hit age 50 and siphoning federal managers with higher pay and better benefits.

Forest Service officials have filled nearly 800 positions since last October, but are still short about 470 people.

“It’s going to take them longer to get to these fires,” said Doug Campbell, a retired Forest Service fire planner who now trains various agencies on fire behavior.

None of the big fires so far this season has gotten out of hand because of short staffing, and officials say they’re confident California has enough resources available to get through the next six months.

With 1,600 seasonal hires, the Forest Service is fielding 5,200 firefighters this year.

The state’s robust mutual aid system also activates thousands of engines working for myriad municipal and county departments in large fires.

Firefighting crews and equipment from other parts of the country are also being moved into California and the rest of the West, said Tom Harbour, the national director of fire and aviation for the Forest Service.

Despite the shortages of engine crews, the Forest Service’s teams of smokejumpers and hotshots are filled.

Engine crews are being moved around the state as weather-related fire risk levels change. The region has also won an extra complement of 15 federal helicopters to beef up capacity for initial attacks in the first crucial hours of a blaze.

The agency has also won approval to begin a massive hiring push to fill the roughly 470 captain, engineer, dispatcher and other specialist vacancies before the fall.

Those are the critical staff required to manage individual engines and direct the army of entry-level and seasonal “water-squirters” in fire prevention tasks once big fires hit.

In the meantime, retirees are being enlisted as emergency hires to help manage large fires this summer and train their replacements on the job — a tactic in use across the country, according to the National Incident Fire Command in Boise, Idaho. And others are being paid overtime to fill the gaps.
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California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection: http://www.fire.ca.gov
U.S. Forest Service, Region 5: http://fs.fed.us/r5