Who fights wildfires out west?

Wildfires in the west get a lot of media coverage, especially now that fire season is upon us.  One angle of some of this news coverage is who's doing the firefighting, and I'm going to summarize some of that coverage in this post.

I first started collecting stories on this topic a few months ago when the Trump administration laid off more than 1000 workers in the Rural Job Corps program.  Lisa Rein reported in the Washington Post that this Forest Service program, which "trains disadvantaged young people for wildland fire fighting and other jobs in rural communities."

The Job Corps Civilian Conservation Centers enroll more than 3,000 students a year in rural America. The soon-to-close centers — in Montana, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Virginia, Washington state, Kentucky, North Carolina and Oregon — include hundreds of jobs in some of President Trump’s political strongholds. In Congress, members of both parties objected to the plan. 

The drawdown of the program, starting in September, will result in the largest layoffs of civil servants since the military’s base realignment and closures of 2010 and 2011, federal personnel experts said. Nine of the centers will close and another 16 will be taken over by private companies and possibly states.

The thousands of young people aged 16 to 24 who participate in the program are from low-income communities.
Politico reported this same story under the headline, "USDA ends long-standing Forest Service job training program for at-risk youth."  Catherine Broudreau, writing for Politico, quotes Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen who told staff,

[Secretary of Agriculture Sonny] Perdue has a goal of efficient and effective government.... This was a high-level policy discussion and decision. It in no way reflects on your excellent work and dedication.  

Noting that the Department of Labor will take on oversight of the remaining program, such as it is, the Washington Post story paraphrased the efficiency point this way:

Officials said many of the Forest Service operations are low-performing, with inefficiencies and high costs, and that a reboot was necessary.

This echoes a common theme of my writing about rurality:  doing most anything in rural areas is inefficient because it is hard to achieve economies of scale in sparsely populated places.  I wish the stories had more to say on the privatization angle, which is barely mentioned.   

In California news, the Sacramento Bee reported on July 31 that Gov. Gavin Newsom has hired hundreds of additional fire fighters with fire season looming.  Wes Venteicher and Sophia Bollag write:

California will hire 393 more firefighters in anticipation of an upcoming wildfire season that has the potential to be even worse than last year’s, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Wednesday. 

The long rainy season promoted heavy growth of grass and other underbrush in which fires can start and spread once the vegetation dries out. Cal Fire and the state firefighter union have said the state needs more firefighters to face the escalating threat.

Newsom signed an executive order Wednesday authorizing more seasonal firefighters to boost staffing on a third of Cal Fire’s 340 engines.

* * *  

The newly announced hires will add to the state’s force of about 6,000 firefighters, a number the Cal Fire Local 2881 union has pointed out is lower than the department’s peak staffing in 1975, when fire seasons were shorter and the state was responsible for less territory. 

Newsom is quoted:

I think that’s going to help morale, it’s going to help with rotation, it’s certainly going to help with women and man power as it relates to suppression efforts and mitigation efforts.

High Country News just published this piece on the use of prison labor to fight wildfires in Arizona.

[Prison] wildfire crews are a rare spark of hope in a dark system. Arizona’s prisons are notoriously callous: According to Corene Kendrick, a staff attorney with the nonprofit Prison Law Office, as other states move toward restorative justice, Arizona is locking up ever more people — even first-time offenders — under mandatory sentencing laws for nonviolent offenses, such as drug use, shoplifting or drunk driving, with little possibility of time off for good behavior. Kendrick said that’s despite plenty of research showing that “extremely tough and long sentences, especially for low-level offenses, don’t reduce crime.” 

Arizona’s draconian policies mean that its state prisoners and county jail inmates have faced unusual mental and physical hardships — fewer than three meals a day, for example, or lack of access to menstrual products. 

* * * 

But even amid these chaotic and oppressive conditions, participants in Arizona’s Inmate Wildfire Program come to believe that they, and their future lives, can be different. It’s the rare program supported by prisoners and correctional officers alike, notwithstanding the exploitative system of which it’s a part.

Be sure to read the entire story for a full account of what is cast as an empowering prison program--apparently a win-win. 

Meanwhile, two magazines just ran big features on California's fire season and the Camp Fire of November, 2018, which destroyed the small city of Paradise.  Read Los Angeles Magazine's story here and the New York Times Magazine story here.  The former is by Mark Arax, who has just published a book on the history of California's quest to control nature, The Dreamt Land.  On the post-wildfire gentrification of Paradise, don't miss this.

And on the subject of wildfires and their aftermath, let me mention again this policy brief recently released by the California Commission on Access to Justice which discusses legal needs and challenges in the wake of disasters.

P.S.  Here's another High Country News piece on fighting wildfires, this on the three months of training wildland firefighting recruits gets.  This is dated August 5, 2019 and precedes the date of this post, but I'd missed it when I wrote this post last month.