How the US Forest Service is prepping for fire season in the Pacific Northwest

As fires in Canada continue to rage, the U.S. Forest Service has dispatched firefighters to combat the flames. When local crews aren’t actively fighting fires in the Pacific Northwest, they’re often sent elsewhere to help. We check in with the U.S. Forest Service on how they’re preparing for the summer fire season in the Pacific Northwest and what their work looks like elsewhere. Our guest is Alex Robertson, the U.S. Forest Service’s director of fire, fuels and aviation for the Pacific Northwest and Alaska regions.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB, I’m Dave Miller. We start today with wildfires. Major fires are raging in Canada and the first fires of the season are now burning in eastern and central Oregon. Alex Robertson is gonna be coordinating a lot of the action this summer and fall. He is the U.S. Forest Service’s director of fire fuels and aviation for the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, and he joins us now. Welcome to the show.

Alex Robertson: Hey, thanks Dave. Glad to be here.

Miller: I mentioned the first fires of the season burning in Eastern and Central Oregon, one big one near Hermiston right now. But what does the phrase fire season mean to you these days?

Robertson: Well, that’s a really great question because it really depends on the year, the seasonality, the snow pack, spring rains and so many factors that drive when our actual fire season starts. And as I think about it, our season really doesn’t start in the Pacific Northwest. It starts wherever our resources are needed throughout the nation: the northeast, the southeast, California, our workforce is a very transient workforce that goes to where the need is. At a national level with a national agency like the Forest Service. Even outside of that, fire season has been very active as you mentioned in Canada and we have a lot of resources up helping our neighbors to the north.

Miller:  And that includes firefighters who are based in the Pacific Northwest, some of them are in Eastern Canada now?

Robertson: That’s correct. We’ve had them up there rotating in and out, back and forth for over a month now.

Miller: Can you remember a time… you’ve been with the forest service for a while now, is there a time in your memory when firefighters from the west were in Eastern Canada?

Robertson: Quite often, we exchange resources with Canada. At this level it is a little bit unprecedented, I don’t know if we’ve ever sent so much. But thinking back to a number of fire seasons as sure to go as 2019, where we sent a tremendous amount of help to Australia for their fire season. We’ve also had a lot of help from those partnering countries come up to help us: Mexico, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, a very lucrative partnership that we often exchange talent, skills, to help each other out in our fire seasons.

Miller: You mentioned snow pack and seasonality and the variations. How are you feeling about prospects for fires in the northwest this summer and fall?

Robertson: Sure. So I think the question that we always have is not whether we’re going to have a fire season. It’s really when it’s gonna start and what is going to be the severity and the snowpack, obviously has an influence on that. So do spring rains, which has a significant impact depending on what we get. In a season like this year, where we have a tremendous snow pack, but especially the west of the Cascades throughout Oregon and Washington, we haven’t had much rain, so we’ve seen some fire behavior in some areas that typically don’t start this early. We’ve also seen more rain on the east side of the Cascades, that we don’t normally see right now and anticipate our finer fuels, the grasses, the cheatgrass, the stuff the kind of fuels that really carries fire and becomes problematic, especially for human caused fires. We’re not in season quite yet in the majority of the east side of the Cascades.

So it’s really about when is it really gonna start? When are fires going to be more difficult and take more resources to control and contain?

Miller: And at this point if I understand correctly, I mean, you’re talking about all kinds of variables, some of which maybe could make the season earlier, some could push it a little bit later. But it seems like you’re saying that the likelihood of the more severe fires is, at this point, being pushed a little bit further into the future.

Robertson: Yeah, I think in some areas, and it remains to be seen, we’ll see what this weekend does. I know we’ve got some weather predicted. If we really go into summer and don’t see any significant rainfall across the west, from here to where we normally wouldn’t see that, [from] early, mid-July, then we would anticipate having difficulty controlling fires, not very long from now. If we do see some rain, that’ll just delay that start. We always anticipate getting starts; lightning, human caused, whatever that is. We know there’s a lot of folks out in the woods recreating now. And that results in new starts, whether it’s negligence or just accidental and that will trigger our system to respond and deal with those starts. The severity of the fire season will depend on how difficult that is.

Miller: What does staffing look like right now? I mean, this is a question that we have been asking people in every single industry for a while now. But what about in firefighting?

Robertson: To put it very bluntly…Congress has really supported us to up our staffing and really provide a service to the American taxpayer at the level that we would expect. The challenges that we have is just, in some locations, finding folks that are wanting and willing or can afford to live in a certain community, or wanting to live in a rural community, to do that work. And so we have some places that are just really hard to recruit and retain employees. We have other places that it’s very easy to recruit and retain and those areas are doing really well. We’re really very similar to where we were last year. And we continue to work through some hiring and some onboarding processes for more firefighters, as we speak.

But the really good news for us is this year, even compared to last year, [is] where we look better at a leadership level. And what that means to the public is how we make decisions, how we mobilize, how we stay nimble and have the ability to respond to a very dynamic and chaotic situation. I feel a lot better about our staffing at that decision making level. And what that does is it just means we’re more efficient and we’re gonna be better with the resources that we have to actually go respond to the fires themselves.

Miller: So, more managers at that mid level, but what are the jobs that have been hardest to fill?

Robertson: It’s our entry-level positions, it’s the lower paying part of our workforce. And there’s many factors to that. It’s housing costs, ability to live within a community, available housing. And then, the rural aspect of so much of our work is, the National Forest System was built on National Forest and ranger districts and a lot of those ranger districts are in some pretty remote places, without a lot of services. And so finding people that want to go those places, if they don’t already live there, that want to move to those places and have less services than maybe some other communities. Those folks are harder to find these days.

Miller: “These days,” I mean, do you see a change in that since when you signed up, a number of decades ago?

Robertson: Absolutely. There used to be a lure to the Forest Service, to go live in some of those places. And, I think the folks that we’re hiring into our entry level positions, it’s not as desirable as maybe what it used to be.

Miller: What about the housing? You’ve mentioned that a couple of times, either the cost of housing or simply the lack of availability. What can you do as an employer to respond to that?

Robertson: It’s very challenging. And as we speak, I’m in Washington D.C., at our nation’s capital, at our Forest Service Washington office. And that’s a large part of the discussions we’re having, is how do we leverage what we have influence over as a  federal agency, to deal with housing. And there’s a lot of options there. They all come with some pretty hefty price tags and a significant amount of time to accomplish, whether it’s building employee housing, working through procurement processes, to get housing that we can subsidize and put our employees in. All of those are on the table. Some of those options are certainly more attractive than others, but they all have a lot of challenges to them.

As we look at what’s going on in our Congress right now, with support for Wildland firefighters, we feel very good about our future. But there’s a tremendous amount of uncertainty as to what that looks like.

Miller: You mentioned that you’re in D.C. right now. I’m sure most of our listeners will be aware of the fact that the massive fires in Eastern Canada, wind blew smoke from those fires all across the U.S. east coast, meaning people in New York City and central New York and Philadelphia, down into D.C., they got a taste of what many people throughout the west have been dealing with every summer and fall. Do you think that that could have an effect on policymakers in D.C.?

Robertson: I couldn’t have said that better than how you just described it, Dave. And I think the answer is that there’s many policymakers that woke up to some problems that we’ve been dealing with and experiencing in the West for a long time.

Miller: Well, what do you think that could mean in practice? I mean, that experience of literally waking up and seeing hazy skies in the nation’s capital?

Robertson: Yeah. And I probably don’t have a very good answer to that, but I think the idea that folks have become more aware of the issue can’t hurt us. And so the timing of working on fiscal year 24 budgets, as we know, we work on a fiscal year that runs out to the end of September, of so much media coverage over firefighter pay and mental health and all the things proposed in the president’s budget, all of those things are on everybody’s radar screen right now. That smoke, impacting a part of the nation that doesn’t normally see smoke, certainly draws attention to some of the issues that we’ve been talking about for a long time.

Miller: If I’m not mistaken, you first joined the Prineville Hotshots in 1993, 30 years ago.

Robertson: That’s correct. Thanks for making me feel old. [Laughter]

Miller: Well, I mean, many of us are old. How much has the Forest Service’s approach to allocating resources to fires changed in that time? I mean, I’m thinking in particular about which fires to focus on and which fires to leave largely alone.

Robertson: Yeah. So there’s a lot of different aspects to that question, is not only has our resource allocation changed, but what’s driven that is largely just the change in what we’re responding to, the problem that we’re trying to find a solution to. Fire seasons are longer. We see faster growing, we see earlier fire seasons, we see just so many changes in from I think back 30 years ago to what was a large fire, [and] to what is a large fire today  and that, to me, isn’t necessarily attributed to how we’re responding, it’s just what the fires are doing. Fuel load up, weather conditions, dryness, all of those factors.

The thing that we’re really focused on as an agency and really with our partner agencies, number one is responder safety. It’s a very, very dangerous job that we do and we’ve experienced, especially in Oregon, over the last few years a number of fatalities of folks out just doing what we’re asking them to do to protect our nation’s forests and our values. That is first and foremost on our minds. And so as we make decisions on where we allocate resources, we do that in an interagency environment, with all of our partners. That’s our number one priority, is the responder and public safety. And so, the results of that sometimes are we make choices to put resources on those fires that are most immediately going to impact or damage high values, like communities, like private timberlands, smoke impacts, all of those things. And what that means is sometimes those higher elevations, more remote, [a] less threat to value fires don’t get resources immediately allocated to them. Those are the choices we make collectively on where to put our stuff. And that sometimes results in fires that don’t get attention right away. And then we have to work on that after, we take care of and suppress those fires that are immediately threatening to lives.

Miller: Alex Robertson. Thanks for your time. I look forward to talking again.

Robertson: Absolutely. Thanks, Dave.

Miller: Alex Robertson is the director of fire, fuels and aviation for the Pacific Northwest and Alaska regions of the U.S. Forest Service.

Contact “Think Out Loud®”

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show, or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.