Wildland fire dispatchers under increasing stress in Oregon and Washington

When a new wildfire starts in the forest, wildland fire dispatchers are the people in charge of getting resources where they need to go. Their early decisions can help to keep a small fire from getting huge. But a 2022 survey of wildland fire dispatchers in Oregon and Washington by the U.S. Forest Service found that “dispatch is experiencing problems that compromise their own health and safety” as well as “the health and safety of other firefighters,” according to a new article in High Country News. Kylie Mohr, a correspondent for High Country News who wrote that story, joins us to talk about it.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. When a wildfire starts, wildland fire dispatchers are the people in charge of getting resources where they need to go. Their decisions can help to keep a small fire from getting out of control. But a recent survey by the forest service found that wildfire dispatchers in Oregon and Washington are dealing with issues that are a threat to their own health and safety as well as the health and safety of other firefighters. Kylie Mohr wrote about this for High Country News and she joins us now to talk about it. Welcome to the show.

Kylie Mohr: Thanks so much for having me.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for what the job actually entails, what wildland fire dispatchers do?

Mohr: Absolutely. So like you said, dispatchers are often some of the first people who are in charge of calling in resources when a fire is reported. So when a new fire needs air tankers or helicopters dropping retardant or water, dispatchers are the ones coordinating what’s flying where, so the aircraft don’t collide. If firefighters get hurt during a fire, dispatchers are the ones who are sending medical help to oftentimes really remote areas. And then once the fire is underway, dispatchers relay information to and from the fire line like wind, humidity, temperature forecasts. So they do a lot, but they’re a really crucial link kind of in the communication and operations chain.

Miller: How much of the decision making falls on their shoulders? I mean, is it up to them to decide whether or not to put out a specific fire, or is that a higher up manager?

Mohr: That’s not really the dispatcher’s decision. Decisions about how or if to fight a fire are made by other people on the ground or people higher up the leadership chain of command. But then those people are the ones calling the dispatchers with what they want and what they need and the dispatchers are then in charge of figuring out how to execute those requests and get resources, people, where they need to be as quickly as possible.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for what dispatchers might be exposed to, what they might hear, the conversations they might have over the course of a shift?

Mohr: Dispatchers are in a really high contact position because they’re communicating with people, sometimes on multiple fires at once. So kind of on the severe end of things, they might overhear chatter or be involved in operations that include finding injured or killed civilians in the middle of a fire. They might be involved when a firefighter is critically injured by a snag, or some other accident on the fire line. The fire community is really pretty tight knit and small, and so sometimes they might overhear conversations about something bad happening to someone that they know. Worst case scenario, one of the dispatchers I spoke with for the story actually ended up overhearing two different firefighter fatalities playing out during her shift. So there can definitely be some pretty traumatizing things that dispatchers are exposed to.

Miller: Why did the U.S. Forest Service conduct a survey of dispatchers in Oregon and Washington last fall?

Mohr: A risk manager for the region, his name is Matt Holmstrom, and he’s a Forest Service employee who led this whole effort. And he told me it’s been a really long time since dispatchers have been kind of examined or checked in on, in this far reaching way, and that it was really overdue. He also told me that the agency really needs to understand its problems in order to find solutions. So that was his approach to the survey.

Miller: What were you able to learn about the scope of the survey?

Mohr: So it included detailed interviews with about 104 of the 189 dispatchers that work in the 14 largest dispatch centers in Region 6, which is agency lingo for Oregon and Washington. And dispatching, like firefighting, tends to be pretty interagency in nature, because fires cross jurisdictions quickly. So oftentimes there’s Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, State Agency, etcetera dispatchers, all working in the same center. So the survey also included people employed by those other entities, not just Forest Service.

Miller: You filed a FOIA request, a Freedom of Information Act request, to get access to a presentation of the survey results as well as transcripts from some of those interviews with over 100 dispatchers. But that request was denied. What did you hear?

Mohr: Well, the Forest Service said releasing those materials would compromise its decision making ability and prematurely announce proposed policies. We appealed that denial and we’re still waiting to see if that gains any traction. They did release some emails as part of the FOIA that were mostly just about the planning process, but the communication did have some kind of illustrative gems in it, including leadership acknowledging that, quote, “Our margins for error are so slim now due to vacancies and increases in workload.”

Miller: What else were you able to learn about the results of the survey?

Mohr: Absolutely. So, I was lucky enough to have some Powerpoint presentation slides of the survey leaked to me and that really helped kind of flesh out the story. That’s how I knew that recruitment, retention and vacancies were identified as major issues, among a bunch of other things that I think we’re going to talk about in this interview. The survey also identified, the interviews identified some kind of unnerving anecdotes. For example, one dispatcher had to have emergency medical surgery because they were so short staffed the person couldn’t take bathroom breaks, but they had known gallbladder issues. And another, an entire dispatch center was on the verge of quitting during fire season last year and even though that didn’t end up happening, there was a lot of turnover and now the center is really short staffed with almost no backup in key positions. So yeah, the slides were very helpful in flushing it all out.

Miller: As I mentioned in my intro, the survey found that dispatchers were experiencing problems. It compromised their own health and safety as well as the health and safety of firefighters on the line. Let’s take these one by one, starting with that second one. How might problems that a dispatcher is experiencing affect the health and safety of firefighters?

Mohr: So the survey identified that problem without giving super specific examples. But the thought is that if dispatch centers aren’t fully staffed or if the dispatchers are exhausted or dealing with mental stress and trauma that there’s more room for mistakes, basically. So maybe resources don’t get called in fast enough. So firefighters end up in harm’s way, in the path of a fire, or maybe communications break down. So firefighters don’t know about something that they should, that would benefit their safety, that kind of thing.

Miller: I mean, I guess it’s analogous to say air traffic controllers, if the people in the towers are super stressed out, if it’s understaffed, if they can’t do their jobs well enough, there could be disasters, as we’ve been talking about, hearing about recently in other places. So, what about the health and safety of dispatchers themselves? What have you heard?

Mohr: Yeah. So some additional research on dispatchers nationwide, I think really helps us answer this question. Some researchers at the Missouri University of Science and Technologies Ozark Research Station, which is such a mouthful, they did a survey of over 500 dispatchers nationwide and it found that 10% were considered at high risk for suicide compared to 0.3% of the general population. So that’s a really striking and sad comparison. And the survey work that they did also found that dispatchers have really high rates of signs of depression and signs of PTSD compared to the general population. So, I think it’s safe to say that they’re experiencing some really challenging mental health issues.

Miller: Are they getting support for the work-based mental health challenges that they’re experiencing?

Mohr: That really varies, but overall my reporting found that dispatchers are often forgotten when it comes to mental health support. The dispatcher I mentioned earlier who overheard multiple fatalities said she felt overlooked and wasn’t offered the kind of trauma-informed resources that are out there. And in some instances, this can lead to dispatchers trying to numb their pain with alcohol and drugs, which is a really slippery slope that both of these surveys identified. The Forest Service survey team said that what’s really needed is the creation of stress first aid materials that are specifically tailored for dispatchers. And also that the Forest Service really needs to follow its existing stress management protocol. So the protocols might exist, but if they’re not being offered to dispatchers, then they’re not doing their job.

Miller: What did you hear about workloads and work life balance? You mentioned earlier that the agency did mention recruitment and retention and vacancies as issues. So clearly, they’re aware of what not having enough people doing these jobs means. But for the people who are there, how many hours do they have to work?

Mohr: It’s really tough. Over half of survey respondents said that they had little to no work/life balance. Many of them feel forced to take on overtime work. They can’t get time off, they don’t receive adequate breaks, shifts can be up to 16 hours long or more during fire season. One dispatcher even told me that his personal record is over 24 hours. So that’s a full day and night of working in this high stress position. And that creates a really vicious cycle where the more experienced dispatchers are heavily relied upon, they’re overworked, then they quit and then the people who are left have even more on their plate.

So it just kind of keeps cycling through and that lack of work/life balance can be really harmful. The dispatcher’s ability to show up for their friends, their relationships, their families, to be present in their life outside of work and fulfill other commitments or obligations that they might have.

Miller: How does pay factor into this?

Mohr: Pay is definitely an issue. Dispatchers say that better pay would really help recruit and retain more people which theoretically should kind of help everything we’ve been talking about. An average Forest Service dispatcher’s base pay is roughly $15 to $20 an hour, and as we know, that’s barely a livable wage in Oregon and elsewhere in the West. Pay for firefighters in general is sort of up in the air right now, with these temporary pay raises that some dispatchers also received from the Infrastructure Bill, they’re set to run out. And there’s work going on in Congress right now to try to figure out a long term solution for that. But there’s also uncertainty around the future of what dispatcher retirement benefits will look like in the long term. And all of that really adds up to a pretty unstable financial picture for dispatchers and another reason that they say they might not stick around.

Miller: You noted that the reason the agency - the U.S. Forest Service - gave you for not releasing the details of the survey is that it could get in the way of the policy changes that they could institute as a result of this survey. Do you have any sense for how they might change their policies as a result of what they’ve learned?

Mohr: I wish I had a better answer to that question. Systemic changes at the federal level, as a result of this survey, are pretty murky right now. When I asked specifically the question that you just asked me, what policies or changes might come about as a result of the survey, a Forest Service spokesperson was fairly cagey and kind of told me just to stay tuned. There are some small changes underway, that includes things like more training for leadership and dispatch centers on how to handle stressful situations and some sharing of resources between centers to help bring short term people up to speed quicker. But none of that is really the systemic, broad policy change that the survey really seems to point towards needing.

Miller: Kylie, thanks very much.

Mohr: Thank you.

Miller: Kylie Mohr is a Montana based correspondent for High Country News. She joined us to talk about the challenges that Northwest wildfire dispatchers are facing right now. It’s based on a recent survey, the details of which haven’t really been released, that was done last fall by the U.S. Forest Service.

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