Wildland firefighter numbers plummet, as need for job rises

You may have heard that wildfire seasons are getting longer, with blazes burning more intensely and lasting longer than ever. In 1993, fires were fought across nearly 1.8 million acres — but by 2021, that area had quadrupled. Not surprisingly, the resources and workforce needed to combat these conflagrations have been increasing as well. But exactly the opposite is happening: more and more of these critically important wildland firefighters are quitting or retiring, and they are not being replaced. As Abe Streep found in his two-year-long investigation for ProPublica, the reasons involve federal policies and what is offered to these critical employees by way of compensation, benefits and working conditions. He joins us to share more details of that investigation.

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. Wildfires are getting more destructive, with blazes burning more intensely and lasting longer, and burning up more acreage. But the workforce needed to combat these megafires is not keeping up. In fact, wildland firefighters are quitting or retiring, and it’s getting harder for the US Forest Service to replace them. The freelance reporter and writer Abe Streep recently completed a two year long investigation for ProPublica, and he joins us now to talk about what he found. Welcome to the show.

Abe Streep: Thank you for having me.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for how steep the decline in wildland firefighters has been in recent years?

Streep: In the past three years, according to the Forest Service, which is the agency that directs most of the country’s efforts to manage and fight wildfires, it has had an attrition rate of 45% among its permanent wildland firefighters.

Miller: It’s a shocking figure, 45%.

Streep: Union officials and advocates refer to it as an exodus.

Miller: Who has been most likely to leave in recent years?

Streep: I don’t know that there’s a simple answer to that. But many people in the agencies that manage wildfire are particularly concerned about the departure of people who have built up a lot of experience and expertise and training over many years. So we’re losing people who really know how to do this.

Miller: As I mentioned briefly at the beginning, the need for firefighters is increasing as their numbers are decreasing. Can you just put that in perspective for us? How much of an increase in demand is there for people with these specialized skills?

Streep: Fire season is increasing in duration. For a long time, the Forest Service and the agencies within the Department of Interior that employ wildland firefighters have relied on seasonal employees. There is a move toward shifting toward more year-round employment because of the duration of wildfires. We’re also seeing obviously fires have increased intensity.

Miller: What did you hear from the Forest Service, the biggest employer, or BLM leaders about this? As you said, you heard the phrase “exodus.” How worried are they?

Streep: I asked Grant Beebe, he’s a former smokejumper who directs the fire program for the Bureau of Land Management, if it in fact had been an exodus. He kind of hesitated at first. But then he said yeah. The Forest Service was a little more cautious in their language about it.

Miller: But I guess I’m just wondering about the level of alarm you heard when you talked to various leaders.

Streep: Yeah. This is a serious issue. I think that there’s no way to spin that.

Miller: In a lot of other industries or arenas like manufacturing or logging or some agricultural work, mechanization has changed the labor picture over decades, it has eliminated many jobs, for good and for ill. In terms of productivity, that’s a good. Ill, if it’s one of your jobs that was eliminated. But is that the case for wildland firefighting? Is there a potential technological fix?

Streep: I think that the short answer is no, that the work is done by people who use chainsaws and hand tools and they have to be near fire to work on fire. Bulldozers are used, engines and helicopters and aircraft that drop chemical retardants on fires. But the work is done by human beings.

Abel Martinez, who’s a Forest Service engine captain in California and who is an official with the union that represents federal wildland firefighters, the national fire chair for the union - “the ship is sinking” is a quote that he said.

Miller: Let’s turn to the reasons for this exodus, starting with pay. How much can wildland firefighters expect to make?

Streep: The pay begins at $15 an hour. That is a raise that was implemented in 2021. Before that, it was $13 an hour, and then they can accumulate supplemental pay for overtime and for hazard pay, which is when you’re in a dangerous situation. There is concern that the emphasis on hazard pay creates an incentive to take risk. And the emphasis on overtime, as one wildland firefighter put it to me, “to be able to provide for our families, we have to basically detach from our families.”

Miller: That quote really stood out to me. He said it’s a catch-22, if we are going to provide for our families, we have to detach from them. What exactly was he referring to? What are the choices that these wildland firefighters are, in a sense, forced to make financially?

Streep: People talk about chasing overtime in this work. To get more pay, they have to chase overtime. There’s a hotshot, a member of an elite crew, who spoke to me for the piece named Hannah Coolidge, who said that for a decade she hadn’t attended a wedding or a funeral during fire season.

Miller: But you point out that pay is not the only issue at play here. Wildland firefighters also have had to contend with an inattentive bureaucracy. One example you give is the way the fire service has handled the issue of the link between firefighting and cancer. First of all, what do we know at this point about that link?

Streep: It is now acknowledged that firefighting as a profession, both for structure and wildland firefighting, that cancer is an occupational risk.

But I think to get to your question about the inattentive bureaucracy, officials have raised questions about those potential linkages for a long time. The research to support that moves at the speed of scientific research, of creating peer reviewed research. But one of the issues that came up in the reporting is that officials and people have been, for a long time, suggesting that the government conduct studies to examine these risks. And that that didn’t happen for a long time.

So it’s now being acknowledged. But there was perhaps opportunity to examine that evidence earlier.

Miller: Another issue that you looked at is on the job injuries. And you did that partly by telling the story of a smokejumper from Oregon named Ben Elkind. Can you tell us, first of all, just about his injury?

Streep: Ben Elkind, he was a smokejumper with the Forest Service who was injured and broke his pelvis in a smokejumping training exercise.

Miller: Despite that injury, he did not file for workers compensation. Why not?

Streep: It’s long been understood that the workers compensation structure in the federal government has historically not well served its federal wildland firefighters. This is something that’s been reported on in the past - BuzzFeed did some good reporting on this. And as Ben put it to me in the piece, his colleagues started a GoFundMe campaign to raise funds for him following his injury. He referred to that as standard operating procedure. I will also say that he’s not the only wildland firefighter I spoke to in the course of reporting who has done that, created crowd funding from other firefighters to support them following a really serious injury.

Miller: You noted that almost every wildland firefighter who agreed to use their full name and have it be printed in your article, that they have official roles with the union, as opposed to being rank and file firefighters. Why do you think that is?

Streep: Well, those people who talk to me are also boots on the ground firefighters.

Miller: As opposed to not having that union protection.

Streep: Yeah, totally. And it’s because there’s a history of the Forest Service dissuading internal criticism. Multiple firefighters I talked to while reporting expressed the fear of retribution for speaking candidly.

Miller: Given everything you’ve talked about, why does anybody seek this job out, or why does anybody stick with it?

Streep: They have to work outside, get to work on a team, get to get really close with the people they work with, not chained to a desk, walking through the woods with a chainsaw. The physical intensity of it, the skills that they amass. In our conversations, Ben often said “I love my job, but-.” That was a refrain that I heard from other people as well. The act of the work itself, there’s something really beautiful in it. Why is everything else so brutally hard?

Miller: Going back to Ben Elkind, the Oregon-based smokejumper who injured his pelvis and did not file for worker’s comp, what’s he doing now? And what did you hear from him about how he’s doing?

Streep: He has since left smokejumping. He’s still working for the Forest Service, and he’s working on a hand crew. That crew is out of state, is not in Oregon. One of the issues that comes up in the piece is that one of the reasons that it’s difficult to make ends meet and make a career increase, especially as the cost of living increased astronomically, in western towns where a lot of wildland firefighters live in the last few years, it’s been historically hard to get pay raises without moving frequently. Ben is gonna be working on a hand crew out of state.

Miller: What did you hear about what hiring has been like for the upcoming fire season? What are fire managers dealing with when they sift through piles of resumes?

Streep: The reporting in the piece shows that the returns have been really bad in this past year. The federal government has acknowledged this issue and has tried to take steps to address it. Federal wildland firefighters have a temporary pay raise right now that was put into effect in 2021 with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Some union officials have said that that is to me that has kept some people around. But it is a temporary pay raise. And in this last hiring period, one official involved in hiring for the Forest Service characterized the returns as abysmal. The numbers were quite bad.

And that’s an issue for everybody because these are people who are tasked with community service.

Miller: Abe Streep, thanks very much.

Streep: Thank you for having me.

Miller: Abe Streep is a freelance reporter and author. He recently wrote about the decline in wildland firefighters for ProPublica.

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