The Forest Service should embrace a full-time workforce

Permanently investing in firefighters would improve the health of employees and the landscapes we protect.

Los Padres National Forest firefighter Jameson Springer watches a controlled burn on the so-called “Rough Fire” in the Sequoia National Forest, California, on August 21, 2015. In California, suffering its worst drought on record, about 2,500 people were forced to flee camps east of Fresno at Hume Lake as the Rough Fire crossed Highway 180, officials said.

When I began working as a hotshot firefighter for the Forest Service in 2001, I was hired as a part-time, temporary worker. At the time, over half the crew was made up of part-time employees. Today, the Forest Service employs approximately 10,000 wildland firefighters, but still less than half of them are permanent full-time workers.

When the Forest Service was formed in the early 20th century, it had only a handful of forest rangers. If a fire broke out, men were pulled out of saloons and other public places to fight it. Since then, the agency has ballooned in size, and its wildland firefighting has changed dramatically. Much of the weight of firefighting now falls on the shoulders of the Forest Service. The agency already helps manage 500 millions acres of land, but it’s also called in whenever fires get big enough to require national support. Half its annual budget is spent on wildfires, with spending increasing exponentially even as the agency’s overall budget remains nearly static. This spending eats into other Forest Service responsibilities, such as fuel management and mitigation, maintenance, and the tending of forest and grassland health.

Read more here: https://www.hcn.org/articles/south-wildfire-the-forest-service-should-embrace-a-full-time-workforce