Feds not keeping up with wildfire prevention and firefighting; folks on the ground say policies need revamping

Washington Post map shows extent of Southwest drought. Click on it to enlarge.

"On the heels of one of the worst wildfire years on record, the federal government is struggling to recruit and retain staff as firefighters grapple with low wages, trauma and burnout from increasingly long and intense fire seasons," reports Sarah Kaplan of The Washington Post.

Firefighters are already battling 48 big blazes over more than half a million acres in 12 states, as "land management agencies are carrying out fire-mitigation measures at a fraction of the pace required, and the funds needed to make communities more resilient are one-seventh of what the government has supplied," Kaplan reports.

Fire experts told Kaplan that the federal government needs to transform its land-management and firefighting polices. “As our seasons are getting worse and worse … it feels like we’ve reached a tipping point,” said Kelly Martin, a wildfire veteran and president of the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. “We need a new approach.”

The federal government is the nation’s largest employer of wildland firefighters, Kaplan reports: "Most are temporary workers, their salaries as low as $13.45 per hour for a starting forestry technician. They spend summers traveling the country, working 16-hour days, 12 days at a time, often relying on overtime and hazard pay to make ends meet. For decades, they’ve relied on a months-long offseason to rest and recover. But now there is no offseason; one fire year simply bleeds into the next, as winter rain and snow is delayed and diminished by climate change."