A U.S. Forest Service document written June 22 said that of the approximately 110 Federal hotshot crews, 25 percent, or about 27 crews, are not able to meet the required standards. This is due to vacant positions and the agency’s difficulties in hiring and retention. Each crew should have 20 firefighters if all the positions can be filled with qualified personnel. So we’re talking about 550 firefighters.
This report comes from NBC Montana which obtained the document. Below is an excerpt from their article.
The June 22 document, written before the Forest Service started awarding some private Type 2 contracts, reads, “We anticipate exhausting our current crew availability within a week or so, based on our Interagency Predictive Services outlook and current trends. Compounding our lack of crews this year is hiring and retention issues within our own ranks, which the Secretary of Agriculture discussed during his town hall with the Chief of USDA Forest Service recently.”
It goes on to say, “We already do not have as many of our own crews available as we normally do. Our Interagency Hotshot Crew ranks have been hit the hardest with roughly 25% of them not meeting Type 1 status, or even not being able to field a 20-person crew. Additionally, our Interagency partners and cooperators are having crew staffing issues as well, diminishing the total number of crews overall.”
The article also has quotes from Riva Duncan, a retired staff officer for the Forest Service who is now the Executive Secretary for the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a nonprofit group advocating for proper classification, pay, and benefits. For example:
“We know that a lot of engines and crews were not able to fill all of their vacant positions,” Duncan said. “And so that has affected staffing levels. It’s affected hotshot crews being able to get type one Hotshot status. There are several engines that are only staffed five days effective instead of seven days effective.”
In addition to the inability of the Forest Service to fill all of their firefighter positions, another problem related to contracting with private companies to supply 20-person Type 2 hand crews is developing. Until this year, the Forest Service relied on the Oregon Department of Forestry to administer those contracts, which expired in April. But this year the Forest Service took over the process and awarded contracts for only 258 out of about 350 potential crews.
Multiple companies that provide crews filed protests with the Government Accountability Office which would prevent any crews from working that received a new contract. But the Forest Service has filed an override with the GAO this week, which will allow them to go forward with awarding contracts.
Another contracting problems is with Type 2IA hand crews which are more capable and highly trained than Type 2 crews and can make initial attacks on new fires. Those contracts for 41 crews expired in December but has been extended to June 30 — Wednesday of next week. If the new contract is not awarded it will take 840 firefighters off line.
Our opinion
With the June 22 Forest Service document reporting, “anticipate exhausting our current crew availability within a week or so,” this contracting issue for hand crews appears to have reached a crisis stage.
Last year there was a severe shortage of firefighting resources. This year could be even worse, with nearly 9,000 firefighters committed today and the National Preparedness level at 4, one below the highest level — and it is still June, just six days into Summer. The peak of the wildland fire season is in July and August. The Forest Service needs to recognize that filling firefighter positions and contracting for hand crews is a critical necessity, and should not be subject to the typical inept processes of their contracting section.
If the Type 2IA hand crew contract is awarded in the next couple of days before the current contract expires, judging from what happened with the Type 2 contract, it will be protested with the Government Accountability Office. That would prevent any crews that did receive a new contract from working unless the Forest Service files another override with the GAO.
If you talk with any private company that has to work with the Forest Service under a contract, they will tell you that process is horrendous and is an ongoing scandal. It takes months and sometimes more than a year to award a contract after it has been announced. At Fire Aviation we follow closely the contracting process for aerial firefighting resources. Check out this search for articles at the site using the search terms “protest contract”.
Too often, as we see in the recent Type 2 hand crews contract debacle, the Forest Service procrastinates and drags their feet, not awarding contracts until just days before the last one expires. Then most of them are protested, which shuts down work under the new contract for months.
I don’t know why the Forest Service’s contracting process is incompetent, so I can’t say specifically how it can be fixed. But an investigation is needed, or a consultant could be hired so that the entire contracting section can be torn down and rebuilt, or at least their processes, work flow, goal setting, and standard operating procedures could be evaluated and improved.
Someone must be held accountable for this very important system that has degraded our preparedness and ability to suppress wildfires.
The Two Major Festering Issues that hurt recruitment;
1) Lack of Pay that is Equivalent to Fire Fighters Nationwide;
2) The Lack of Workers Compensation Coverage and CONTINUED Medical Care for Duty Related Injuries/Illnesses.
The U.S. Dept of Labor Office of Workers Compensation Programs are A JOKE.
All Federal Firefighters and Law Enforcement Officers, (i.e. Rigorous Positions), are covered by OWCP, yet fail to receive the proper Medical Treatment, Prescription Medications and Long Term Care.
NUMEROUS injured F/F’s and LEO’s go ignored, untreated and uncompensated when they suffer a VALID in-the-line-of-duty INJURY or ILLNESS
All Federal Firefighters and Law Enforcement Officers need to be moved to a Workers Compensation System similar to the Veterans Administration, (such as Disability Ratings for Head, Heart and Spinal Injuries).
It’s not just Klamath National Forest Management that’s blacklisting people, it’s HR. There are over 600 of us waiting to work, but HR blocks us. Please reinstate us, so that we can do our jobs.
We really need to form a FEDFIRE agency!
What ashamed. IMHO these firefighters are heroes. Imagine walking or jumping into a burning forest fire. HEROES
Consider three things. Prehaps there are too many Hotshot Crews to keep a standard reflecting when we had half as many. Revising many of them to 10 person fire modules may be a solution.
Many contract crews may have been sliding with suboptimal performance for years because ‘we were glad to get what we got.
Centralized management of BizOps has been a failing debacle for years so why give them more opportunity to fail.
Not sure what the cutoff is for the “fortnite generation”, but pretty sure there’s plenty of them humping chainsaws around at this very moment..
The “shortage” is due to utilization of resources especially Type-1 crews. Hotshot crews sitting on dead fires and not being properly prioritized. If we could get OT to count towards retirement and high 3 we would be able to hang on to Crew overhead a whole lot easier instead of people chasing the next pay grade.
It’s less chasing a higher pay grade and more chasing an employer that respects your work and pays a living wage.
These people aren’t all moving up to FMO, they’re leaving the agency.
Doesn’t help when places like Klamath National Forest Management are blacklisting people because they’re mad and embarrassed people did their job better then them and made the public aware of it.
Lets see…. Private contractors are competition to federal yet we wonder why they drag thier feet to award new contracts. Every agency has a different method and long run goal. Too many chiefs and to little indians. Lots of butting heads. Yet the real important issue is we need more fuel reduction teams to work around urban interface then move to merch timber sales to save our valuable recourses. Screw your contracts up the pay scale to reduce fuels out of season. Then the amount of fire fighters are not needed in the long run. JG ICT5/FFT1/Industrial Timber Faller. Also fire fighters have a huge suicide rate much higher then national average. We sacrifice relationships, quality of life, and health for this country and we deserve higher pay, free counseling, and earlier retirement since we die early in life.
Lets see…. Private contractors are competition to federal yet we wonder why they drag thier feet to award new contracts. Every agency has a different method and long run goal. Too many chiefs and to little indians. Lots of butting heads. Yet the real important issue is we need more fuel reduction teams to work around urban interface then move to merch timber sales to save our valuable recourses. Screw your contracts up the pay scale to reduce fuels out of season. Then the amount of fire fighters are not needed in the long run. JG ICT5/FFT1/Industrial Timber Faller. Also fire fighters have a huge suicide rate much higher then national average. We sacrifice relationships, quality of life, and health for this country and we deserve higher pay, free counseling, and earlier retirement since we die early in life.
Big Ernie
Take care of the boots on the ground and attrition rates will be cut in half. Physical and mental health of FS firefighters is foremost.
I worked in wildland firefighting and other emergencies 52 years with “boots on the ground” then on an IMT until retirement. It’s devastating to witness the degradation of capacity during worsening conditions with climate change. My very best to all who are responding to incidents.
The craziest thing to me is the coverup. They (USFS) are denying FOIA requests, saying documents don’t exist to reporters but then they somehow the document gets shared with media and they are caught lying about being “over-prepared” when their own emails and documents show a shocking lack of staffing.
If I were running the USFS I’d simply ask for the data, how else can you make informed decisions?
Conduct mental health, staffing and injury surveys? Simple.
Instead I spoke with someone at the regional Multi-Agency Coordination Group and they told me they don’t even know about any staffing numbers and they are all known only by local units that don’t even report them…
What a joke and total failure of leadership. If you don’t know the problem, you can’t find a solution.
Hello,
First, I am not a firefighter but I have been caught in a few over the years and my thousands of miles of backpacking. You guys are Gods. I am most concerned abt this quote….. No one will be held accountable!! Very few politicians/Govt figures are ever held accountable.
Buddy Schuster
“Someone must be held accountable for this very important system that has degraded our preparedness and ability to suppress wildfires.”
This is Who We Are. Forest Service leadership at its best. What a joke.
Get real- it’s Duty, Respect, Integrity.
Hey now lets be nice. At least all the background checks on the employees were done in a timely fashion.
George, nailed it. Held a meeting with firefighters a while back to talk about working conditions. Thought classification and such might take over. What lit them up more than pay issues? HR failures. Mirrors this comment thread. Have it on my list of things to address…
Well, NIFC Public Relations doesn’t seem overly concerned. From a recent AP story that’s easily googleable:
‘ “There’s not technically a shortage of firefighters because we always overprepare,” said Jessica Gardetto, a fire center spokeswoman with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and a former wildland firefighter.’
Um… Seriously? Come on folks, the taxpayers are smarter than that. Raise your hand if you wear nomex and think we are overprepared.
Speechless.
I cannot wait for the excuse of: “It is the increased Unemployment Compensation that hotshots and other temps are getting from the feds that prevent hiring of experienced people for 2021.” It is NOT.
Although a lot of us in the 70’s and 80’s signed on as a temporary job that got in our blood, after a few years (seasons), we accepted that “Hey, this what I do for a living”. Today, others are hiring at a much better comparative pay rate than was available in the 70’s and 80’s. The feds need to compete financially to keep good people. Period.
At the heart of it is a broken process that the Agency is too vested in poor management philosophies, and too cowardly to change.
ASC has been an unmitigated DISASTER since its inception, but the FS won’t do the right thing and say “this looked good on paper, but failed in the real world, let’s re-evaluate”. No, instead the Agency has doubled down and centralized contracting, hiring, and engaged in “budget modernization” moves that have all the same hallmarks of failed centralized planning. Rather than being a responsive land management agency driven by the needs of the people on the ground, USFS has become a model of bureaucratic stupidity, driven by high level GS and ES employees more focused on spreadsheets and data collection than the people they nominally “serve”. No wonder it finishes last or next to last in employee satisfaction surveys, and people are fleeing it in record numbers.
Spot on!!!
Good article, Bill,
But you didn’t even touch on the debacle
that is the Forest Service hiring out of the “service center” in Albuquerque. A huge drag on any type of hiring – temp or perm.
Knowing that that system has been broken since it started, there is no optimism for improving contracting.
Just today, word finally came from Bryce Pitchford, that he has sent out a letter to the agencies regarding how to deal with the conclusion of current Type 2IA contracts. The said letter was not forwarded to at least one of the largest holders of those contracts. In the contracting world we don’t know if our folks are coming home on the expiration date. Go figure. Mean while we have folks that can’t deploy because of the timing of contract awards and knowing how many drivers to process thru the migrant worker standards program. MSPA has had our applications for three weeks and have the same time left for a response from the agency.
Contracting incompetence is just one symptom of a poorly organized and nonfunctional agency. This year all contracting was centralized, just like HR was (and we see what disaster that has been). Acquisitions is also centralized – same consequences. These admin functions are no longer mission focused – just compliance focused. No local people, just faceless, nameless bureaucracies Our Biz Ops people seem absolutely clueless as to the impact on the agency.
I believe there is other contributing factors at play here as George has stated . Of course competitive pay/benefits is an issue . However, some of this can be attributed to centralization in HR now located in Albuquerque, Contracting much of which was pulled into Boise. Procurement from what I am told is in process of being consolidated in Boise. All of this was done to “standardize processes and meet audits”. Well along with the HR oversight and processes comes meeting hiring goals and the appearance of the work force. It appears that fewer people regardless of background are attracted to the federal wildfire profession as I did for 34 years. The institutional inertia involved in hiring whether seasonal or permanent has taken its toll. I know having lived in Albuquerque and spouse being reassigned to ASC. Many of the people in HR there are not steeped in the FS but they sure know how to engineer the workforce. This includes HR at the regional level too. Will anyone acknowledge this? Probably not for it is more important to pursue lofty goals than meet safety/staffing standards. Oh and blame the local level units for not “recruiting properly” is another tired dodge.
When I was going through training back in 1976 Curlew job Corp wauconda , wash . The training was very brutal there was 100 of trainees trying to get there red cards . By the time they got done / w / us only twenty five made the cut . ( CAT 1 Forestry Aid ) many thx ? curlew job corp ..
Thank you for the excellent article Bill. Hopefully we’re at a watershed moment in regards to classification and pay.
I work for the usfs as an engineering technician for the five years. The managers are too concern with moving up the pay scale. No-one actually in charge. A complete joke. I am back in state government, Life here is logical.