NIFC: When all the West is on fire at once, this is who deals with it

A command center in Boise is responsible for deploying America’s strained firefighting resources as more than 100 wildfires burn across the country.

By Joshua Partlow
July 28, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
Republished with permission by the Washington Post

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BOISE, Idaho — As Sean Peterson took his seat Friday morning in the nation’s nerve center for fighting wildfires, 104 large fires raged uncontained across the United States.

The federal government’s firefighting resources were already fully committed, but requests from regional coordination centers kept pouring in.

The day before, his office had turned away requests for 37 aircraft, 40  engines, and hundreds of specialists from dispatchers to heavy equipment bosses. Six hundred more requests had landed that morning. The Park Fire in northern California was exploding at a pace that horrified and amazed even the hardened veterans here. A firefighter injured by a tree had been evacuated to an Idaho hospital. And an aircraft had gone missing overnight amid the smoke billowing from Oregon’s Malheur National Forest.

Peterson, with his can of Liquid Death on the conference table, scanned the room before the morning briefing.

“Ready to rock and roll?” he asked.

When all the West is on fire at once, this is who deals with it.

Peterson manages the 32 employees at the National Interagency Coordination Center (NICC), a key part of the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) on the fenced-in federal government campus abutting the Boise Airport. The staff, including personnel with the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and other agencies, must constantly weigh the threats of multiple rapidly changing fires and deploy their limited resources where they can do the most good.

After weeks of extreme heat and waves of lightning storms, there is so much fire burning now that the U.S. has reached Preparedness Level 5 (PL5), something that has happened this early in the summer only four times in the past 20 years, according to staff here.

At times like this, there’s never enough help.

“No fires are going to get everything that they want,” Peterson said.

The vibe here is not Situation Room suits and ties. It’s looser and more outdoorsy: short sleeves and jeans, sandals and tattoos. But it’s serious work.

On the video conference, Jeff Walther, a representative from the Pacific Northwest region, informed the group that a single-engine airtanker had gone down the night before while fighting a new blaze near the Falls Fire on  the Malheur National Forest.

“Ground crews are out there this morning trying to locate,” Walther said. “Pretty difficult terrain. Smoke’s still hampering the area.”

“Thanks Jeff, and definitely, our thoughts from here, along with everyone in the dispatch coordination community, hoping for the best,” Derrek Hartman, the center’s deputy manager, told him. “I feel terrible for the situation going on.”

The Forest Service and the Grant County Sheriff’s office later confirmed that the pilot had died.

The staff at the coordination center are familiar with these risks. Nearly all of them worked as firefighters. And many have worked together for years or decades, building a camaraderie and rapport that helps them navigate the logistical maelstrom on any given day.

Peterson, a third-generation firefighter with a scar on his right cheek from one of his close calls, grew up in California and took his first firefighting job two weeks out of high school. He was raised partially in Paradise, the mountain town that was demolished by the 2018 Camp Fire, one of the deadliest fires in U.S. history. Both of his childhood homes there went up in flames.

Over his three-decade career, he has watched as fires have grown in scope and intensity. He’s lived to see a winter fire that burned more than 1,000 homes. Forests hit by repeated fires that have transformed into quick-burning grasslands. When he started, he said, a 50,000-acre fire was a very rare occurrence.

“Now that’s the norm,” he said. “Right now we have six fires burning over 100,000 acres. And we haven’t even got to August yet.”

Peterson acknowledges that warming temperatures from climate change are part of the story but he also believes the decline of the logging industry — including clearcuts that helped thin the forest and gave firefighters anchor points from which to work — is to blame for the country’s worsening fire problem.

This summer’s quick explosion has followed two relatively light fire years, as abundant winter rain and snow has nourished the West. To fire experts, wet winters mean more grass, which eventually dries out and turns to kindling when the heat cranks up.

“We can turn good news into bad news like nobody’s business here,” said Steve Larrabee, a Bureau of Indian Affairs official who is the center’s fire and fuels analyst.

This year got off to an ominous start when wildfires in Texas and Oklahoma burned more than a million acres. “We just don’t get million-acre fires in February,” Larrabee said. In the past several weeks, there have been many major fires in the Pacific Northwest and California. Now, the Great Basin and Northern Rockies are lighting up, too. About 3.8 million acres have burned in the U.S. so far this year, above the average over the past 10 years of 3.4 million acres.

Larrabee tracks metrics of the dryness of dead trees and vegetation. He is concerned that the numbers seem okay but aren’t really corresponding with the “spectacular fire behavior” now showing up in parts of the West.

“These things that are usually fire barriers, like green vegetation, they’re not working like fire barriers like they normally do,” he said.

The biggest crisis right now is northern California’s Park Fire, near Chico, which has burned more than 300,000 acres in less than three days. Officials suspect an arsonist started the inferno that now threatens thousands of homes. Evacuation orders are in place for several communities, including  what’s rebuilt of Peterson’s hometown of Paradise.

“It will be one of the largest — if not the largest — and one of the most devastating fires on record in the country when it is all said and done in the fall,” Peterson said on Saturday.

Amid all of this, the coordination center must steer desperately needed firefighting resources around a constantly shifting map.

On Friday, fire managers from the Great Basin, with 26 new fires ignited the day before, said they needed all types of crews and aviation support. Meanwhile, the Northern Rockies, battling 77 new fires, wanted smokejumpers and rappellers.

Shortages at such a time become more glaring. All 27 contracted caterers who feed fire camps have already been committed, so beyond that, teams  will have to buy meals from whatever local providers they can find.

The day before had reached a high-water mark for demand this year for infrared flights to map fire perimeters and work new fires, with 81 requests. And the federal government’s 91 single-engine airtankers were also all spoken for, staff here reported.

There are 26,020 firefighters deployed just on large fires, the most this year. More help is needed.

Peterson met on Thursday with officials from Australia and New Zealand, longtime firefighting partners of the United States. Those countries agreed to send 80 people, including personnel in sorely needed middle management positions such as division supervisors and task force leaders. The most critical shortage, Peterson said, was in local fire dispatch centers, where there are more than 100 vacancies. People in these grueling jobs field 911 calls and coordinate the response to new and growing fires.

“Nobody wants to do it anymore because they’re just burned out,” he said. “It never stops.”

And there’s no respite ahead. Red flag warnings were peppered across the West with wind gusts expected up to 45 mph. Smoke from Canada’s fires, also raging, had finally reached Europe, one staffer noted, just as the Olympics were starting. Outside the nation’s firefighting command center, yellow smoke hung low over Boise.

At the end of the morning briefing, Peterson reminded his staff to take care of themselves.

“This is going to be a marathon,” he said.