The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) on Monday officially opened up applications for its U.S. Wildland Fire Service Director position.
The department is accepting applications for the position from Sept. 29 through Oct. 13. The position will be based in either Washington, D.C., or Boise, Idaho, and has a salary of $191,900 to $225,700.
The job posting offered insight into the service’s priorities, including:
Lead all wildland fire management activities across the DOI, including workforce development, technology investments, communications, and administrative support, ensuring alignment with departmental mission, priorities, and policies.
Coordinate and oversee structural fire management programs while collaborating with the National Park Service, Bureau of Reclamation, and other stakeholders.
Represent the Department on wildland fire issues before Congress and the president.
Oversee all aspects of the Wildland Fire Management Account, including budget development with other federal partners.
Serve as the Department’s lead for firefighting under the National Response Framework.
The departments also said it will begin shifting away from “outdated systems and fragmented response” that have hindered previous wildfire efforts.
“For too long, outdated and fragmented systems have slowed our ability to fight fires and protect lives. Under President Trump’s leadership, we are cutting through the bureaucracy and building a unified, modern wildfire response system that works as fast and as fearlessly as the men and women on the front lines,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in the press release. “By streamlining federal capabilities and strengthening our partnerships with state, tribal and local teams, we will deliver the common-sense reforms needed to safeguard our communities, our lands and our future.”
Smother, a collection of poems, by Rachel Richardson
Wildfires and poetry are not strangers in the publishing world but with Smother, poet Rachel Richardson has added a new element by combining her views on the challenging nature of wildfires with those of raising children.
How do we become good parents in a world that is struggling to find new ways of surviving regular, large, threatening fires?
Richardson is the co-founder of Left Margin LIT, a literary arts center in Berkeley, California. In 2024 she was named an inaugural Artists-in-Fire Resident through the Confluence Lab and is now trained as an FFT2 wildland firefighter. She lives in Berkeley, half a mile from where she was born.
Wildfire Today invited her to tell us more about her inspirations for Smother, a collection of poems on wildfire, children, climate change, landscape, friends, family, rage, sorrow and more.
What inspired you to write these poems during these difficult times with wildfire?
I began writing a book about living in California, and in the Bay Area specifically, in 2017. The first things I found myself writing about were technological, actually – the way technology is changing the way we interact with each other and with nature. I’m a parent, and I saw it strongly in the experience my daughters were having growing up compared to the experiences I had had in the 80s and 90s.
But in 2017 we also started feeling major effects of the record-breaking fires that were burning in California – smoke and air pollution at levels that were new and startling. I didn’t intend to write about fire, but since I try to be receptive to the world when I write, smoke kept finding its way into my poems.
Then when Covid hit, in 2020, combined with the record-breaking Lightning Complex fires and Creek fire (together burning about 4 million acres in California) that summer, all my themes converged. It felt like the massive out-of-control burning symbolized a fundamental shift in our sense of what childhood could be, and how we could imagine a future in California. That was when I began to understand that my book was fundamentally about these two elements, fire and parenting.
What did your training as a firefighter add to your work?
Thinking about the devastation of those fires was pretty bleak, so I began to seek out more information about the causes of wildfire, hoping to change my fear of them into something more productive. I wanted to have an answer for my children about how we could live in harmony with our landscape, and I wanted to feel less terrorized by the prospect of fires’ destruction.
I enrolled in FFT2 training to learn more of the science and social components of wildfire. Then I participated in several prescribed burns with community organizations in Yolo and Trinity Counties. These experiences of making community with others interested in fire, and of burning to improve the ecology of the landscape, made me feel I could be part of the solution. Fire was not just something humans could control and direct, but it was a necessary force in the Western landscape, and a tool that could be used to benefit the land.
I am not sure what I’ll write next, but this work will have a big impact on it.
What do you know now about wildfire that you didn’t before you started writing these poems?
Fire is powerful, but not always to be feared. I am much more in awe of fire as a force in the Western landscape, and I am more motivated to find ways for humans to live better in our fire-adapted ecosystem. We can steward the land into a much more resilient state if we get right with our relationship to fire.
Smother, a collection of poems, by Rachel Richardson
Rachel Richardson is the author of three books of poetry, Smother (W. W. Norton & Co., 2025), and Hundred-Year Wave (2016) and Copperhead (2011). Her poetry and prose have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, at the Poetry Foundation, on The Slowdown, and elsewhere.
Rachel received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan. She also holds an MA in Folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a BA in English from Dartmouth College. She has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, Stanford, University of San Francisco, and, most recently, as Distinguished Visiting Writer at St. Mary’s College of California in the MFA Program in Creative Writing.
Following are two exerts are from Smother:
AFTER FIRE
[This poem is about a tree-planting event at Berkeley’s Tuolumne Camp, a public family wilderness camp near Yosemite that burned in the 2013 Rim Fire.]
The kids cradled baby trees
in their arms – plastic conical pots
with the starts of incense cedars
and ponderosas sprouting upward –
tiny shivers of needles
spurting from thin beginnings
of branch – and we trudged
up the hillside with paper packets
of nutrients, tree tea, stuffed
in our jeans pockets, to toss
into the planting holes. The rains
were coming. Everything felt lucky.
THE “I WANT” SONG
But there’s so much that I want –
for the trees not to burn, or at least
not these trees, not unless they’re far away or
beneficial to the understory. I want to stop
feeling like I’d better buy the fruit
now because maybe next year there will be
no more fruit, no more water, maybe the crops will burn
or wither or be sprayed with the chemical that kills
the bees and which studies now show
kills the bees’ children and children’s children
two bee-generations after exposure.
I want not to think about the expiration of the world.
A new report out of Colorado found that homeowners in the state have the sixth-highest insurance costs in the nation, primarily in wildfire-prone areas. Costs aren’t expected to fall anytime soon.
More than 321,000 homes in the state face “moderate or higher” wildfire risk, around 12% of the state’s total housing units. Report author Caroline Conley Norris pointed to increased development in wildfire-prone areas as a major reason for the increase.
Many insurers have also decided to remove themselves from certain areas of the Colorado market since wildfire risk is too high, but not nearly at the same rate as other disaster-prone states. Norris said that may be because Colorado is less regulated than other states.
“It could mean that insurers are able to cover their risk (in Colorado) in other ways. They can raise their premiums or adjust their terms in a way that makes them feel comfortable,” Norris told Colorado State University. “We’re seeing a lot of non-renewal in places like California and Florida, where insurers are seeing repeated giant losses from these hazard events and they aren’t able to raise their prices fast enough.”
Colorado lawmakers just opened up their FAIR insurance coverage plan to residential property owners. The plan is meant to act as a last-resort insurer when homeowners can’t get any other coverage.
Currently, 33 other states have FAIR plans, but each state sets up its plans differently. Norris said it’s harder to get approved for a FAIR plan in Colorado, but she believes that’s because lawmakers were trying to keep the state budget in mind.
“It will be interesting to see what happens here in Colorado,” Norris said. “When homeowners in some high-risk areas have really expensive insurance options but aren’t eligible for the FAIR plan, will they opt to not buy home insurance and self-insure? We’re seeing some affluent homeowners do that in Florida because paying for repairs out of pocket is a better option than buying prohibitively expensive insurance.”
The United States Department of Agriculture on Tuesday announced that the agency has invested $200 million in 58 wildfire reduction projects across the nation.
The programs span 22 states and two tribes, and include efforts like updating community wildfire protection plans and removing hazardous fuels and overgrown vegetation.
The funding comes from the Congressionally-created Community Wildfire Defense Grant Program. The program is slated to invest $1 billion over five years to assist at-risk communities in preventing wildfires. 2025 is the program’s third year.
“No single organization can address the severe wildfire threats we face today,” Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz said. “It is imperative that we work together to protect our forests and communities. For those communities that already have plans in place, these investments will enable immediate, collaborative action to reduce wildfire risk.”
The state with the most approved grants in round three of the program was Colorado, with eight projects funded. Two projects in the state each received just under $10 million in funding, including:
“Protecting the Gateway to the Rockies” through the Larimer County Office of Emergency Management, which includes defensive space improvements on 900 parcels, wildfire mitigation treatments on 500 acres of open space, and wildfire preparedness education at 75 community events.
Wildfire Risk Mitigation program through the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, which will expand the county’s Sustainable Lands and Safer Homes (SLASH) program, hire more staff specifically for wildfire risk education, and help purchase numerous kinds of field equipment and gear.
The project with the largest amount of funding approved was a $10 million program in New Mexico. The “Colfax Wildfire Risk Reduction Project” through the Cimarron Watershed Alliance will “implement high priority wildfire risk reduction treatments including fuels reduction, evacuation route clearing, restoration focused forest thinning, and defensible space work on private lands in and around communities.”
The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Fix Our Forests Act in January and has yet to have any motion in the Senate. The bill has effectively been stonewalled under both the Biden and Trump administration after it also stalled in committee in a Senate committee in 2024.
The Act would create an interagency Fireshed Center focused on wildfire prediction and tracking, establish fireshed management areas in forests with high wildfire risks, and expedite the review of wildfire-related forest management projects under the National Environmental Policy Act.
Critics against the Act claim it would further open up forests to logging and allow a large-scale rollback of the Endangered Species Act, National Historic Preservation Act, and National Environmental Policy Act.
Advocates at Megafire Action, a non-profit organization focused on policies to help avert catastrophic wildfires, recently unveiled the ad campaign, claiming to be the first ever made to support a piece of wildfire legislation, just days after the Trump Administration announced the upcoming creation of the U.S. Wildland Fire Service. Megafire Action CEO Matt Weiner told WildfireToday that the Service wouldn’t be designed to address the same problems that the Act tackles, which means Senators need to take action on the bill now.
“The missing piece in all of this is workforce,” Weiner said. “We’ve been asking our wildland firefighters to do too much with far too little for too long, all while putting their health and safety on the line. My hope is that building a better, more efficient system will help us make the case for workforce reform and funding.”
Weiner addressed the concerns brought up by other members of the Senate, but said the larger issue is lawmakers’ lack of urgency on the matter.
Megafire Action’s ad buy will target Washington and other local news outlets through video and static advertising and run for one week.
The National Transportation Safety Board has released its final report on a mid-air collision of two firefighting helicopters over Cabazon, California, that killed two firefighters and a pilot in 2023.
The crash of the two on-duty contracted Cal Fire helicopters, a Sikorsky S-64E Skycrane and a Bell 407 – a derivative of a LongRanger, resulted in the deaths of Cal Fire Assistant Chief Josh Bischof, 46, of Menifee, Cal Fire Capt. Timothy D. Rodriguez Jr., 44, of San Jacinto and contract pilot Tony Sousa, 55, of Red Bluff.
The Board’s final report determined that the crash’s cause was due to the Skycrane flight crew’s decision to fly at an altitude of 4,000 feet, which was a dangerous and unapproved altitude for the craft.
“The Skycrane flight crew’s decision to enter the Fire Traffic Area’s 7-nm NOCOM ring at an altitude significantly above their maximum cleared altitude, which resulted in their need for an aggressive descent into congested airspace and subsequent failure to see and avoid the Bell 407,” the Board’s findings said.
The collision caused the Bell 407 to break apart and crash, killing all three people inside. The Skycrane was damaged in the collision, but it safely landed.
Both helicopters were part of the late afternoon initial attack response to the Broadway Fire west of Palm Springs. Both aircraft took off from nearby Hemet, 11 miles southwest of the fire, with the Bell 407 airborne approximately three minutes ahead of the Skycrane. The two helicopters flew different routes around mountainous terrain toward the fire, and ADS-B data showed both helicopters on a converging flight path until the time of collision west of the fire.
Join us in Florida for the 2026 International Smoke Symposium.
We are now open to proposals for talks, workshops or other special sessions that meet the needs of global experts and practitioners at the forefront of wildland fire and smoke science.
This premier event convenes air quality specialists, fire professionals, health scientists, policymakers, and technology innovators to explore the complex challenges and emerging solutions surrounding wildland and agricultural smoke.
As a hybrid event, all presentations will be live-streamed and taped for later playback.
From Maryland (2013) to Long Beach (2016) to a fully virtual format in 2020, the International Smoke Symposium continues to evolve—uniting global voices and advancing the science and practice of smoke management. The 2026 symposium will be held in person at the new Leigh Perkins Conservation Education Center in Tallahassee, Florida.
What to Expect:
• Cutting-edge research on smoke tracking, modelling and health impacts.
• Strategies for field management, communication and response.
• Insights into social, ecological and economic implications.
• Training opportunities for operational professionals.
• A showcase of innovative tools and technologies.
Join for the 2026 International Smoke Symposium ISS4, Tallahassee, Florida, March 23-27, 2026. In person and online.The deadlines for submission of proposals for Presentations and for Special Sessions closes on October 24, 2025
The United States Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture announced the establishment of the U.S. Wildland Fire Service, a consolidation of all federal wildland fire agencies under the Interior.
Creating a joint federal firefighting aircraft service
Standardizing the Emergency Firefighter Program
Establishing a joint contracting, procurement, and payment center
Building a government-wide Wildfire Enterprise IT System
Developing a unified wildfire risk mapping tool
The departments also said they will begin shifting away from “outdated systems and fragmented response” that have hindered previous wildfire efforts.
“For too long, outdated and fragmented systems have slowed our ability to fight fires and protect lives. Under President Trump’s leadership, we are cutting through the bureaucracy and building a unified, modern wildfire response system that works as fast and as fearlessly as the men and women on the front lines,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in the press release. “By streamlining federal capabilities and strengthening our partnerships with state, tribal and local teams, we will deliver the common-sense reforms needed to safeguard our communities, our lands and our future.”
The announcement is a continuation of President Donald Trump’s executive order in June, which directed the departments and all agencies represented by the National Interagency Fire Center to enhance their wildland firefighting capabilities at the state and local levels, including through the use of artificial intelligence, data sharing, and mapping capabilities.
“Time and time again, we have witnessed the devastating consequences of wildfires caused by mismanagement and a lack of preparedness. Under President Trump’s leadership, we are taking bold action to modernize wildfire response systems, streamline federal wildfire capabilities, and strengthen their effectiveness. We started this work in the spring and have continually updated our policies and programs to properly manage our forests through common-sense timber production and management, protecting our national forests and grasslands for generations to come,” Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said. “Secretary Burgum and I are committed to leading a bold transformation of the federal wildfire system to help our communities, neighbors, and partners better prepare for, respond to, and recover from wildfires.”
Research and experiments on airdrops in France began with the first LABEX (LArgage Bombardier d’eau EXperimentation) experiment in 1995.
Following the acquisition of CL-415 waterbombers by the French government, it quickly became apparent that to optimize aerial firefighting, it was necessary to understand the dropping characteristics of the aircraft.
Entente Valabre, the laboratory of the French Securité Civile, oversaw measuring the ground patterns of the French waterbomber fleet.
The aim of the LABEX research is to determine the ground patterns of various water-bombing aircraft and analyze the ground distribution of the released product by application rate class.
Each aircraft comes with a range of dropping programs. To optimize aircraft use in aerial forest fire fighting, it is essential to know the surface areas covered by the different applications – how much area is covered and by what depth of drop.
To complement these experiments at a real scale, with real aircraft, other experiments are carried out to understand and model aircraft drops are conducted. Analysis by Entente Valabre researchers of the airtanker ground patterns show that the product is not deposited uniformly, and is often deposited very irregularly, because of a complex fragmentation process of the liquid column released by the aircraft.
Although the release process seems simple, the fluid dynamics governing the transformation of a liquid block into a cloud of droplets are only partially understood. The droplets can be neither too fine to avoid dispersion and evaporation, nor too large to avoid harsh impacts on vegetation and the ground, resulting in projected objects. Large-scale fragmentation of a drop, which leads to the formation of liquid meteors that take longer to atomize into droplets, is a complex process and its physical origin is unexplained.
DETERMINATION OF GROUND PATTERNS
Ground patterns are evaluated on flat test areas, free of vegetation or covered only with herbaceous vegetation up to a height of 20 centimetres.
The test area dimensions are determined according to the aircraft to be tested and the areas is set up in a grid. The drop patterns are measured by distributing receptacles over the test area, comprising a fixed support and a collection cup designed to catch the liquid. After each test, the cups are hermetically sealed, collected and weighed. Each pattern is then plotted on a predefined scale, corresponding to classes of application rate in litres per square metre per day, or litre/metres².
Various camera views of retardant drops show specific factors that help to determine effectiveness. Photo courtesy of Entente Valabre.
DETERMINING RELEASE EFFICIENCY
The ground-pattern efficiency is primarily related to the application rates obtained, depending on the product released – water or retardant. In the Mediterranean region, under normal conditions of vegetation (10 metric tonnes per hectare), weather (wind less than 60 km/h) and terrain (not generating excessively difficult trajectories or significant turbulence), a rate of 0.8 lm2 is representative of an effective release using long-term retardant, while a rate of 1.6 l/m2 is representative of an effective release using water.
The various ground patterns parameters are:
The length and depth for coverage rates above the representative application rates
The area and product volume above representative application rates
The homogeneity of the ground pattern
The difference between the time the drop hits the ground and the time it totally covers the ground.
Ground pattern extension and concentration levels are not the only release characteristics that can determine the effectiveness of a drop. The speed of the released product can have a considerable influence on breaking fire-induced updrafts during direct attack, on upwind accuracy, or on safety on the ground. All these factors can be qualitatively related to the phases of ground-pattern formation. The three phases – retardant cloud tearing, atomization and dispersion – explain the various stages that take place between the initial break-up of the product cloud and the formation of droplets that have reached their final size. The rheology of the product, the height and speed of the aircraft, and the release system play an important role in these phenomena.
Observation of the drop is very important to assess its effectiveness, and valuable information can be gleaned from camera images. For this reason, a few subjective criteria are selected:
The status of the cloud when it hits the ground and the way it disperses while resting on the ground.
The drop patterns are measured by distributing receptacles over the test area, comprising a fixed support and a collection cup designed to catch the liquid. After each test, the cups are hermetically sealed, collected and weighed.
PRESENTATION OF RESULTS
The ground patterns are presented in the form of summary sheets in which the following are described:
technical flight data (altitude, aircraft speed)
technical loading data (weight, volume)
meteorological conditions
ground patterns characterization.
Following these analyses, recommendations are made regarding the use of different dropping programs for specific firefighting missions, for example initial attack or retardant barrier construction.
EXPERIMENTAL CAMPAIGNS IN FRANCE
Five experimental campaigns have been conducted in France:
A liquid drop in the wind tunnel at the Institut wind de Mecanique des Fluides de Toulouse and computational fluid dynamics of a Canadair CL-415 drop. Images courtesy of Entente Valabre.
LABEX campaigns are time consuming and costly; therefore, it is essential to have a dropping model that can be used to vary, for example, the height of the drop, the wind direction and the characteristics of the product released – questions that water bomber pilots frequently ask to understand and optimize their practice.
With this in mind, a team at the Institut de Mecanique des Fluides de Toulouse is developing a dropping model that has already been tested against results obtained during various LABEX campaigns.
Initially, the approach was based on ground patterns from the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service’s open-access technical reports, which made it possible to study and model the main characteristics of a ground footprint, namely its length, width and density of deposited product.
The use of numerical simulation as a tool for predicting the drop cloud produced by an aircraft appears to be very attractive for gaining access to all the physical mechanisms involved. However, the computing resources available, even at the biggest French and European computing centers, do not currently allow researchers to describe the entire process from the aircraft to the ground.
The three phases – retardant cloud tearing, atomization and dispersion – explain the various stages that take place between the initial break-up of the product cloud and the formation of droplets that have reached their final size.
An approach developed by PhD candidate Corentin Calbrix in his thesis for Universite de Nimes was limited to describing the fragmentation of the released liquid in a zone close to the aircraft, i.e. 10 metres below the aircraft. Computational fluid dynamics studies of the CL-415 and Dash 8 drops were carried out, showing that fragmentation and dispersion in this zone prefigured ground deposition 50 metres below, which could be deduced by extrapolation of the drop cloud envelop. This approach can now be used to study drops by these aircraft under various operational conditions, particularly in the presence of crosswinds, to help interpret the differences in ground patterns observed during LABEX and provide useful information to optimize forest fire fighting.
Frontal and lateral observation of the release during a LABEX is an essential element in assessing the quality of a release. The eye can identify the quality of product fragmentation and dispersion and anticipate the characteristics of the ground pattern. Packages with a higher concentration of liquid are generally easy to observe and are likely to generate areas of higher concentration on the ground, making the ground pattern less uniform and of poorer quality.
The explanation for this fragmentation mechanism is not yet available: Is it a physical instability intrinsic to fragmentation at this scale, or the memory of a disturbance transmitted to the fluid by the release system? To answer this question, studies are underway at the Institut de Mecanique des Fluides de Toulouse combining wind tunnel experiments and numerical simulation.
A one-tenth scale dropping device has been installed in the 2.4 metre diameter wind tunnel, capable of delivering up to 25 m/s of relative wind. The fragmentation of the liquid column is filmed by a high-speed camera at 2,000 frames per second. The first results of the water release show a specific fragmentation mechanism that cannot be explained by literature results at smaller scales.
A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code benchmark is underway to challenge various French and American research codes for the study of this instability; these codes must be able to reproduce wind tunnel experiments before the study of fragmentation at aircraft scale can begin.
Ultimately, understanding the origin of the instability and its modes will lead to proposals for better designs for release systems.
The aim of the LABEX research is to better understand and optimize aerial forest fire fighting. It is essential to know the different firefighting missions of aircraft to provide recommendations on the use of the different drop programs available on each aircraft. Climate change leads to changes in fire behavior, and the missions of firefighting aircraft must be adapted to these new phenomena. The tools and experiments described above will be used to improve existing dropping systems, to validate their operational use, and to assist pilots in the understanding of their practice.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency’s push to change a decade-old air pollution rule was recently advanced in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
Committee members on Wednesday discussed a draft of the Wildfire Emissions Prevention Act (WEPA), which would amend a portion of the Clean Air Act to allow looser restrictions on when officials can start prescribed burns. The act would specifically change the EPA’s Exceptional Events Rule, which allows states to be exempt from meeting national air quality standards during high-pollution events they can’t control, to allow prescribed burning to be considered an “exceptional event.”
Committee Chair Senator Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican from West Virginia, led Wednesday’s hearing championed the Act, saying passing it will help reduce wildfire emissions.
“WEPA would ensure that states won’t be penalized for using prescribed burns and facilitate state leadership on actions that would mitigate wildfire risk,” Capito said during the hearing. “I look forward to hearing from our witnesses about the environmental and public health benefits that would come from having WEPA signed into law.”
The act mirrors a request from EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in March, when he asked staff to revisit the agency rule. EPA staff said that prescribed burns are virtually never nominated for exclusion under the rule.
An analysis published February considered the potential impacts of the change: “The relevant parts of the rule are very complex, but, to simplify, they indicate that if a prescribed burn complies with certain regulations and standard practices, it will be deemed by the agency to be ‘not reasonably controllable or preventable’ and classified as a ‘natural’ rather than ‘human-caused’ event, such that the ‘unlikely to recur’ requirement no longer applies,” the study on the rule published said. “To qualify, prescribed burns must comply with smoke management plans that reduce pollution effects and multiyear land resource management plans that set the frequency and location of burns. These requirements are quite complex and potentially burdensome.”
One of the witnesses at Wednesday’s hearing was Jonathan Wood, the vice president of law and policy at the Property and Environment Research Center. He believes passing the act would work to solve the policy problem.
“It would give the Environmental Protection Agency and states needed flexibility to treat prescribed fire smoke the same as wildfire smoke, while streamlining the process,” Wood’s statement from the hearing said. “It would also have no effect on EPA’s authority, the pollutants covered by the CAA, or any substantive environmental standard.”
