BLM firefighters compete in physical fitness challenge

Billings Veterans Fire Crew
Billings Veterans Fire Crew. (BLM photo by Cody Phillips)

By Karly DeMars, BLM State Fire Planner; and Chris Barth, BLM State Fire Mitigation and Education Specialist

Physical fitness is essential to firefighter performance, mental health, and safety. For example, fatigue has been found to be a contributing factor in many firefighter accidents. To encourage physical fitness, the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) sponsors the annual BLM Fire Operations Fitness Challenge. The voluntary fitness challenge provides a common system by which BLM firefighters can measure current fitness, establish fitness goals, track fitness improvement, and receive recognition for their efforts.

Recently, several BLM Montana/Dakotas wildland firefighters participated in the annual BLM Fire Operations Fitness Challenge. The highest scoring male and female participants in Montana/Dakotas were recognized for their achievements. Both are firefighters from the North Central Montana District and work at the Zortman Fire Station. First-year seasonal firefighter, Jessica Race, was the top female participant and third-year seasonal firefighter, Kevin Henry, was the top male participant. Those participants scoring a Level 4 (300 points) were also recognized for their achievements.

BLM fitness winners
Left: Kevin Henry, a third-year firefighter from North Central Montana District/Zortman Fire Station, displays his award for being the highest achieving male participant in Montana/Dakotas in the 2021 BLM Fire Operations Fitness Challenge. (Photo by Karly DeMars). Right:Jessica Race, a first-year firefighter from North Central Montana District/Zortman Fire Station, carries a chainsaw after completing project work this summer. Jess is the highest achieving female participant in Montana/Dakotas in the 2021 BLM Fire Operations Fitness Challenge. (BLM photo by Jessica Race)

“Firefighter fitness and well-being are the foundation to maintaining a healthy and resilient workforce to meet the demands of the job. BLM Montana/Dakotas encourages all our firefighting staff and partners to participate in high-quality training and fitness activities for the challenges they face,” said Aaron Thompson, BLM Montana/Dakotas State Fire Management Officer. “While the BLM Fire Operations Fitness Challenge is voluntary, Montana/Dakotas firefighters consistently participate in this annual activity, and we are proud of both Kevin and Jessica for their accomplishments.”

The BLM Fire Operations Fitness Challenge tests participants in four basic exercises — push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, and a timed run of either 1.5 or 3.0 miles. Participants are evaluated using a point system for each exercise category. Achievement is categorized in level increments where Level 1 is the minimum and Level 5 the maximum fitness level.

Congratulations to all 2021 BLM Fire Operations Fitness Challenge participants!

For more information on BLM’s Fire Operations Fitness Challenge, visit: www.nifc.gov/about-us/our-partners/blm/training/fitness-challenge.

 

Who should receive credit for the wildland firefighter provisions in the recently passed infrastructure legislation?

Wildland firefighters
Wildland firefighters. USFS image.

The infrastructure bill passed by Congress last week will significantly change the employment landscape for federal wildland firefighters. We covered the details earlier, but it includes pay raises, a distinct “wildland firefighter” occupational series, mental health support, conversions of 1,000 seasonal wildland firefighters to permanent full-time, and many other issues — totaling $3.3 billion for fire management.

This is an unprecedented, probably once in a lifetime legislative achievement. Some of the changes are so sweeping that there may be a need to smooth out some unanticipated consequences. There could be opportunities for fine tuning in two other pending bills:  H.R. 4274 Wildland Firefighter Fair Pay Act, and H.R. 5631 Tim Hart Wildland Firefighter Classification and Pay Parity Act. Brief descriptions of the two bills are in the article we published October 26.

All but the most cynical will look at the bill passed last week as a huge step toward improving the work environment for 15,000 firefighters and hopefully will begin to turn around issues with hiring and retention. The fire management section was drafted by legislators, as well as staffers for the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. Many special interest groups provided input. One of them was Grassroots Wildland Firefighters (GRWFF).

“There is so much noise in the system around the pending legislation,” wrote GRWFF President Kelly Martin in an email last week just before the final passage. “We want to make sure it’s clear that these are not ‘our’ bills. These bill’s are the legislator’s and we’ve only served as subject matter experts for them. We really want to be clear that we are not seeking credit. The credit belongs to the wildland firefighters out busting their asses and to the families of those who have died.”

Ms. Martin submitted the statement below from the organization. She said it was written by herself, Vice President Lucas Mayfield, and Executive Secretary Riva Duncan.

Grassroots Wildland Firefighters (GRWFF) would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who is supporting the wildland fire community and fighting for long overdue reforms, and to thank Bill Gabbert for letting us use this forum for much needed open and honest dialog

We’d also like to help clarify some potential misunderstandings people might be talking about. We’ve seen a few articles, comments, posts that H.R. 5631, Tim’s Act, is “our” bill. No legislative bill is ‘owned’ by any particular special interest group, GRWFF included. Legislation belongs to the legislators and their staffs who write these bills. Rep. DeFazio (D-OR) initially introduced the “Infrastructure Bill” with wide-spread bi-partisan support in the House and Senate, and Reps Neguse (D-CO) and Porter (D-CA) and their staffs wrote “HR 5631, better known as Tim’s Act.” The GRWFF serve as subject matter experts when reviewing and drafting bill language, as do many other groups. We have been extremely fortunate legislators have reached out to us as known experts in the field of federal wildland fire workforce issues. Collectively, Grassroots Wildland Firefighters provide hundreds of years of professional experience to help educate and inform elected officials of needed federal reforms wildland firefighters deserve given the high risk and hazardous workplace conditions. We, along with many other special interest groups, will continue to advocate for long overdue reforms. We owe our elected officials a tremendous  debt of gratitude for their deep interest in these fundamental reforms which will affect federal Wildland Firefighters for generations to come. 

The existing and former workforce and their families deserve the credit. To the firefighters on the firelines, whether they are ground-based, aerial delivered, or arrive by equipment, we are proud you trust us to deliver your stories; it is the fire management officers and duty officers; the dispatchers and the prevention technicians; the fuels technicians; and, sadly, it is the firefighters, and their families, who have paid the ultimate price. All of these dedicated and passionate women and men deserve the credit for the successes so far. They are the ones who face daily risks of severe injury and death; daily hazardous and often toxic environmental conditions and the ones who shoulder the mental, financial and emotional trauma of this very demanding profession. We advocate together for these needed reforms      

We want no credit. We are not interested in any perceived “ownership.” We only want meaningful change and reforms. We want a cohesive effort and voice for the existing workforce that leads to lasting and positive change. 

Tim’s Act builds upon the groundwork that pending legislation offers up. Unlike the Infrastructure Bill, there are no sunset provisions in Tim’s Act. These are permanent reforms that are needed for the workforce. It is the “cup trench” for the uphill battle that wildland firefighters, their families, and friends face in the coming decades. It has broad bipartisan support in the House and in the Senate. Tim’s Act is something that both Republican and Democrat elected officials can agree to. It finally addresses broad reforms as a path to modernizing the federal wildland firefighter workforce. It is bipartisan legislation which works to ensure we recruit and retain highly trained, experienced and qualified federal wildland firefighters to respond, at a federal level, to all-risk, all-hazard disasters throughout the US and when requested, provide international wildfire support as well. 

We are just beginning our journey together. We will continue to speak for those who cannot. We will continue to provide our expertise and experience to those who ask for it and for those who fight alongside us. We are in it for the long-game. You and your colleagues have the ability to speak up, too. We are taught to lead up, and if we see something, we say something. The status quo is no longer acceptable. The demands of the 21st century fire environment require us to work together and commit to the hard work ahead of us. We believe this time is different. Supporting Tim’s Act is the opportunity to lead up. Let your elected officials know how the reforms identified in Tim’s Act will affect you personally if/when this bill becomes law. Your support makes a difference to our volunteers passionately dedicated to these reforms. Join our exciting movement; get engaged and stay informed.  https://www.grassrootswildlandfirefighters.com/get-involved. 

Nothing about us without us.  

Welcome to Yosemite, the new Pyrocene Park

Yosemite national park prescribed fire
Prescribed fire in Yosemite National Park. Merced River and moon. NPS photo by Isaiah Hirschfield.

By Steve Pyne

The Pleistocene epoch that began 2.6 million years ago sent ice in waves through Yosemite.

Glaciers gouged out great valleys along the Merced and Tuolumne rivers, ice sheets rounded granite domes, cirques sculpted the High Sierra. John Muir traced virtually every landscape feature of Yosemite to its legacy of ice.

Now the residual ice is melting, the streams and waterfalls are drying and the living landscape is burning. In 1990, the A-Rock fire closed the park for the only time in its history, so far. The 2013 Rim fire burned around the Hetch Hetchy reservoir; the 2018 Ferguson fire burned along the park’s Wawona Road. Where the fires didn’t spread, their smoke did.

Add in the industrial combustion of fossil fuels, with its climatic impacts, and virtually every management issue of Yosemite today traces back to fire.
~
Humans have always used fire: It’s our ecological signature.

The end of the last glaciation allowed us, a fire-wielding species, to interact with an increasingly fire-receptive planet. Our pact with fire was mutual. Fire allowed us to flourish; in return, we have taken fire everywhere, even to Antarctica.

The pact had to operate within boundaries set by living landscapes. After all, fire was a creation of life, which furnished its oxygen and fuel and established ecological barriers. Then we discovered an immense reservoir of combustibles buried in geologic time. It was as though we had found a new world –- a fossilized, “lithic” landscape –we could work the way we did living landscapes. The only constraints were those people chose to impose on themselves.

Add up all the burning that people now do in living, and it would seem we are refashioning the Earth with the fire-informed equivalent of an Ice Age, complete with a change in climate, rising sea levels, a mass extinction, major shifts in biogeography and smoke palls. Little on Earth is unaffected.

Fire is driving off the last vestiges of the Pleistocene, from its ice to its mammoths. We have been creating a Pyrocene for millennia, but binge-burning fossil fuels put the process on afterburners.

Fifty years ago Yosemite recognized that its fire scene was out of whack. The problem then was not too much of the wrong kind of fire but too little of the right kind. The park sought to restore pre-settlement fire regimes. Among targeted sites was Illilouette Creek, an elevated basin southeast of Glacier Point.

The park recognized that suppressing fire had stockpiled fuels from the foothills to the crestline, caused Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove to overflow with invasive conifers that blocked views, and prevented the fabled sequoias from regenerating. The park introduced prescribed fire and learned to loose-herd wildfires. The Illilouette basin shuffled toward something like its former fire regime.

No place has the fire program it wants, but Yosemite seems better positioned than the national forests and private lands around it to cope. The issue is no longer to restore natural fire but to find the right mix of fires suppressed and prescribed, and of wildfires managed, to ward off the megafires that are plaguing everyplace else.

Yosemite deals with fires that can threaten small and not-so-small villages. Its specialty is working with wildland fire.

By Aug. 20 of this year the park had coped with 54 fires, 43 from lightning and 11 from people. Some were put out. Some were confined within natural barriers. And a few burning in Illilouette Basin were tweaked as nature’s invisible hand massaged them into five decades of layered burning. The legacy of past fires had altered the conditions for the fires that followed, softening the shock of tougher, meaner burns.

Yosemite has long been celebrated for distilling into near-crystalline state the magnificence of the Western landscape. As it moves from ice to fire, it is showing that it may also serve as a proxy for some of what the Earth needs to do to survive our deepening fire age. There is no way we can’t not manage fire.

Stephen Pyne
Stephen Pyne

Steve Pyne is a contributor to Writers on the Range where this article was first published. It is a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is the author of The Pyrocene. How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next.

 

 

Our new age of fire

Firefighters on the Monument Fire
Firefighters on the Monument Fire in Northern California, August, 2021. USFS photo.

By Steve Pyne

Fire in the West is expected, and not so long ago, it seemed something the West experienced more than anywhere else. Nationally, big fires were treated as another freak of Western violence, like a grizzly bear attack, or another California quirk like Esalen and avocados.

Now the wildland fires flare up everywhere. There are fires in Algeria and Turkey, Amazonia and Indonesia, and France, Canada and Australia. Last year even Greenland burned.

Fire seasons have lengthened, fires have gotten meaner and bigger; fires have begun not just gorging on logging slash and prowling the mountainous backcountry, but also burning right into and across towns. Three years ago in northern California, the Camp fire broke out along the Feather River and, burning southwest, incinerated the town of Paradise. Now, the Dixie fire, starting 20 miles north in the same drainage, is burning in the opposite direction, taking out the historic town of Greenville. The fires have us coming and going.

The causes have been analyzed and reanalyzed, like placer miners washing and rewashing tailings. Likewise, the solutions have been reworked and polished until they have become clichés, ready to spill into the culture wars.

The news media have fire season branded into their almanac of annual events. Scientific disciplines are publishing reports and data sets at an exponential rate. So far as understanding the fire scene, we’ve hit field capacity. What more can we say?

One trend is to go small and find meaning in the personal. But there is also an argument to go big and frame the story at a planetary scale that can shuffle all the survival memoirs, smoke palls that travel across the continent, melting ice packs, lost and disappearing species, and sprawling frontiers of flame, in much the way we organize the swarm of starlight in a night sky into constellations.
~
I’m a fire guy. I take fire not just as a random happening, but as an emergent property that’s intrinsic to life on Earth.

So I expect fires. All those savanna fires in Africa, the land-clearing fires in Brazil and Sumatra, the boreal blowouts in Siberia and British Columbia, the megafires in the Pacific Northwest — all the flames we see.

But then there are fires that should be present and aren’t — the fires that once renewed and stabilized most of the land all over our planet. These are the fires that humanity, with its species monopoly on combustion, deliberately set to make living landscapes into what the ancients termed “a second nature.”

But it was not enough. We wanted yet more power without the constraints of living landscapes that restricted what and when we could burn. We turned to fossil fuels to burn through day and night, winter and summer, drought and deluge. With our unbounded firepower we remade second nature into “a third nature,” one organized around industrial combustion.

Our fires in living landscapes and those made with fossil fuels have been reshaping the Earth. The result is too much bad fire and too little good, and way too much combustion overall.

Add up all those varieties of burning, and we seem to be creating the fire equivalent of an Ice Age, with continental shifts in geography, radical changes in climate, rising sea level, a mass extinction, and a planet whose air, water, soil and life are being refashioned at a breakneck pace.

It’s said that every model fails but some are useful. The same holds true for metaphors. What the concept of a planetary Fire Age — a Pyrocene — gives us, is a sense of the scale of our fire-powered impact. It suggests how the parts might interact and who is responsible. It allows us to reimagine the issues and perhaps stand outside our entrenched perspectives.

What we have made — if with unintended consequences — we can unmake, though we should expect more unknown consequences.

We have a lot of fire in our future, and a lot to learn about living with it.

Stephen Pyne
Stephen Pyne

Steve Pyne is a contributor to Writers on the Range where this article was first published. It is a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is the author of The Pyrocene. How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next.

NOAA satellites zoom in on wildfires

By NOAA

Fire weather is heating up across the western United States, exacerbated by an intense heatwave and ongoing severe drought. NOAA satellites are monitoring numerous wildfires and keeping watch on areas primed for ignition. As of June 17, 2021, 33 large fires are currently active, burning more than 400,000 acres in 10 states. More than one million acres have burned across the country so far in 2021.

NOAA satellites zoomed in on several of the major fires burning in the western U.S, including the Telegraph and Mescal Fires in southeastern Arizona, Pack Creek and Bear Fires in Utah, and the Robertson Draw Fire in Montana.

GOES-16 (GOES East) and GOES-17 (GOES West) are monitoring these fires in near-real time. Flying in geostationary orbit, they keep constant watch over the same area, and help to locate fires, detect changes in fire behavior, and predict their motion. They also provide important information about the size, temperature, and intensity of fires that would otherwise be unavailable.

Fire temperature imagery from geostationary satellites is particularly useful to identify new hot spots and the direction those hot spots are moving, especially for fast-growing or newly-formed fires. Specialized imagery that combines data from multiple channels on the satellites’ Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) instrument, allows both a fire’s hot spot and associated smoke plume to be visualized.

Satellite imagery of several of the fires, including the Pack Creek and Bear Fires in Utah and the Telegraph Fire in Arizona, reveal impressive plumes with thick pyrocumulus clouds, which form when there is enough moisture and atmospheric instability over an intense heat source and smoke.

JPSS satellites feed the HRRR-smoke model, the first weather forecast model in the U.S. to monitor wildfire smoke. The model relies on multiple satellite measurements, such as heat energy, wind speed, rainfall and atmospheric temperature, and combines these data with vegetation maps. The combined data is mapped to a three-dimensional grid that provides information on surface level smoke, and smoke high in the atmosphere. The model also produces a forecast with detailed updates on the height of the smoke plume, the amount of smoke produced and the direction it’s expected to move.

The HRRR-smoke model from June 15, for example, shows smoke from the fires in Arizona and Utah moving north and east across the country.

The benefits provided by the latest generation of NOAA satellites aren’t just seen during a fire but are important in monitoring the entire life cycle of a fire disaster. Data from the satellites are helping forecasters monitor drought conditions, locate hot spots, detect changes in a fire’s behavior, predict a fire’s motion, monitor smoke and air quality, and monitor the post-fire landscape like never before.

Timely satellite imagery is critical, potentially life-saving information in a dynamic fire environment. In the past, incident meteorologists had a single low-resolution image that updated every 15 minutes — typically the image was already 20 minutes old when it arrived at the forecaster. Now, GOES-16 and GOES-17 frequently detect fires before they are spotted on the ground – as early as 10 to 15 minutes before emergency notifications to 911.