Author: Editor

The United States Department of Agriculture recently announced $23 million in grants supporting timber production in President Donald Trump’s effort to “unleash domestic production” of the nation’s natural resources.

The aim of the USDA’s grants is reportedly to transport “hazardous fuels” from national forests to processing facilities, supporting timber production, according to the department. A department spokesperson told WildfireToday the effort would specifically be targeting “low-value” wood in the protected forests, like dead trees, fallen branches, and dense undergrowth.

“Eligible material considered hazardous fuels may include logs, roundwood, chips, biomass and other byproducts from authorized existing projects transported to facilities for use in manufacturing wood products and/or wood energy/services,” USDA said in an emailed statement.

News of the grants was released a month after USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins announced her cooperation with Trump’s “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production Executive Order, which cleared the way for millions of national forest acres to be logged.

Rollins, through a memo sent in April, listed over 112 million acres of National Forest Service land under an “Emergency Situation Determination,” over half of all Forest Service land. The designation allows the service to take immediate action in the designated acreage, including salvage of dead or dying trees, commercial harvesting of trees infected with insects or disease, and harvesting of trees deemed “hazardous” due to their closer proximity to roads or trails.

“The United States has an abundance of timber resources that are more than adequate to meet our domestic timber production needs, but heavy-handed federal policies have prevented full utilization of these resources and made us reliant on foreign producers,” Rollins said in a memo in April. “It is vital that we reverse these policies and increase domestic timber production to protect our national and economic security. We can manage our forests to better provide domestic timber supply, create jobs and prosperity, reduce wildfire disasters, improve fish and wildlife habitats, and decrease costs of construction and energy.”

The Forest Service is accepting applications for hazardous fuel removal through June 20. Information about upcoming webinars will reportedly be available soon on the Forest Service Timber Transportation website.

Trucks heading to the Palisades fires 11 January 2025. Photo: Kelly Martin 

By Lindon Pronto

We have entered an operational gray zone: wildfires burning in cities. These fires are the jurisdiction of urban fire departments, but often they rely on wildland firefighters to get the job done, and wildland firefighters are increasingly being called to fight wildfires in urban environments.

During the breaking news frenzy around large wildland fires, I rarely say what I really want to say – it’s a game of responding to sensational and reactionary questions, just like how we approach fire itself. So, here’s what I’ll add to the discussion about the LA fires.

This is an edited version of an article in Wildfire Magazine Special Edition: LA Fires

There will be a lot to learn. And some officials and organizations are going to need to take some responsibility. And certainly, residents in fireprone landscapes need to contemplate their own responsibilities. But these are the two fundamental questions I see that we need to address:

1. What will be collectively required of us to prevent such disasters in the future?
2. How will we respond to similar disasters when they occur?

Since the January fires, news stories, op-eds and social media have been swirling with lots of great propositions to these questions: more prescribed fire, fire-hardened construction (hempcrete!) and landscaping, better urban planning, building codes, budget priorities, public utility SOPs, fire-tech, etc. I think the answers to how to address question 1 are relatively straightforward – experts have been sounding the alarm and offering solutions on these issues for decades. Answering question 2 is more challenging.

Looking at the long list of things to address to prevent such a disaster from happening again, it’s obvious the changes, motivation, behavioral shifts, policy response and funding needed mean we will likely have many more devastated communities long before these changes come to fruition. This brings us to question 2 –the burden on the conscience of the collective response community. At the end of the day, we all still expect firefighters to respond, as they have always done.

Fire fighting is siloed: there are many types of firefighters from municipal and state to industrial, airport, and maritime. To oversimplify in the California context, there are wildland firefighters and urban / structure firefighters, and some who do a bit of both, especially in California, known for its wildland-urban interface.

CAL FIRE is an example of an agency that evolved to do both. Los Angeles County Fire is another example. But fundamentally, wildland firefighters are trained and equipped differently and operate tactically and strategically different than urban fire departments.

I’m not knocking one group of firefighters; I’m just saying we don’t expect a smokejumper to run into a burning building. But we do expect urban fire departments to manage the most complex and extreme wildfires, ordering outside resources as needed.

But telling an urban firefighter not to extinguish a burning building goes against every instinct. This was apparent in the LA fires – urban firefighters pumping massive quantities of water through large-diameter fire hoses on fully involved structures. In other words, valiantly using the equipment they have, to do exactly what they were trained to do. Urban firefighters are a stationary firefighting force whose objective is to tap into the nearest fire hydrant; the fire truck serves as pumping platform and the firefighters are committed to this effort until the structure is fully extinguished. This is obviously an untenable approach if a sea of structures is on fire during a wind event. Houses and cars, businesses and schools – all on fire. Instead of trees and bushes, it’s a jungle of petroleum products and biomass – a devastatingly overwhelming situation.

Wildland firefighters are trained not to fight a house on fire but to stop it from spreading to the surrounding area. Wildland firefighters operate very differently; their initial objective is not to extinguish a fire but to rob it of available fuel to eventually contain its spread. This is why wildland firefighters are very mobile, and move with the progression of the fire, often doing so without relying on water, or at least very little water.

Looking ahead, I believe the response community does need to think outside the box when it comes to this new operational gray zone. Firefighters will be called into these scenarios in the future, and to answer that second question, adaptations in our strategies, tactics, and use of resources need to be addressed. Maybe we can learn a thing or two from the wildland fire community – after all, as the Washington Post reported, LA has long been over-dependent on wildland firefighting agencies like the U.S. Forest Service to handle fire in the city and county’s jurisdiction.

This is an edited version of an article in Wildfire Magazine Special Edition: LA Fires

Lindon Pronto (M.Sc. environmental governance) has more than 20 years of experience and expertise in wildfire management with employment, research, deployments, and remote support in more than 30 countries in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Pronto has years of operational experience as a federal wildland firefighter in California.