Lone Peak Hotshots. Screenshot from their video below.
Fire crews and organizations have produced some excellent videos showing the highlights of their fire activities in 2020. We like to post them each year, and we used to be able to do it with one article, but so far this year we have found 28 — too many for one article. So this year we will do it intermittently over a two-week period.
For some senior-level fire personnel their pay stops after working a certain number of overtime hours
Roosevelt Fire, Bridger-Teton NF, WY, Sept. 29, 2018. Photo by Kari Greer.
Senator Diane Feinstein has introduced the Wildland Firefighter Pay Act, a bill that would raise the maximum limit on overtime pay for federal firefighters. The current limit affects higher level employees at the GS-12 and above level, and some GS-11s depending on if they are exempt from the provisions in the Fair Labor Standards Act. Under the existing provisions if they work hundreds of hours of overtime they may reach the cap after which they earn no more money. In some cases later in the fire season employees who spent a lot of time fighting fires have been told they earned too much and were forced to pay some of it back.
The proposed legislation eliminates the existing annual and pay period limits and creates a new one that places the maximum annual pay including overtime at Level II of the Executive Schedule, which in 2020 was $197,300.
“The current overtime pay cap for these brave men and women is outdated and represents a significant hurdle in retaining our most-experienced firefighters,” Senator Feinstein said. “Lifting this cap would ensure that these first responders are fairly paid for their hard work while helping build a federal firefighting service that can meet the challenges of our ‘new normal’ when it comes to wildfires.”
The Forest Service estimates that up to 500 senior-level firefighters either stop participating or do not request pay for hours worked once they reach the pay cap. This has a significant effect on federal wildfire response capabilities.
Senator Feinstein’s press release did not mention raising the pay of the federal wildland firefighters who live paycheck to paycheck.
Mill Creek Hotshots, Idaho City Hotshots, Baker River Hotshots, & Feather River Hotshots
Mill Creek Hotshots. Screenshot from their video below.
Fire crews and organizations have produced some excellent videos showing the highlights of their fire activities in 2020. We like to post them each year, and we used to be able to do it with one article, but so far this year we have found 28 — too many for one article. So this year we will do it intermittently over a two-week period.
President Joe Biden speaks to firefighters, January 27, 2020
From the White House today President Joe Biden made a brief address to the firefighters that were at the International Association of Firefighters convention.
During the four minute speech he said:
All men and women are created equal, and then a few become firefighters. So I owe you. The nation owes you. Especially when we keep asking more of you to deal with raging fires made more dangerous by the climate crisis.
When he was Vice President he spoke at the memorial service July 9, 2013 in Prescott Valley, Arizona, for the 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots who died June 30, 2013 on the Yarnell Hill Fire. From the C-SPAN recording, we made a video clip of his remarks and the slide show that followed featuring the 19 men. You can see the entire two-hour service at C-SPAN.
Vice President Joe Biden speaks at the Granite Mountain Hotshots’ Memorial Service, Prescott Valley, Arizona. July 9, 2013. Photo by Bill Gabbert.
As Vice President Mr. Biden also spoke September 12, 2009 at the memorial service for the two firefighters killed on the Station Fire near Los Angeles, Tedmund Hall and Arnaldo Quinones.
Even with mild COVID symptoms, 30 to 50 percent of patients develop long term residual issues
Screenshot from the Fire Engineering conference, Getting firefighters back to work after COVID-19, January 27, 2021.
Today Fire Engineering held a ground-breaking online conference, talking with physicians and Fire Chiefs to discuss getting firefighters back to work after they have been infected with the coronavirus. Hosted by Rick Lasky and Terry McGrath, the physicians talked about the effects of the disease and how it affects firefighters. The Chiefs discussed ideas and procedures for getting them back to work, and how to determine if they are ready — or should they be put on light duty.
One practice being used now is to administer various medical or physical tests before they test positive, and then if they later test positive, administer it again to compare the results.
If you are interested in the effects of the coronavirus and how fire departments are dealing with it, the 91-minute Zoom conference can be extremely worthwhile and valuable.
If you can’t spare 91 minutes, at least watch Dr. Tim Harris, Chief Medical Officer at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, Denton, Texas explain how the disease affects firefighters, from 9:40 to about 19:00. I transcribed some of the highlights from that section:
The difficulty with this disease is, with your young and vibrant workforce, you probably will have either mild or asymptomatic disease. Even within that mild or asymptomatic cohort, we’re seeing 30 to 50 percent of people with long term residual issues that when you stress them physiologically or mentally you’re going to see some degree of impairment.
The primary impairment is because the ace receptors on your lung and heart, we’re seeing people with lung fibrosis. You can’t breathe. The scarring is permanent, irreversible, and can only be treated with a lung transplant… But the cardiac impairment, 30 percent of athletes that develop COVID have long term cardiomyopathy — you develop heart muscle damage where the heart can’t pump as hard as it normally does so you develop systolic heart failure, or you have arrhythmia.
The other one that is also somewhat worrisome is the neurological impairment. And that goes to judgment. And judgment is very important in your job. You don’t want these people entering a structure fire with an impairment, whether it’s cardiac, pulmonary, or neurological… You want the brains, heart, and lung working so they can do their job.
Testing positive for the coronavirus could mean the end of a firefighter’s career. We don’t know what all of the long term effects are going to be, but irreversible lung damage is occurring now in some patients.
Much of the discussion was about, “How do we know what the path back to work is, are we looking at the right data,” said Russel Burnham a PA-C who treats firefighters at Front Line Mobile Health. “Asking ‘Are you OK’, is not the best method to determine if someone is fully recovered.”
Dr. Harris said the cardiopulmonary exercise test is a very valuable tool for determining the cardiac and pulmonary fitness of firefighters, before and after coronavirus.
Fire departments and federal and state agencies that employ wildland firefighters need to develop a post-COVID protocol to determine fitness to resume work.
Will they also cover up vehicle accidents, tree strikes, and burnovers?
Fire personnel on the Williams Fork Fire in Colorado in 2020. USFS Photo by Kari Greer.
The U.S. Forest Service and the four land management agencies in the Department of the Interior have refused to disclose how many of their firefighting personnel have been hospitalized due to the coronavirus.
To their credit, the FS has provided the numbers that have tested positive throughout 2020, and as recently as January 19 spokesperson Stanton Florea told Wildfire Today that since the pandemic started 642 have tested positive. Of those, 569 have recovered, Mr. Florea said, but 74 have not yet fully recovered or returned to work as of January 19. But he said they did not know how many had been hospitalized.
I attempted to obtain similar information from the Department of the Interior, but after several days of delays, receiving no data, and the request being elevated to higher levels, spokesperson Richard Parker wrote in an email, “We respectfully decline to comment further on this topic at this time.”
Four land management agencies in the DOI employ fire personnel, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Fish & Wildlife Service, and National Park Service.
There is no legitimate reason for the DOI or the Forest Service to be secretive about the effects of the pandemic on their firefighting personnel. If they refuse to say how many have been sickened by the coronavirus because of their jobs, what’s next? Will they cover up other injuries and fatalities, such as tree strikes, vehicle accidents or rollovers, broken femurs, concussions from rolling rocks? Will the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center have to stop issuing reports about accidents which can provide learning opportunities? Or have they already?
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) does not prevent the agencies from releasing anonymized summary data that does not identify individuals. For example, anyone can go to the Centers for Disease Control website and get COVID statistics at the county level. Numbers available on a day by day chart include cases, deaths, percent positivity, and new hospital admissions (COVID). Below are the stats for Clay County, South Dakota which has fewer residents, 13,864, than there are wildland firefighters in the federal agencies. This does not invade anyone’s privacy or violate HIPPA.
COVID statistics for Clay County, SD, January 27, 2021. CDC
It is not asking too much for the agencies that employ around 15,000 firefighters to maintain and release the same information available for Clay County residents, few of whom are serving their country battling wildfires in a job that was already dangerous before the pandemic.
Refusing to disclose the number of infected or hospitalized fire personnel prevents these tactical athletes from making an assessment of the degree of additional risk they are in. Providing this life and death data is the least we can do to help fire personnel make decisions about risking their health … or not.
It is immoral and unethical to keep this information secret.
The upper levels of the BLM have been in turmoil for the last two years. During the entire Trump administration no BLM Director was confirmed, and 200 Washington office employees were told their jobs were being moved thousands of miles away to western states. The term “hollowed-out” has been used to describe the management of the agency. And in the Department of Agriculture, 250 researchers in Washington quit after being faced with forced relocations according to Propublica.
Maybe under the new administration the cloud of secrecy over the effects of the coronavirus on forestry and range technicians will be lifted and transparency will become more normal.
The article was edited to indicate that the 250 researchers who quit, according to Propublica, were within the Department of Agriculture, not necessarily with the Forest Service (which is in the Department Agriculture).