C-130 aircraft to parachute drop drinking water and other emergency supplies for Tonga residents
Lightning at the Hunga Tonga volcano. Still image from video by Potungaue Koloa Fakaenatula / Servicio Geológico de #Tonga.
The massive underwater Hunga Tonga volcano that erupted near Tonga in the South Pacific on January 14 triggered almost 7 hours of lightning as well as a tsunami. A ground-based lightning detection system recorded nearly 400,000 strikes with 200,000 occurring in a one-hour period. For comparison, a severe lightning bust in northern California might have hundreds or a few thousand strikes. The ash cloud reached at least 60,000 feet with some reports saying the initial plume reached 100,000 feet, three times the altitude of commercial airliners.
Below is a video showing part of the eruption recorded by Potungaue Koloa Fakaenatula / Servicio Geológico de #Tonga. A lightning strike or two can be seen at 29 seconds. Most of the lightning was probably inside the ash plume or higher in the column.
Entre vapor de agua, rayos y flujos piroclásticos, esta fue la pesadilla que se vivió en las cercanías del volcán #HungaTongaHungaHaapai después de su gigantesca erupción de ayer. pic.twitter.com/fvRuOYM1YY
The nearby island of Tonga was heavily affected by a four-foot tsunami followed by deposits of ash, which at least temporarily contaminated water supplies and shut off most utilities. A C-130 from New Zealand was scheduled to drop supplies by parachute.
The volcano is part of the highly active Tonga–Kermadec Islands volcanic arc, a subduction zone extending from New Zealand north-northeast to Fiji.
May, 2022 is the target date to issue the final policy for federal employees
OPM’s timeline for development of a Wildland Firefighter job series. OPM graphic.
The US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has created an action plan for the development of a job series to more accurately reflect the work that is now being done by wildland firefighters (WLFF) employed by five federal agencies. For the last 50 or more years WLFFs working for the Departments of Agriculture (DoA) and Interior (DoI) have been pigeonholed into Forestry or Range Technician positions. Their pay is very different from firefighters who work for private industry, municipal departments, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, and private contractors who fight wildland fires for the DoA and DoI.
The timeline created by the OPM is very ambitious for a task to be completed by half a dozen federal agencies. It establishes May of this year as a target for issuing the final policy.
During those five months the OPM expects to:
Review the current situation and compare work done by firefighters inside and outside the agencies;
Survey the federal agencies for what work they need accomplished;
Create groups and subgroups to meet regularly for job classification;
Hold focus groups;
Obtain input from leadership of the agencies;
Meet with human resources subject matter experts and the leadership of the agencies to discuss findings and recommendations;
Draft policy, guidance, and/or tools for Wildland Firefighter (WLFF) work in the Federal government;
Receive comments and feedback from the agencies;
Issue the final policy in May, 2022.
OPM’s action plan for development of a Wildland Firefighter job series. OPM graphic.
After the new WLFF job series is developed, then the five agencies have to actually adopt it and convert their firefighters into Firefighter positions. If the series requires higher pay, that could become a stumbling block. But if there are as many vacant positions now as there were last May they probably have enough unspent salary money to take care of the difference. But I would be surprised if there are many working in the new series before the start of the fiscal year that begins October 1, 2022 at the very earliest.
In a perfect world the development of the WLFF job series would have been initiated decades ago by leadership of the five federal agencies that employ a total of about 15,000 of these firefighters (if all positions were filled): Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Forest Service. Instead, they and the OPM are being forced to do the right thing by bipartisan infrastructure legislation passed by Congress in November, 2021.
Federal WLFFs have been recommending a realistic job series for decades, but within the last year their voices have been louder than ever and members of Congress have noticed. A fairly new non-profit organization, Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, has been one of those voices helping to raise awareness with the public and legislators.
Two other bills have been introduced in the last few months that address pay issues for federal WLFFs, H.R. 4274Wildland Firefighter Fair Pay Act, and H.R. 5631Tim Hart Wildland Firefighter Classification and Pay Parity Act. Brief descriptions of the bills are in the article we published October 26. The legislation has been introduced, referred to five committees, and one hearing was held by the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands.
Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Ben and Matt.
Teams would be called “Complex Incident Management Teams”
File photo. Southern California Incident Management Team 3.
A decade after a similar concept was proposed, the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG) is being asked again to change the way Incident Management Teams (IMT) are configured. Currently there are three levels, Types 1, 2 and 3, with Type 1 IMTs being the highest qualified. The idea is to combine Types 1 and 2 into just one type, which will be called Complex Incident Management Teams (CIMT).
The Incident Workforce Development Group (IWDG), a working group of IMT practitioners and subject matter experts jointly chartered by the Fire Management Board (FMB), crafted a memo to the FMB asking for the change, in order to address the following:
Reduced number of IMT participants to fill IMT rosters, impacting the total number of IMTs available nationally;
Inconsistent use of IMTs due to lack of national IMT rotation management and commitment approval;
Reliance on Administratively Determined (AD) employees, retirees, and cooperators to staff IMTs without commensurate trainee use; and
Standardization of the IMT mobilization processes and other criteria across Geographic Areas.
In 2010, recognizing that the workforce management and succession planning for wildfire response was not sustainable, the NWCG chartered an interagency team to develop a new organizational model for incident management. In October, 2011 the NWCG released a 51-page document, Evolving Incident Management — A Recommendation for the Future. (If they issued a companion report, a Recommendation for the Past, we were unable to find it.) The suggestion was to merge all federally sponsored type 1 and type 2 teams into one type of IMT. There would three response levels: Initial attack (type 4 and 5 incidents), extended attack (type 3 incidents managed by type 3 IMTs), and complex incidents managed by Complex IMTs. Wildfire Today’s last update on that proposal was in 2015.
Below is a copy of the memo about the current suggestion. It was signed January 10, 2022 by the two top fire guys in the US Forest Service and the Department of the Interior and sent to the Fire Management Board, NWCG, and the National Multi-Agency Coordinating Group.
(Click on the document above to see at bottom-left how to zoom in or scroll to pages two and three.)
The recently released report about the 2020 fatality on the El Dorado Fire addressed many issues the investigators felt were related to the management of that incident, including the current system for configuring IMTs:
“The same concerns exist for Incident Management Teams (IMT). With the reduction of 39 percent of the Forest Service’s non-fire workforce since 2000, the “militia” available to assist in IMT duties is rapidly being reduced to a mythical entity, often spoken of but rarely seen. The 2020 fire year was simply the latest in a long string of years where we did not have enough IMTs, let alone general resources, to address suppressing fire in our current paradigm. On the El Dorado Fire, Region 5 took a creative approach to ensure Type 1 oversight by grafting a Type 1 incident commander onto a Type 2 team, when no Type 1 teams were available. While this met the need and policy requirements, one cannot help but wonder what the difference really is between a Type 1 and Type 2 team. Why not just create one national team typing system, and why not ensure that it is staffed to a holistic fire management response (see Theme 2) and not just a direct perimeter control response.”
Figure 1 from the research paper. Distribution of 166 US wildland firefighter entrapments that occurred within CONUS (1981–2017) by time of day (local time) and month of the year.
A reminder:
Five common denominators of fire behavior on fatal and near-fatal fires have been identified through studies of tragedy fires. It is important for firefighters to readily recognize them to prevent future disasters.
Such fires often occur:
On relatively small fires or deceptively quiet areas of large fires.
In relatively light fuels, such as grass, herbs, and light brush.
When there is an unexpected shift in wind direction or in wind speed.
When fire responds to topographic conditions and runs uphill.
Critical burn period between 1400 and 1700.
Alignment of topography and wind during the critical burning period should be considered a trigger point to reevaluate tactics.
Blowup to burnover conditions generally occur in less than 60 minutes and can be as little as 5 minutes.
Updated research
On October 9, 2019 a document was published that summarized the work of four researchers who sought to find commonalities that led to the entrapments of firefighters on wildland fires. The paper is titled, “A Classification of US Wildland Firefighter Entrapments Based on Coincident Fuels, Weather, and Topography.” Apparently they were hoping to confirm, fine tune, revise, or update the “Common Denominators of Fire Behavior on Tragedy Fires” defined by Carl C. Wilson after the 1976 Battlement Creek Fire where three firefighters were killed near Parachute, Colorado.
The researchers conducted an analysis of the environmental conditions at the times and locations of 166 firefighter entrapments involving 1,202 people and 117 fatalities that occurred between 1981 and 2017 in the conterminous United States. They identified one characteristic that was common for 91 percent of the entrapments — high fire danger — specifically, when the Energy Release Component and Burning Index are both above their historical 80th percentile.
They also generated an update of the time of day the entrapments occurred as seen in the figure at the top of this article. This has been done before, but it’s worthwhile to get an update. And, this version includes the month.
You can read the entire open access article here. If you’re thinking of quickly skimming it, the 7,000 words and the dozens of abbreviations and acronyms make that a challenge. There is no appendix which lists and defines the abbreviations and acronyms.
The authors of the paper are Wesley G. Page, Patrick H. Freeborn, Bret W. Butler, and W. Matt Jolly.
Below are excerpts from their research:
…Given the findings of this study and previously published firefighter safety guidelines, we have identified a few key practical implications for wildland firefighters:
The fire environment conditions or subsequent fire behavior, particularly rate of spread, at the time of the entrapment does not need to be extreme or unusual for an entrapment to occur; it only needs to be unexpected in the sense that the firefighters involved did not anticipate or could not adapt to the observed fire behavior in enough time to reach an adequate safety zone;
The site and regional-specific environmental conditions at the time and location of the entrapment are important; in other words, the set of environmental conditions common to firefighter entrapments in one region do not necessarily translate to other locations;
As noted by several authors, human factors or human behavior are a critical component of firefighter entrapments, so much so that while an analysis of the common environmental conditions associated with entrapments will yield a better understanding of the conditions that increase the likelihood of an entrapment, it will not produce models or define characteristics that predict where and when entrapments are likely to occur.
The factor that was common for the majority of entrapments (~91%) was high fire danger. As a general guideline, regardless of location, the data suggest that entrapment potential is highest when the fire danger indices (Energy Release Component and Burning Index) are both above their historical 80th percentile.
One thing that will be interesting to watch is if the historical three-hour window from 1 to 4 p.m. when many of the fatalities have occurred is going to be stretched as the earth warms and extreme fire behavior becomes more frequent.
Jerry Perez, new USFS National Director of Fire and Aviation Management. USFS photo.
The U.S. Forest Service has selected Jerome “Jerry” Perez to be the new National Director of Fire and Aviation Management in Washington, D.C. He is currently the Forest Supervisor of the Angeles National Forest in Southern California.
The position has been vacant, occupied by acting personnel, since Shawna Legarza retired 18 months ago, June 30, 2020. Since then employees detailed temporarily to the job included Klamath Forest Supervisor Patty Grantham, Helena-Lewis and Clark Forest Supervisor Bill Avey, and Southwest Region Fire Director Jacob Nuttall.
“I welcome Jerry’s 32 years of experience and expertise as he leads our outstanding firefighters and guides the fire and aviation program to meet the challenge of preventing and managing wildfires,” said Forest Service Chief Randy Moore. “He steps into this position as the agency focuses on significantly increasing the pace and scale of hazardous fuels treatments focused in areas that have the highest risks of wildfires and threats to vital infrastructure.”
Prior to working on the Angeles NF Mr. Perez served as California State Director for the Bureau of Land Management and was the Oregon/Washington BLM State Director. Before his stint at the BLM he worked for the Forest Service in several positions, including Deputy Regional Forester for the Intermountain Region in Utah, Forest Supervisor on the Daniel Boone National Forest in Kentucky, Deputy Forest Supervisor for the Stanislaus National Forest in California, and was the National Litigation Coordinator in the Washington Office.
He has a Forestry degree from West Virginia University and a law degree from Columbus School of Law at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Mr. Perez also served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ghana, Africa.
Seasonal entry-level firefighters now making more than $15 an hour
Corral fire, a few miles northwest of the state Capitol building in Helena, Montana June 25, 2012. KXLH photo.
Wildland firefighters working for the state of Montana have received a pay increase. The state announced today that seasonal firefighters in Montana will get an additional $1.70 per hour, bringing the minimum base pay to $15.50 per hour.
“Montana’s wildland firefighters are some of the most important and necessary personnel serving our state, especially with recent, more severe fire seasons,” Governor Greg Gianforte said. “This well-deserved pay increase will help ensure our wildland firefighters remain the most skilled and mission capable firefighting workforce in the region.”
Department of Natural Resources and Conservation Director Amanda Kaster said, “It is more important than ever that we modernize our firefighting workforce to effectively address the challenges we face during these unprecedented fire seasons.”
Montana’s job listing website today shows seasonal firefighters at Anaconda will be paid $15.50 to $16.19 an hour, while engine bosses at the same location will earn $16.85 to $18.47 an hour. Both job announcements have a disclaimer that the actual pay may be less than advertised: “This agency may use a training assignment. Employees in training assignments may be paid below the base pay established by the agency pay rules.”
It may not be a coincidence that this pay raise came after Congress passed the bipartisan infrastructure legislation in November authorizing pay increases for federal wildland firefighters of $20,000 a year, or an amount equal to 50 percent of the base salary — the lesser of the two.
In a quote often attributed to President John F. Kennedy, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” However, it can take some time for the ripples to reach every vessel and the height reached may not be equal. For example, CAL FIRE vs. federal firefighters.
These pay increases, while long overdue, are deserved and welcomed by firefighters who work in one of the toughest and dangerous professions.
Compensation of federal firefighters
The next step to benefit federal firefighters is for Congress to pass H.R. 4274Wildland Firefighter Fair Pay Act, and H.R. 5631Tim Hart Wildland Firefighter Classification and Pay Parity Act. Or, some combination of the two. Brief descriptions of the bills are in the article we published October 26. The bills have been introduced, referred to five committees, and one hearing was held by the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands.
