Will Federal Layoffs Affect Fire Operations This Fire Season?

The answer is a resounding YES.

I spoke with Riva Duncan from Grassroots Wildland Firefighters for my podcast Life with Fire yesterday, and am sharing our conversation here (as well as on the usual channels like Spotify and Apple). We spoke about how wildfire operations will be impacted by the loss of some 4500-5000 employees in the Forest Service, National Park Service and BLM. Riva—who has literal decades of experience in fire operations, and who retired from the Forest Service in 2020—issues a dire warning for the state of our wildland fire workforce ahead of our upcoming fire season, especially given this recent news and the existing retention issues wracking the agency.

Also I’m encouraging those who want to support federal workers in Washington State to attend one of the President’s Day protests taking place tomorrow in Olympia, Seattle, Wenatchee and Tacoma. I’ll be joining in Seattle. Consider attending a protest to support the public land stewards in your life!

Transcript (minus my opener and closer):

Riva Duncan: My name is Riva Duncan, and I retired from the US Forest Service at the end of 2020, after 32 ish years in fire and and I, and I like to tell people like, I worked all over the US for the Forest Service. I worked on the east and the middle and the west. And I like to do that because I try to talk a lot about how fire is not a Western problem. Some people still think it's only a Western thing. And you know, we know, you and I know it's not even a national problem. It's a global problem, but, but everybody, everybody needs to be concerned. And when I retired, shortly after that, I joined Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, which is a nonprofit advocacy group that was started in 2019 to advocate for significant reforms for federal wildland firefighters. And so you know, legislation for better pay, comprehensive health and well being benefits. And we are a nonpartisan organization. We've been fortunate to be able to work with legislators on both sides of the aisle and also work with the agencies and then with other groups that so kind of support this cause. So in Grassroots we've been busy. We're always busy, but with all this latest going on, we've been getting a lot of requests from media and journalists, and those of us in our organization who are retired or no longer work, we can speak freely. And so we're trying to be the voice for the workforce right now. Well, we've always tried to be that. We feel like it's particularly important right

Amanda Monthei: And so you guys are focused on the fire workforce, the workforce, the the firings this week have primarily impacted non-fire folks, but I'd love to get your perspective on how this ultimately will impact fire folks in many, many different ways.

RD: Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. And we've, we've been telling journalists that a few fire folks have been in the cuts, but for the vast majority, it's non-fire people. But we know internally how critical that workforce is to support fire, and we know that some of those folks who are recreation techs and timber markers and biologists and foresters who are actually also firefighters, and where I live right now, in the southeast, the southeast cannot accomplish all the prescribed burning that they do without the non-fire collateral duty workforce. They are critical, and also in the Northeast. So that's a big part of how we accomplish targets in the eastern United States. But yeah, these folks fill in on engines. They fill out on crews. When I worked on the Klamath, we had, we call them boosters, we had folks who would repel, I don't think that's probably as popular now with some of the requirements, but, but they played a critical role in operations. But then, as you mentioned, all the support functions behind the scenes, and to continue to talk about prescribed fire, because you and I are both huge advocates for that. You know, those are the folks doing the environmental assessments. We need biologists to make sure we're not harming habitat for a big prescribed burn. You know, we need archeologists to clear the sites first. You know, they are doing the planning, all the planning that goes into us being able to put a match on the ground. So it's part of ecosystem management, ecosystem health, but it's also part of the suppression response organization as well.

AM: And a part of this is that the work that these prescribed fire initiatives are doing, or that the folks that are doing these prescribed fires are doing that's also helping fire suppression, ultimately, down the road, that's also helping firefighters. It's all interconnected, and I just wanted to make that as clear as possible. Do you have anything to say about that?

RD: It’s making things safer for firefighters we talk about, you know, and there's controversy even within our workforce. But if we keep putting out every fire, then when we go back and fight fire in that same place in a few years, the fuels are going to be even worse, right? And you can make the same argument about prescribed fire. Prescribed fires help firefighters make a stand much more safely and effectively, if they're going back to a wildfire that's burned near a prescribed fire, or a mechanical fuel break, or a shaded fuel break, or, you know, things like that. And so direct effect on safety of not just the public, but firefighters as well.

AM: Yeah, and I wanted to speak a bit about IMTS. I'm hearing a little bit less about this today than I was yesterday. And I'm wondering, with these probationary employees being the ones that were primarily fired, if that is going to have an impact on IMT support structures, can you speak to that? Do you know much about sort of that side of things at this point?

RD: When people outside of the government hear ‘people are on probation,’ I think they think, oh, behavioral or performance issue, that's why they're on probation. So I think we need to be clear to explain what that is. Probation is just you're within the first year of your permanent position, and you're kind of, you know you're on probation for a year. And so when people go from being a temporary which we have people who work for years as temporaries, and then they finally get their first permanent position, they're under probation for a year. And then we have supervisors who are under supervisory probation. And so your first time as an official supervisor, you're on probation for a year, and then we have other hiring authorities that have a two-year probation. But for now, it's just the folks under regular one-year probationary. You're only supposed to be on one probationary period. But sometimes, if you go from one agency to another that starts over, you know, and so for a lot of it, it's, it's people kind of newer in their jobs, but that's not everybody. We've got people who've been doing this work for years, right? And so maybe this is just their first permanent job. So when we talk about incident management teams and the support functions, logistics, planning, Public Affairs, finance, you know, we draw really heavily from the non-fire workforce, right? And it does take qualifications and it takes experience to get into a lot of those positions, but some of those are entry level, and we count on our non-operational firefighters to fill those positions. So I think they're going to figure out that is having a pretty huge impact on incident management teams. It may not be people who are on the roster, the 60 or 80 people who are rostered, but all the people they order then to support those other functions, resource advisors, you know all of that they're going to be struggling to fill those critical positions.

AM: Yeah, absolutely. Do you have any other thoughts? You know, I'm thinking like other roles that are that, are that people are mentioning to me anyway? Are that they would fill in on engines when people were sick, or they'd fill in on cruise when people were sick, they fill out. They of course, fill in on militia crews and things like that. Are there any other impacts that you can think of that you'd like to speak

RD: Yeah, and I think we need to not use the word militia.

AM: Oh, good. Good point.

RD: We were doing an interview once with grassroots and use that word, and they thought we were talking about armed people so, and it's clunky, so we try to say collateral duty or non fire. But you know, with the struggles with recruitment and retention that we've been seeing for the last several years, yeah, if we want to roll an engine out, and we've only got four folks, then we might go to the timber crew and say, who's available to go on this fire assignment and go with this engine, you know? And so again, it's just going to make those struggles to fill out our crews, our hand crews, fill out our engines, our wildland fire modules, you know, we depend on those folks a lot.

I was, I was chatting with somebody on Instagram, and they stood up a full collateral duty squad of timber markers, recreation techs, and they just filled this huge critical role in initial attack on their unit, and were able to use them effectively to, you know, initial attack a fire that they were able to get a handle on. And those happen all over the place too. This has a huge ripple effect. And I think in Grassroots, because we do focus on the fire folks, but we want to give a shout out because most of us started in non-fire jobs. I started in timber. I loved my coworkers who were not in fire. I love the support they provided. And we're heartbroken by this. We're all heartbroken by this. A lot of them are spouses of wildland firefighters and partners and and family members, and it's just, it's crushing right now.

AM: That's a great point, and it's something I've seen in my DMs as well on Instagram, is that this is really impacting folks that met in the forest service through fire, and then the husband or something, went into a non-fire position, or the the wife did, or whatever it might be. But still, this is having a real impact especially on families in rural areas. That's something I can't get over, is that, I mean, these are places where it's really hard to find positions outside of government jobs, and what are these people supposed to do? A lot of these are early career folks. There are a lot of folks that are my age that are finally able to, you know, get a career position, and finally able to maybe get a mortgage, and finally able to think about a family, and this is what's happening to them at that point in their career. That's really so sad to see.

RD: Yeah, and they're community members. In these rural communities, there's a lot of reliance, often on Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Park Service, you know, Fish and Wildlife Service, all those folks being taxpayers in these communities, like you said, having a mortgage, or being a renter, you know, shopping at the local grocery store or feed store. And if these folks are losing their jobs, and we already know some of these rural communities are already struggling, if these folks are losing their jobs, they're going to leave, right? So, so it doesn't even impact, you know, we could talk about, why should the public care beyond public safety with wildland fires, but they should also care because these people are contributing to their local economies. They’re coaches, you know, their spouse might be a teacher. And so, again, that's just another part of this ripple effect that I think, you know we need to be able to communicate, and that's what we're trying to do in grassroots. We've been fielding media interviews every day this week, and we're all trying to talk about that, the contributions of the non fire operational employees who are a huge part of. The success of wildland fire suppression and prescribed burning,

AM: yeah, and I see the work that y'all are doing, and you're crushing it, and I know a lot of it's behind the scenes, but there's a lot of people that appreciate what you guys are doing. And so do you have any other action items for folks right now?

RD: No, you know, we have some allies within the agency, of course, that give us some inside information, and so that's really helpful. And we're trying, then to get that information out to other groups, like, Fired Up which is the spouses group. They've got spouses coming to them and saying ‘Oh my gosh, we're so worried my spouse might be on the chopping block or whatever’. So we're also trying to get information out to folks, you know, that also have a following, maybe a little bit different, you know, so that we can try and get as much information out to as many people as we can as we find it out. You know, there are still so many uncertainties, still so many unanswered questions, but when you know, if we know something, we're going to share it. If we don't know what we're going to tell you. Tell you, we don't know, we're going to try and find it, or we're going to try and find a group that might have some information, like the union. We've been working really closely with the union, you know, and trying to share information they've been provided. So it really is going to take a village, you know, for us all to support each other in the federal workforce right now.