Recently, the Donald Trump administration ordered that all wildland fires be extinguished regardless of where they are or what started them. Like his other land management ideas, this one is far out of date and ignores decades of science and the experience of generations of firefighters. Not only is this Trump policy counterproductive, it is also deadly. Already 3 firefighters have died as a direct result of the Trump and Interior Secretary Douglas Burgum policy.
For example, in northern New Mexico, a lightning fire called the Frijoles (beans) Fire is burning at the southern end of the Rocky Mountains. It is consuming land in a designated wilderness area that has been starved of fire for more than a century due to fire suppression polices that have been the backbone of the US Forest Service’s budget for more than a century. The area where the fire is burning is in extreme drought and the ponderosa pine and mixed conifer forests the fire is consuming are overgrown with thickets. The thickets are there because of overgrazing by livestock and fire suppression.
Fire professionals assigned to the fire (more than 700) know that their full suppression efforts (ordered by Trump) probably won’t work. The fire will continue to burn until the weather puts it out or it runs out of fuel on the flanks of 13,000 foot peaks to the east. Even so, they continue to dump loads of fire retardant which firefighters know does little if any good and they are emptying nearby reservoirs onto the fire with helicopters. The aviation contracting companies are delighted with the millions they will make but their efforts will do little good to stop the fire except on the margins.
The firefighters have protected nearby communities to their credit. This is perhaps the only thing they can realistically be expected to do under these conditions. And these conditions exist on hundreds of fires in the West this year.
The Frijoles Fire is just an example of thousands of fires burning across the drought stricken West this summer. Far worse things are happening in Utah and Colorado where the Snyder fire, burning in a remote wilderness far from towns, killed 3 firefighters and severely injured two others.
Some firefighters work from helicopters that deliver them far from roads to fight fire. In the case of the Snyder Fire, five helitack firefighters were placed deep in a designated wilderness area far from any towns or highways, in rough country where few people go. The Snyder Fire was growing toward wild country and eventually would have arrived at sparse fuels where it could have been contained. Instead, three lives were lost for absolutely nothing and two people with severe burns remain in hospital, all to fight a fire in remote semi-desert country.
“The question is, why were they attacking that fire in the first place?” asked Timothy Ingalsbee, a former federal firefighter and cofounder of the advocacy group Firefighters United For Safety, Ethics and Ecology. “What was actually at risk? If it was a bunch of shrubs on remote mountaintops, what was the real risk that justified putting those firefighters at risk?” Tim was speaking to Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Trump conservatives reserve a special arrogance toward land managers, environmentalists, and others who take an interest in informed land management and care for wildlife and watersheds. They make changes to long standing polices without consulting experts, believing that their special conservatism is more informed than experience or science-based policy. We see this arrogance in the smirk on Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz as he deflected criticism of his and Trump decisions that lead to the firefighter deaths.
Trump has made 2 billion dollars since he took office a second time, but he is not the only one directly enriching themselves from government service. Republican Senator Timothy Sheehy of Montana owns a fire aviation company called Bridger Aerospace that is a big contractor to federal fire agencies. He is making millions from this full suppression policy which he promotes from his Senate office. He says he has put Bridger Aerospace in a blind trust, a meaningless gesture. Meanwhile his aircraft carry out mostly futile slurry drops over fires. Slurry slows fire down briefly and can allow on the ground firefighters to make some progress sometimes. Often it is a public relations effort to reassure a worried public.
Meanwhile, Senator Sheehy and other relevant businesspeople pushed the Trump administration to consolidate all the firefighters in Department of Interior agencies into one “Wildland Fire Service.” (They tried to get the US Forest Service firefighters into this new agency also, but Congress blocked it because it would have caused a severe crisis across the Forest Service in terms of budget and mission.) They formed the Wildland Fire Service right in the middle of fire season causing chaos and confusion for no clear reason.
For example, Bandelier National Monument is a 33,000-acre national monument in northern New Mexico. It has a group of firefighters who take care of the national monument and the adjacent Valles Caldera National Preserve, both areas under the National Park Service. It used to be these firefighters answered to the superintendents at Bandelier and Valles Caldera. Now they answer to somebody far away in Burgum’s new fire service. Who signs their paychecks? What is the priority for these fire managers? Confusion like this is happening across the United States thanks to Burgum who consulting with almost nobody before he established the National Fire Service which was widely opposed by professionals in the agencies.
This summer a bulldozer operator fighting the Wright’s Spring Fire in southern Oregon was also killed, probably when the 20,000-acre fire he was fighting changed direction suddenly. Two helicopter pilots were killed on the Widemouth 2 Fire in central Utah in early August. These firefighter deaths are happening because fires are becoming much more active and extreme with the warming and drying of the climate from global warming. Fires do not behave like they did before 2000 and fire agencies are scrambling to adjust to much more intense and deadly fires even as agencies are struggling to recruit new firefighters.
Meanwhile the Trump/Burgum regime is making matters far worse by taking us back to the 1930s with fire policy that promotes the buildup of fuels through full fire suppression. They are worsening future fires and endangering firefighters and rural residents across the West with an ignorant policy.
