Blazes Highlight Shortage of Manpower, Equipment

When the Marlin Springs fire started in Idaho’s Salmon-Challis National Forest, incident commander Paul Hefner waited more than a week before sending in his first firefighting attack crews.

“We had Type II crews that were very, very green, with no chain saws, in some very rugged country along the Continental Divide,” he said. “We couldn’t do it safely and effectively.”

Hefner kept his firefighters off the line until the National Interagency Fire Center could send in experienced crews.

“It’s been like this all summer, actually,” Hefner said. “There were times on fires in the Salt Lake desert when we had no crews at all. We had to take the management team and outfit them.”

As the historic fire season of 2000 burns down to smoldering ash, the post-mortems are beginning, the attempts to learn what worked and what didn’t.

Several fire bosses and administrators said the shortage of people, particularly trained supervisors, and equipment--everything from helicopters to shirts and pants--was among the biggest problems.

But they attributed the shortages not to government policies or poor planning, but to an occurrence that could not be foreseen--the outbreak of huge wildfires throughout the West almost simultaneously, rather than staggered through the season as usually occurs.

At the Interagency Fire Center in Boise, the nerve center of the national firefighting effort, the formal reviews will be mainly behind the scenes.

“We have some people that we’re going to try to bring in, some senior line officers, and ask them to take a look at how we operated,” said Ron Dunton, program manager at the Bureau of Land Management. He said reports on those reviews probably will be available to the public online.

Politicians already are conducting their reviews. Republican congressmen and senators say they believe Clinton administration forest management policies were part of the problem, and they are holding hearings on that premise.

Fire bosses said the most apparent problem was simply shortages--of experienced fire managers and of equipment.

Montana’s two big supply centers complained at one point they virtually exhausted their supplies--everything from fire hose and tools to the special fire-resistant clothing firefighters must wear on the lines--and they were unable to fully outfit crews with necessities.

Incident commanders Hefner and Mike Melton and federal managers Dunton and Dennis Pendleton each said the demand for firefighting resources throughout the United States outstripped supply and allowed the blazes to become more intense.

“In my mind, the most critical shortage was fire-line supervisors,” Dunton said. “We need people that can direct other people on an uncontrolled fire.”

Dunton, Hefner, Melton and Pendleton blamed the fires and resource shortages on extreme weather systems that touched off fires all at once, instead of gradually over the course of the season as historically occurs.

“There were a lot of fires that occurred maybe a couple of days after the first fires were starting to be staffed,” Hefner said from his post at the Clear Creek Complex wildfires in Idaho. “A lot of those fires had minimal resources on them because they just weren’t available. So they got big and there wasn’t much we could do about it.”

Dunton explained that fire-line supervisor training takes three to five years, “which hindered our ability to put more firefighters and military out.”

Once it became apparent that there would not be enough fire crews and aircraft to go around, supervisors were forced to shift their priorities through August to protecting communities rather than fighting the fire itself, the four managers said.

“It didn’t shift into containment mode until we got some [cold, wet] weather on the fires that allowed us to go in,” Dunton said.

Each of the four men said this year’s fires were comparable to the tough years of 1988 (when Yellowstone burned), 1994 and 1996. But, they pointed out, the blazes were unique because 11 Western states had major fires at the same time. The subsequent lack of resources made for another difference.

Dunton said government agencies provide resources based on historical needs. But he called this fire season the kind that peaks on the scale.

“Ninety-nine percent of the rest of the time, you don’t have any activity,” he said. “Economically, it’s really not too practical to plan for this kind of year because it happens infrequently.”

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On the Internet:

National Interagency Fire Center: https://www.nifc.gov