As my recent diaries have shown there is a shortage of firefighters to meet the unprecedented amount of fires burning across our state. As I began digging into this yesterday I came across the same report highlighted in today's Monterey Herald - that US Forest Service firefighting efforts have been cut to the bone and left the nation vulnerable to massive fires. Deliberate staffing shortages have left the USFS unable to do vital off-season brush clearance, and left them without the staffing to get a quick jump on fires in their crucial initial stages.
The federal firefighting system is "imploding" in California, due to poor spending decisions and high job vacancy rates, as the region struggles to keep pace with what looks to be a historic fire season, a firefighters' advocacy group charges.
As a result, the firefighters say, small fires have exploded into extended, multimillion-dollar conflagrations because the U.S. Forest Service has been unable to contain them during the early "initial attack" stage...
As the "sheer number" of California wildfires pushed the nation to its worst measurable level of wildland-fire preparedness last week - Level 5 - a national multiagency coordinating group announced in a memo Monday that firefighter staffing levels in Northern California "cannot be maintained."
The report, by the FWFSA, has been around for a few months now. Wildland firefighters have been screaming about the issue to anyone who would listen, including Dianne Feinstein:
After facing pressure from California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and other lawmakers last spring, the Forest Service promised it would immediately fill its vacancies and launched a "Fire Hire" campaign to attract firefighters in Sacramento that concluded two weeks ago.
"I believe the agency should have been able to muster a stronger force," Feinstein said. "All signs indicate that things will only get worse."
Feinstein said that despite promises of full staffing from [USFS Administrator Mark] Rey, only 186 of the agency's 276 engines were manned at the start of the 2008 fire season.
Ron Thatcher, president of the union that represents 20,000 Forest Service employees, has estimated that attrition has left the service at 70 percent to 80 percent of its authorized staffing levels, and that up to 39 percent of fire crew leader positions were vacant as the 2008 fire season kicked off.
Rey, Bush's USFS administrator, has a long background in the timber industry. He blames environmentalists for the problems, but firefighters and those who know the issue are having none of it.
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