In the mountains near the Colorado/Utah border, five federal firefighters deployed emergency fire shelters this past weekend as flames overran their position. Three did not survive. Their deaths have pulled back the curtain on a set of sweeping changes to how the United States fights wildfire — changes that safety advocates and fire scientists say are reviving a strategy the government itself abandoned decades ago.
One of the firefighters killed worked for the U.S. Wildland Fire Service, a new agency created this year without the customary approval of Congress. It was built by folding together personnel from four Interior Department agencies: the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the National Park Service. The other two firefighters killed worked for the Forest Service, which was not merged into the new agency only because Congress blocked that part of the plan.
Both the new agency and the Forest Service are now operating under a policy of “full suppression,” ordered by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. Under this directive, the Wildland Fire Service is instructed to attack every fire under its management as quickly as possible, regardless of the terrain, the cost, or the resources already known to work. Former federal firefighter Timothy Ingalsbee, who now co-leads the advocacy group Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, asks the question: if a remote wildfire is burning through shrubs on an empty mountaintop, what exactly justifies sending a crew in to stop it?
Full fire suppression is a return to the so-called 10 a.m. rule, a 1935 federal policy that required agencies to extinguish every new wildfire by 10 the following morning. For decades, that rule shaped how American forests were treated, and decades of retired fire officials say we are still living with the consequences. Michael Dudley, a retired Forest Service director of fire, aviation, and air management, points to the 10 a.m. rule as the reason today’s forests are so overgrown: officials got good enough at stopping fires that the small burns which once cleared out dead material and undergrowth simply stopped happening, and fuel kept piling up instead.
Former Forest Service wildfire researcher David Calkin calls this dynamic the fire paradox: The harder firefighters work to make fire disappear, the more fuel accumulates on the landscape. The more fuel accumulates, the harder the next fire is to stop.
The four Interior agencies now folded into the Wildland Fire Service already extinguished 98% of the fires they handled before the reorganization. Steve Ellis, a retired Bureau of Land Management deputy director, argues the new agency and its full-suppression mandate won’t change the fires that are hardest to stop, which are typically fueled by dense, overgrown, dry forests. What it will change, he warns, is the safety margin for the people sent to fight them: severing forest management from fire suppression, he says, makes firefighting less safe and puts communities at greater risk, not less.
The consolidation itself has left firefighters uncertain about basic chains of command. Dudley describes a workforce still sorting out who is in charge and who reports to whom, months after the reorganization took effect. The agency is now led by newly appointed Chief Brian Fennessy, previously chief of California’s Orange County Fire Authority, and an Interior spokesperson describes him as highly respected and experienced with complex fire challenges. Luke Mayfield, a founder of the group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, says he believes consolidation will ultimately serve firefighters better, but acknowledges the new agency still has a lot of work ahead with a fire season that is not waiting for the organizational chart to settle.
Photo: The Capitan Gap Fire, and the discovery point of the real life Smokey Bear, was at the pass between the Engine and the sign. Tahoe National Forest Fire Engine 731 with Crew (Assistant Engineer Ruben Villa and Engineer Dan Mitchell) were temporarily assigned to the Capitan Ranger District of the Lincoln National Forest in June 1990.
