Category: Labor and Working

Before the ravenous Caldor fire laid siege to South Lake Tahoe, California’s top firefighting priority lay just to the north, where the Dixie fire scorched more land than any other single fire in state history. Together, the two behemoths have already blackened more than 1m acres (4,000 sq km) along the Sierra Nevada range. And fire season in the American west is just heating up.

The climate crisis has helped create extreme fire emergencies, with huge, rapid-moving blazes tearing through a hot, parched landscape at lightning speed. Fires have hopped granite summits firefighters had hoped would slow their spread. Blazes have displayed erratic burn behavior, making their movements hard to predict.

The extreme conditions raise fresh questions about the ability of the country’s firefighting forces to control an emergency that has grown exponentially bigger year after year.

Roughly 27,000 firefighters have been deployed across the west this summer, according to officials. Local crews have received support from federal agencies, firefighters from other states, soldiers and national guardsmen.

There is no official or expert estimate for how many firefighters are needed, but it is clear their numbers have fallen short. More than 8,200 first responders battled to stop California’s Dixie and Caldor fires. They were armed with dozens of helicopters, hundreds of dozers and a multitude of equipment. While there have been wins and important progress made, neither fire has been contained.

Once-in-a-career blazes become routine

For the first time in its history, California’s fire agency, Cal Fire, in the 2020-2021 fiscal year was on track to spend more than $3bn fighting wildfires, according to a report from the California legislative analyst’s office released last autumn.

Since 2012, fire suppression costs in the state have risen sharply each year. With more resources needed to battle the blazes, there have been fewer available for preventing them. Firefighters are seeing the effects of a system under pressure on the ground.

Over the last six years, the work of fire crews has changed drastically as the frequency, quantity, and size of the fires have gotten worse, according to Tony Martinez, a Cal Fire captain who has worked with the agency for 28 years.

Once-in-a-career blazes of years past had become the norm, Martinez said.

In the past months, fire crews have been repeatedly reassigned, moving from one fire to the next as new ignitions take place. Difficult decisions have had to be made. Protecting human life is always the top priority followed by saving structures, and sometimes that has meant ceding acreage in mountains and forests.

“Firefighting resources are scarce,” said Isaac Sanchez, a battalion chief of communications with Cal Fire. “But we still have a responsibility to attack the new fire or respond to the new 911 phone call.”

During last year’s record-breaking fire season, when more than 4.2m acres across California burned, Cal Fire reported that the scarcity of fire crews was one of the greatest challenges faced by incident commanders. “The lack of crews became a significant operational liability,” officials wrote in a siege report on the harrowing year. “The mutual aid system in California was stretched to its limits as fires burned up and down the state.

“The destruction of watersheds, communities, lives and livelihoods was profound,” the report continued. “In the short term, air quality across much of the state was abysmal. In some areas, the sun was blotted out by smoke, making mid-summer temperatures feel akin to the dead of winter.”

Related: ‘We do it together’: how a Lake Tahoe community prepared to flee the Caldor fire

Burns this year are outpacing last year’s devastating season. In addition to 15 large blazes in California, firefighters are battling 86 others across the US.

A strain on firefighters’ health

The state of California has increased funding and expanded its hiring in recent years. Cal Fire added close to 3,000 temporary firefighters to its ranks last year and in March this year the governor approved $80.74m to add 1,399 mostly seasonal firefighter positions using emergency fund authorization. The state’s budget this year also includes $1bn to be spent over several years for wildfire prevention.

In addition, local firefighting crews have been reinforced by teams from out of state, the national guard and other state and local agencies. But firefighters still feel strained.

Martinez thinks Cal Fire is still understaffed. “The result of that falls on the shoulders of the firefighters on the ground.”

Sanchez said he thought current crew levels in California could manage the firefight ahead, and that crews and officials had prepared for the scale of the challenge. “But there are times when no matter what you do, depending on the conditions out there, fires are going to establish themselves and grow into the disasters we see now,” he said.

He added: “If I had it my way, of course I would have 10 times as many resources as we do now. But these are the number of resources,” Sanchez said. “They are finite.”

Sanchez said that the fatigue and emotional struggles among fire crews were real. He said he felt the same way. “The overall strain on wellbeing and energy levels is cumulative,” Sanchez continued. “It adds up and is certainly affecting folks as we speak.”

Contributing to the crunch is the Covid crisis. A 16-member Cal Fire strike team fighting the Caldor Fire had to be sidelined for two weeks, after the virus started spreading through its ranks.

Staff shortages on the federal level, too, are adding strain. US Forest Service (USFS) records showed that only half of fire engines were fully staffed at the start of the season. Martinez said the federal shortage put further strain on resources within California agencies. “We were warned before fire season started that the Forest Service has major shortages and people are quitting at higher rates than us,” he said.

“They told us that we are going to have more of a commitment because of their lack of resources,” he added. “It compounds.”

Internal USFS documents, reported on by the Pew Charitable Trusts non-profit newsroom Stateline, noted that a third of agency engines were understaffed. Staff positions went unfilled as low pay and low morale pushed more federal firefighters into other lines of work, the news report concluded. “The agency sought to fill 781 vacant permanent positions in California during spring hiring this year, according to the data. But it ended the hiring period with 725 vacancies. That’s a net gain of just 56 employees,” Stateline reported in July.

“During years of extreme drought and prolonged fire activity across the country, resources are stretched to their limits,” Babete Anderson, national press officer for the USFS, told the Guardian in a statement. “The firefighter staffing shortage is mainly caused by limited candidate pools and competition with state and private fire organizations in California that pay two to three times the base pay of federal firefighters.” The federal government, she added, had recently taken steps to support wildland firefighters while improving recruitment and retention efforts.

The federal government has made moves to increase firefighter pay, a step advocacy groups have called a good start. Last month, the USFS announced pay increases were coming and that firefighters wouldn’t make less than $15 an hour from 30 June to 31 December this year. The infrastructure package passed by Congress earlier this year also included $600m to raise wages by 50% and shift 1,000 seasonal positions to permanent.

According to Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, an organization of active and retired federal wildland firefighters, those pay increases aren’t sufficient. The increases falls “woefully short”, said Kelly Martin, the organization’s president, given “the extreme risk and consequences that firefighters face on the fireline”.

“Recruitment is very difficult because of the low wages and people can’t find housing,” Martin said. “We are seeing shortages – they just cannot fully staff to what is needed in a year like this.”

Organizations like Grassroots point out that the government still doesn’t recognize many federal workers battling wildfires as emergency responders; instead, it considers them forestry technicians, range technicians, miscellaneous administrators and resource specialists. The classification can mean those workers miss out on services and resources. The part-time nature of their employment also affects retirement and other benefits.

“We are at a turning point in the climate change battle and the demands on federal wildland firefighters at the frontline have become a year-round request,” the group wrote on its website. “The federal government has failed to keep pace with this changing dynamic and firefighters are left with increased mental illnesses, increased rates of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, and pay that falls below minimum wages in many parts of the country.”

While staff shortages have made fighting fires harder, Martin emphasized that real investment was needed on the prevention side. Extreme fires will continue outpacing efforts to fight them, if more isn’t done to cull the dense, dry vegetation that fuels them.

“What we really have to think about is how we embrace and manage fire,” she said. “We have a dual need. We have to protect life and property but we have another need to put more good fire on the landscape and that’s where we are really short with resources, both from a fiscal and human capital standpoint.”

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Just last week, managers overseeing the fight against the massive wildfire scorching California’s Lake Tahoe region thought they could have it contained by the start of this week.

Instead, the Caldor Fire crested the Sierra Nevada on Monday, forcing the unprecedented evacuation of all 22,000 residents of South Lake Tahoe and tens of thousands of tourists who would otherwise be winding down their summers by the alpine lake straddling the California-Nevada state line.

That drastic move might never have been needed if authorities could have thrown more firefighters at the blaze when it was small. That didn’t happen because the Dixie Fire was simultaneously raging across the mountain range 100 miles (161 kilometers) to the north, on the way to becoming the second-largest wildfire in California history.

“I do think the Dixie and the way that it’s burned and its magnitude did impact the early response to the Caldor,” said Scott Stephens, a professor of wildland fire science at the University of California, Berkeley. “It really drew resources down so much that the Caldor got very few for the first couple days.”

By the time Caldor approached Lake Tahoe two weeks later, there were 4,000 fire personnel, dozens of water-dropping aircraft and hundreds of fire engines and bulldozers.

But all that manpower and equipment were overmatched by tinder dry conditions, whipping downslope winds and an overgrown forest ripe to burn, a half-dozen fire experts said. And with resources already stretched across the West and internationally, they said the long-term situation will only worsen as exhausted firefighters battle bigger blazes that start earlier and last longer.

“Mother Nature is calling the cards on our hubris that we can conquer and control wildfires during these extreme conditions,” said Timothy Ingalsbee, a former federal firefighter who now heads Oregon-based Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, which advocates for working with wildfires instead of reflexively putting them out.

The Caldor Fire ignited from an unknown cause on Aug. 14 in the steep wooded foothills east of California’s capital city of Sacramento. In the first few days, about 240 firefighters were dispatched, compared to the 6,550 firefighters battling the Dixie Fire at the time.

It wasn’t until four days later that Cal Fire Chief Thom Porter said fire managers diverted 30 fire engines from the Dixie Fire to the Caldor Fire. Overnight, the number of engines and firefighters nearly tripled. But by then the fire had already burned through Grizzly Flats, destroying dozens of homes in the town of about 1,200 people.

“We are moving resources around as needed, sharing among the incidents,” Porter told reporters on Aug. 18. But he acknowledged that “we are having a very difficult time” because resources were so stretched across the West.

Officials couldn’t say how many firefighters would have been ideal and when, but Cal Fire was candid that there initially was a shortage, said Ken Pimlott, who retired as the agency’s director in 2018 and lives a few miles from the fire’s origin.

“Early on, this was not the highest priority because there were other threats on other fires that were higher,” Pimlott said.

As the fire marched toward Lake Tahoe and its crystal clear waters that attract visitors from around the world, it destroyed hundreds of homes and other structures and left a firefighter with serious burns.

Still, officials predicted as recently as last weekend that they could hold the fire outside the Lake Tahoe Basin. They feverishly expanded fire lines to take advantage of the barren granite that caps the mountain chain which has formed an impenetrable barrier to flames in the past. This time, their optimism merely lulled residents into a false sense of security, leaving many scrambling to pack their lives in bags when evacuation orders came Monday.

Chad Hanson of the John Muir Project said fire managers were foolish to think they could stop the flames based on the expected winds.

“It is 100% predictable that under those conditions the fire will continue to move in that direction. So it’s hard for me to imagine why anyone would conclude otherwise,” said Hanson, a frequent critic of forest management efforts.

Firefighters had thought they made good progress during favorable conditions going into the weekend, said Jason Hunter, a spokesman for Caldor Fire managers. But then came the changing weather pattern with “incredibly gusty winds” that pushed burning embers over the crest.

“The weather, is what it boils down to, is what changed,” Hunter said. Containment projections are a “constantly moving target” based on evolving conditions, he said. The Caldor Fire’s containment projection has since been pushed back to Sept. 13.

Experts agreed conditions are grim because drought has been worsened by consecutive climate change-driven heat waves that sap humidity before dry winds whip flames and ferry embers sometimes a mile or more ahead of the main blaze.

“These embers are leapfrogging over fire lines and rivers, ridges and roads and other things that typically stop wildfire spread, and so you have these fires kind of hopscotching across the landscape,” Ingalsbee said.

Firefighters were outflanked by a shift in localized winds that funneled flames into the Tahoe basin, said John Battles, a University of California, Berkeley professor of forest ecology.

Fire managers have become adept at projecting the weather and how fuels will burn, but still lack the ability to predict localized winds at fires — some caused by the fires themselves — with 10 different computer models offering as many conflicting outcomes, he said.

“They’re trying to predict winds at a mountain pass. That is the most complex topography we have,” Battles said. “That’s why you have this feeling like they didn’t know what they’re doing.”

He added: “When you’re fighting a fire the size of the Caldor, you make your best guess.”

The Caldor Fire is just the second in modern history to have traversed the Sierra. The first was the Dixie Fire that started in mid-July near the town of Paradise and has grown to 1,300 square miles (3,367 square kilometers), more than four times as large as Caldor.

Such monster fires typically come later in the year when conditions are their driest but also when cooler days, rising humidity and ultimately rain and snow have aided the firefight, said Char Miller, a professor at Pomona College who has written extensively about wildfires.

But California has received far less precipitation than normal the last two years and there’s no guarantee more will arrive this fall to aid firefighters. “This may burn through October,” Miller said.

Yet the fire experts said the biggest challenge is neither drought nor climate change, but the overgrown forests that could actually benefit from fire — so long as it is set or allowed to burn at a low intensity during the spring or fall before it can explode out of control.

Firefighters still quickly contain about 95% of fires, but it’s the ones that escape that do the major damage, Pimlott said. Once fires spread, firefighters may need to start prioritizing communities that can be protected while letting the flames burn around them, he said.

“It’s a hard pill to swallow for all of us in the firefighting community, because we want to put these fires to bed,” he said. “We just may not be able to do that on every one of these fires, because of the conditions we’re facing.”