Good Pro Publica piece here.
Wildland Firefighters, who would seem to qualify as Essential Workers, make an hourly rate about the same as they might at McDonalds.
Many are leaving the field, go figure.
Go to the link for some good personal profiles.
But at exactly the time when the country needs wildland firefighters more than ever, the federal government is losing them. In the past three years, according to the Forest Service’s own assessments, it has suffered an attrition rate of 45% among its permanent employees. Many people inside and outside the fire service believe this represents one of the worst crises in its history. Last spring, as the 2023 fire season was getting started, I asked Grant Beebe, a former smokejumper who now heads the Bureau of Land Management’s fire program, if there had been an exodus of wildland firefighters. He initially hesitated. “‘Exodus’ is a pretty strong word,” he said. But then he reconsidered. “I’ll say yeah. Yeah.”
“The ship is sinking,” Abel Martinez, a Forest Service engine captain in California and the national fire chair for the National Federation of Federal Employees, the union that represents wildland firefighters, told me. (For this story, almost every wildland firefighter who agreed to use their full name has an official role with the union; the one firefighter identified by their middle name does not.)
Although nobody could provide precise numbers, leaders like Beebe are especially concerned that the attrition has been particularly acute among those with extensive experience — those like Elkind. It takes years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to train a wildland firefighter capable of overseeing the numerous resources — engines, helicopters, smokejumpers — that are deployed on large fires. As Beebe put it, “You can’t just hire some person off the street into one of our higher-level management jobs.”
The reasons for the exodus are many, but fundamentally it reflects an inattentive bureaucracy and a culture that suppresses internal criticism. Only in 2022 did the fire service acknowledge an explicit link between cancer and wildland firefighters, even though officials have long expressed concern about the connection. And it was only last year that the fire service held its first conference on mental health, even though officials have been aware for decades of the high incidence of substance abuse and divorce among wildland firefighters.
But more than anything, wildland firefighters are leaving because they’re compensated so poorly, the result of a byzantine civil service structure that makes it extremely hard to sustain a career. The federal fire service is responsible for managing blazes on nearly 730 million acres of land — an area almost the size of India. Among the five agencies, one dominates in terms of influence and size: the Forest Service, which employs more than 11,000 wildland firefighters, most of whom work from roughly April to October. The hiring system dates to the early years of the agency, when it often recruited from bars and relied on volunteers to suppress wildfires by 10 a.m.
About one third of the workforce is temporary — firefighters who are automatically laid off at the end of each season. Even those who are permanent receive compensation starting at $15 per hour until they accumulate overtime and hazard pay. Because of the way the government classifies their work, it’s extremely difficult for wildland firefighters to increase their base salaries unless they frequently move around the country. Altogether, it’s a pay structure that incentivizes risk taking and a nomadic existence.
For more than a century, the Forest Service was able to call on a ready workforce, one made up largely of rural men. (It is estimated that 84% of wildland firefighters are male.) Because of the reliable flow of applicants, the agency did not need to advocate for increased pay. But the changing nature of fire seasons, combined with the skyrocketing cost of living in the mountain West, has made firefighting less alluring than it once was.
A Forest Service spokesperson wrote that since 2021 the agency has acknowledged the attrition among its workforce: “It is why agency and department leadership have been doing everything possible in coordination with the administration and Congress to provide a permanent, competitive increase in wildland firefighter pay, as well as staffing capacity and mental health programs.” The spokesperson pointed to a raise — from $13 to $15 an hour — created by the Biden administration in 2021. The spokesperson also wrote, “With the increasing duration and intensity of wildfires the agency understands the need to do much more.”
Last fall, the Forest Service processed its applicants for 2024. An official who has been involved in hiring for the agency for more than a decade characterized the returns as “abysmal” — “It’s the smallest list I’ve ever seen,” he told me. A severe dearth of applicants for temporary seasonal jobs — the entry point for the next generation of wildland firefighters — forced the agency to extend its hiring period. For permanent positions, the returns were not much better.
Well that just dragged some stuff out of the closet. Be some beer-drinkin’ tonight
The cost of adaptation goes up as the ability to pay gets tougher. Too many (including some climate scientists) don’t understand how much prosperity depends upon psychology, like the confidence in the system retaining some basic level of stability. Instead, this time there isn’t going to be anybody left to fix it.
Renowned idiot Ben Shapiro once dismissed sea level rise as not a big deal because people could just sell their homes and move somewhere else. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t have any understanding much deeper than that. They’re still thinking in terms of a “new normal” and can’t imagine how quickly everything in their lives can go to shit.
I grew up under the nuclear threat of the Cold War. I expect catastrophic climate change to be just a slow-motion but more relentless global nuclear war.