The recent devastating wildfires in Los Angeles highlight the urgent need to overhaul America's firefighting systems. The current reliance on seasonal staffing, mutual aid, and overworked federal agencies is unsustainable in a world of increasingly frequent and severe wildfires.
Firefighters battled the Palisades Fire as it raged through the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles on January 7th. The fires in the Los Angeles area have been devastating, destroying over 15,000 structures, displacing approximately 200,000 people, scorching over 37,000 acres, and tragically resulting in at least 27 deaths. However, experts believe the damage could have been significantly worse.
Officials acknowledged that they lacked the necessary fire personnel to effectively handle the situation. The current system relies heavily on a complex network of local, state, and federal agencies that frequently support each other, often traveling long distances across state lines to do so. This mutual aid is evident in the presence of firefighters from neighboring states like Nevada and Arizona on the fire lines in Los Angeles, and in the aircraft overhead bearing liveries from nearby Orange County and even distant Quebec. North America's wildland firefighting systems heavily depend on this mutual aid network, and it was pure luck that numerous agencies, both near and far, had the capacity to assist in this crisis. By January 14th, a week after the fire erupted and when numbers began a slow decline, there were 5,123 firefighters assigned to the Palisades fire and 3,408 assigned to the Eaton fire, according to status reports. However, a system reliant on luck is not sustainable. It is already strained and risks collapsing in a world facing increasingly frequent and severe wildfires.The federal forces that form the backbone of the wildland firefighting system are the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, along with a handful of smaller agencies. All are overworked due to a long history of overburdening and underpaying a workforce that is largely seasonal. These agencies face chronic staffing shortages, leading to a wildland fire workforce in America grappling with mental and physical health crises and even homelessness.Better-supported and more stable local and state agencies, by necessity, prioritize their local jurisdictions. The reason Orange County can provide substantial aid to Los Angeles currently is that there are no major fires burning in Orange County. If Canadian wildfires were raging, they wouldn't be able to rely on the Quebecois Super Scooper aircraft seen skimming water from the Pacific to combat the Palisades fire. Los Angeles County already boasts some of the highest concentrations and quality of firefighting resources globally. Even with more personnel or equipment, the Palisades or Eaton fires wouldn't have been contained within a day or two. Given the severe drought, strong winds, and a lack of beneficial natural or prescribed fire in the landscape, which has resulted in what experts call the region's fire debt, ignitions this month were likely destined to cause significant fires. Even if these fires were unavoidable, Los Angeles narrowly escaped further destruction from numerous new blazes that ignited after the Palisades and Eaton fires were already out of control.As is typical in our current system, additional firefighters from outside the local area arrived to relieve the exhausted initial responders after their 24- or 48-hour shifts. These relief firefighters helped prevent new fires from escalating out of control. As a former firefighter myself, I have long advocated for the benefits of mutual aid and resource-sharing systems. However, our world is changing, and firefighting tactics must adapt. Our firefighting systems still rely on seasonal staffing surges, but as these January blazes demonstrate, there is no such thing as a 'fire season' anymore.Land managers, researchers, and advocates correctly point out the urgent need to reintroduce fire to Western landscapes to mitigate some of the damage caused by over a century of mismanagement. However, prescribed fire in densely populated areas like Altadena or Santa Monica poses significant challenges with limited scope. As fires in the so-called wildland-urban interface become increasingly destructive, fighting them remains the only viable option for protecting lives and property. And fighting these fires requires a robust and year-round workforce. This means exploring options like permanent National Guard activations focused on firefighting. It might even necessitate implementing voluntary local or national service models that channel Americans' desire to help into these overburdened and overwhelmed systems. None of these solutions would replace the mutual aid we see when communities share resources; those systems should be expanded as well. Whatever the new system looks like, it cannot continue to rely on the same approach used every fire season – if the usual response failed in Los Angeles, it won't work anywhere else
Disaster Relief Emergency Services Wildfires Firefighting Mutual Aid National Guard Disaster Relief Fire Season Resource Allocation
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