Wildfire Today

Non-fire forest workers to be deployed during 2025 wildfires, USDA head says

Hunter BasslerMay 21, 2025United States, Wildland Firefighter6 Comments

As the U.S. moves towards peak fire season, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has signed a memo signaling the Department of Agriculture’s approach to wildfire response under the Trump administration.

The memo – signed on Tuesday 20 May – directs the Forest Service to take several actions over the next 30 days, including policy changes for when the nation’s fire preparedness level is high.

At Preparedness Level 3 and above, Rollins directed USFS Chief Tom Schultz to “prioritize and redeploy the non-fire workforce” to support wildfire response. A Preparedness Level 3 is issued when the potential for wildland fires is normal for the time of year, according to the National Interagency Fire Center, meaning it’s likely non-fire personnel will be deployed in 2025.

“This will include a necessary adjustment to the agency’s other program work,” Rollins’ memo said. “Exercise all available authorities, consistent with prior direction, to ensure the agency is using every tool and authority available to meet the Nation’s wildfire response needs.”

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins and U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum signed a joint memo on wildfire preparedness on May 20, 2025.

Rollins also told Schultz to identify the impact of “voluntary” departures on the firefighting and fire support workforce, and to remedy critical vacancies to ensure the proper resources are available. The directive was made just months after the department was forced to hire back all 6,000 USDA workers the Trump administration fired on Feb. 13.

The mass firing included thousands of federal land employees, around 75% of whom had secondary wildland fire duties, according to Grassroots Wildland Firefighters Vice President Riva Duncan, who obtained the numbers from the National Federation of Federal Employees’ Wildland Fire division.

It’s unclear how many of those workers returned to their jobs after the firing.

READ MORE: USDA hires back all 6,000 fired workers from past month, including public land employees

Rollins also signed a more general wildland firefighting memo with Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum on Tuesday, stating the nation’s wildland firefighters will have all necessary resources and support during 2025’s peak wildfire season.

That memo, addressed to top personnel at the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Serivce, said their leadership would be essential to protecting people during the already above normal wildfire year.

“The scope and complexity of today’s wildfires require unity,” the memo said. “Success demands the seamless collaboration of Federal, State, Tribal, and local agencies, along with community partners to maximize resources; enhance effectiveness; and ensure swift, coordinated responses. Together, we will prevent countless tragedies and protect the lands that support our way of life.”

US boosts National Forest logging for ‘wildfire risk’ reduction

Hunter BasslerMay 19, 2025United States, Wildfire4 Comments

The United States Department of Agriculture recently announced $23 million in grants supporting timber production in President Donald Trump’s effort to “unleash domestic production” of the nation’s natural resources.

The aim of the USDA’s grants is reportedly to transport “hazardous fuels” from national forests to processing facilities, supporting timber production, according to the department. A department spokesperson told WildfireToday the effort would specifically be targeting “low-value” wood in the protected forests, like dead trees, fallen branches, and dense undergrowth.

“Eligible material considered hazardous fuels may include logs, roundwood, chips, biomass and other byproducts from authorized existing projects transported to facilities for use in manufacturing wood products and/or wood energy/services,” USDA said in an emailed statement.

News of the grants was released a month after USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins announced her cooperation with Trump’s “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production Executive Order, which cleared the way for millions of national forest acres to be logged.

Rollins, through a memo sent in April, listed over 112 million acres of National Forest Service land under an “Emergency Situation Determination,” over half of all Forest Service land. The designation allows the service to take immediate action in the designated acreage, including salvage of dead or dying trees, commercial harvesting of trees infected with insects or disease, and harvesting of trees deemed “hazardous” due to their closer proximity to roads or trails.

“The United States has an abundance of timber resources that are more than adequate to meet our domestic timber production needs, but heavy-handed federal policies have prevented full utilization of these resources and made us reliant on foreign producers,” Rollins said in a memo in April. “It is vital that we reverse these policies and increase domestic timber production to protect our national and economic security. We can manage our forests to better provide domestic timber supply, create jobs and prosperity, reduce wildfire disasters, improve fish and wildlife habitats, and decrease costs of construction and energy.”

The Forest Service is accepting applications for hazardous fuel removal through June 20. Information about upcoming webinars will reportedly be available soon on the Forest Service Timber Transportation website.

LA Fires – Burning Cities

Guest WriterMay 18, 2025May 19, 2025California, Training, Wildland Firefighter2 Comments

Trucks heading to the Palisades fires 11 January 2025. Photo: Kelly Martin

By Lindon Pronto

We have entered an operational gray zone: wildfires burning in cities. These fires are the jurisdiction of urban fire departments, but often they rely on wildland firefighters to get the job done, and wildland firefighters are increasingly being called to fight wildfires in urban environments.

During the breaking news frenzy around large wildland fires, I rarely say what I really want to say – it’s a game of responding to sensational and reactionary questions, just like how we approach fire itself. So, here’s what I’ll add to the discussion about the LA fires.

This is an edited version of an article in Wildfire Magazine Special Edition: LA Fires

There will be a lot to learn. And some officials and organizations are going to need to take some responsibility. And certainly, residents in fireprone landscapes need to contemplate their own responsibilities. But these are the two fundamental questions I see that we need to address:

What will be collectively required of us to prevent such disasters in the future?
How will we respond to similar disasters when they occur?

Since the January fires, news stories, op-eds and social media have been swirling with lots of great propositions to these questions: more prescribed fire, fire-hardened construction (hempcrete!) and landscaping, better urban planning, building codes, budget priorities, public utility SOPs, fire-tech, etc. I think the answers to how to address question 1 are relatively straightforward – experts have been sounding the alarm and offering solutions on these issues for decades. Answering question 2 is more challenging.

Looking at the long list of things to address to prevent such a disaster from happening again, it’s obvious the changes, motivation, behavioral shifts, policy response and funding needed mean we will likely have many more devastated communities long before these changes come to fruition. This brings us to question 2 –the burden on the conscience of the collective response community. At the end of the day, we all still expect firefighters to respond, as they have always done.

Fire fighting is siloed: there are many types of firefighters from municipal and state to industrial, airport, and maritime. To oversimplify in the California context, there are wildland firefighters and urban / structure firefighters, and some who do a bit of both, especially in California, known for its wildland-urban interface.

CAL FIRE is an example of an agency that evolved to do both. Los Angeles County Fire is another example. But fundamentally, wildland firefighters are trained and equipped differently and operate tactically and strategically different than urban fire departments.

I’m not knocking one group of firefighters; I’m just saying we don’t expect a smokejumper to run into a burning building. But we do expect urban fire departments to manage the most complex and extreme wildfires, ordering outside resources as needed.

But telling an urban firefighter not to extinguish a burning building goes against every instinct. This was apparent in the LA fires – urban firefighters pumping massive quantities of water through large-diameter fire hoses on fully involved structures. In other words, valiantly using the equipment they have, to do exactly what they were trained to do. Urban firefighters are a stationary firefighting force whose objective is to tap into the nearest fire hydrant; the fire truck serves as pumping platform and the firefighters are committed to this effort until the structure is fully extinguished. This is obviously an untenable approach if a sea of structures is on fire during a wind event. Houses and cars, businesses and schools – all on fire. Instead of trees and bushes, it’s a jungle of petroleum products and biomass – a devastatingly overwhelming situation.

Wildland firefighters are trained not to fight a house on fire but to stop it from spreading to the surrounding area. Wildland firefighters operate very differently; their initial objective is not to extinguish a fire but to rob it of available fuel to eventually contain its spread. This is why wildland firefighters are very mobile, and move with the progression of the fire, often doing so without relying on water, or at least very little water.

Looking ahead, I believe the response community does need to think outside the box when it comes to this new operational gray zone. Firefighters will be called into these scenarios in the future, and to answer that second question, adaptations in our strategies, tactics, and use of resources need to be addressed. Maybe we can learn a thing or two from the wildland fire community – after all, as the Washington Post reported, LA has long been over-dependent on wildland firefighting agencies like the U.S. Forest Service to handle fire in the city and county’s jurisdiction.

This is an edited version of an article in Wildfire Magazine Special Edition: LA Fires

Lindon Pronto (M.Sc. environmental governance) has more than 20 years of experience and expertise in wildfire management with employment, research, deployments, and remote support in more than 30 countries in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Pronto has years of operational experience as a federal wildland firefighter in California.

LA Fires – Reconnaissance

Guest WriterMay 14, 2025California, Prescribed Fire, Prevention, Review1 Comment

By Michael Scott-Hill

In mid-January I was sent on a military company assignment to recon the Los Angeles fires and use the experience to teach our leadership staff about wildfire. I was in Australia and was flown to California. As I packed, I turned on the TV and saw footage – big flames, heroes, victims and their stories, political blame slinging, shouts of incompetence, and lots of videos of fire aviation operations.

I arrived in Southern California and linked up with my small team of corporate leaders. I was their wildfire expert and the next day, after the red flag weather forecasts for Santa Ana winds lifted, we headed down the coast to visit the tragic wake of the Pacific Palisades fire.

[This is an edited extract of a longer article on the author’s observations from his assignment on these fires taken from Wildfire Magazine Special Edition: LA Fires.]

Having spent a career around the US Forest Service wildfire operations, the footprint of wildfire response was familiar: inbound structural city firefighting engines in short convoys; task forces; tents; trucks; trailers; staged fire equipment; and crews waiting at an oceanside incident command post. There were no federal fire response rigs, just CAL FIRE local fire response vehicles, and many law enforcement patrolling to deter arsonists and looters.

The Pacific Coast Highway between the coastline and where the rolling hills – with their brush and dried grass – climb upward among homes. Photo Michael Scott-Hill

PERSPECTIVE FROM YEARS OF BURNING

Days later, flying back to Australia, I processed all I had experienced.

I’ve worked on countless wildfires with the US Forest Service, yet these LA fires were unique. No matter how each began, did the fires have to be as bad as they turned out to be?

Thirty-two years ago, I had been a wildland firefighter stationed in Southern California and earned my place on the Los Padres Hotshots. In 1993 we successfully fought several wildfires sometimes driven by Santa Ana winds.

I learned that the fire regime in California is ancient in its cyclic patterns. I was taught about weather patterns and fire fuels; we specialized in working the big fires along the urban fringe. Southern California is one of the world’s most wildfire prone areas, and its wildfire flames have the potential to mix with its people – and often do.

In Southern California many people craft comfortable lives, using technology to distance themselves from the realities of the natural world: air conditioners and beautiful shady yards insulate the people from the natural hot, often harsh, landscape.

What has changed in the Southern California wildfires since I was a young hotshot?

The tactics employed in fighting wildfires have shifted – at least in California – to promote situations for large fire growth using indirect attack strategies. Weather patterns worldwide have shifted, causing fire seasons to be altered in locations; and of course, there are financial realities that make wildland fire fighting no longer as attractive a profession as it once was.

There are factors in Southern California that won’t change. The hot sun will shine. The grass and brush will grow, and this vegetation will cure and die in its normal life cycles. The Santa Ana winds will always blow in strong from Nevada and race over the hills. Wildfires will always start naturally, by accident, or arson.

Piles of yard vegetation to be chipped had been cut by contracted crews awaited mobile chippers. The hazard-reduction operation continued into areas untouched by fire, to reduce future fuels. Photo Michael Scott-Hill

Which of these factors can be modified by humans? Fuels that fires consume can be managed to reduce accumulation (loading) that builds up over time. Wildfires need fuel to take hold and grow, just as they need ignition sources. The wildfire fuels typical of Southern California, such as dried grass, brush and timber, all have predictable cyclic points in their life cycles when they are ready, able to carry, and to be consumed by fire.

In Southern California when I was working there, urban interface zones and Santa Ana winds were always factors; they were dangerous, so we learned about them and used that knowledge to prepare for all that could happen. Could the LA Emergency Response Management apparatus have been better prepared? LA has seen urban development expand its boundaries more than its density; the interface is so much larger than it was when fire careers began. And the 30-year fire return interval in chaparral is longer than many careers. How do agencies prepare?

There are many valuable lessons in disaster management, and pre-disaster preparedness that can be pulled from the LA fires, if we take the time and effort to look carefully enough beneath the layers of smoke that might be blocking our vision.

Read the full article in Wildfire Magazine

Firefighting partnership between North America and Australia tested by fire season overlap: report

Hunter BasslerMay 11, 2025May 11, 2025Australia, Canada, United States, WildfireLeave a comment

A decades-long arrangement that shares firefighting resources between Australia, United States and Canada is under threat from increasingly overlapping fire seasons.

The two regions’ wildfire seasons historically peaked at opposite points of the year, making the partnership a no-brainer. Lengthening fire seasons in both regions, thanks to climate change, is placing more constraints on the resource-sharing partnership and shortening pre-season preparation windows.

A new report from researchers in Australia, Germany, and Switzerland used data from the Canadian Fire Weather Index and computed season length statistics to estimate how much the two seasons’ wildfire seasons will overlap over the next decades. The researchers found the overlap in western North America and eastern Australia has increased annually for generations, and the overlap’s increase is expected to quicken.

“We find that the overlap is projected to increase by ∼4 to ∼29 days annually by 2050,” the report said. “Our analysis shows that the length of fire weather season overlap between eastern Australia and western North America has increased by approximately one day per year since 1979.”

military bushfires helicopter rappell — Posted by Defence Australia, @DeptDefence, December, 2019.

The overlap between the two regions was most consistent during the end of the fire weather season in western North America and the beginning of the fire weather season in eastern Australia. Specifically, the years with greatest overlap were seen when the fire weather season in eastern Australia was longer than average, while high overlap still happened during times of average fire weather days in western North America.

Researchers were also concerned that Fire Weather Index values, or measurements of major drivers of fire weather like high temperature, low humidity, and wind speed, were also higher during years of greater overlap, heightening the risk of extreme fires.

“We argue that the changes in risks to firefighting cooperation come not only from a general increase in fire weather season overlap, but also from the increased probability of extreme fires,” the report said. “An increased probability of extreme fires … implies possible changes in the frequency of disasters that require an emergency response, for example, with an exchange of personnel as experienced in 2019–20 or 2023.”

Click here to read the full report.

Record-breaking wildfires burning through Europe heading into peak season

Hunter BasslerMay 8, 2025Europe, Greece, India, Japan, WildfireLeave a comment

Less than halfway into the year, numerous regions in the northern hemisphere have already exceeded their average yearly burned areas.

Around 74,000 acres (nearly 30,000 hectares) have already burned in the United Kingdom since the beginning of 2025, the most acres burned in a year since record keeping began in 2012, according to data from the Global Wildfire Information System. Other nations, including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, and Ireland, have also seen more acres burned this year than their 2012-2024 burned area average.

“These figures paint a concerning picture about the growing incident rate of wildfires in the UK,” a spokesperson from the UK’s National Fire Chiefs Council said in a press release. “Responding to wildfires requires a lot of resource and often over long periods of time, which puts pressure on other fire and rescue service activities.”

Greece, which saw its highest number of annual burned acres in 2023 at 418,089 acres (169,195 hectares), is preparing for a “troubling” wildfire season in 2025 by mobilizing its largest-ever firefighting force.

The nation’s Fire Brigade now has more than 18,000 permanent and seasonal firefighters, compared with its previous largest brigade at 15,500 in 2022. The Ministry of Climate Crisis and Civil Protection also added 270 firefighting vehicles to its fleet, reaching a total of 3,700.

Erickson Air-Cranes in Greece — Erickson Air-Cranes. October 2021 in Greece. Photo by Dimitris Klagos.

“Our collective goal is to reduce the number of fire outbreaks, swiftly contain those that occur, and adopt a holistic approach to large-scale fires,” Greece’s Minister of Climate Crisis and Civil Protection, Giannis Kefalogiannis told the Greek City Times. “Climate change requires our unwavering attention and preparedness.”

Other European countries which usually see very active wildfire seasons are off to slow starts, with relatively mild amount of burned hectares since the year’s beginning, including:

Italy has only had 4,970 hectares burn this year compared to their 151,000 hectare average.
Spain has had 15,837 hectares burn this year compared to the 151,000 hectare average.
Portugal has had 6,234 of its 113,000 average.
France has had 17,000 out of its 44,000 average.

Other nations are facing severe firefighting shortages heading into peak season. India is reportedly facing a firefighting deficit of around 1.5 million firefighters compared with global standards, according to reporting from the Indian Express.

Japan, which saw its largest wildfire in over 30 years in February, is also facing a significant shortage of volunteer firefighters. The nation’s numbers have fallen from nearly 2 million in 1956 to 746,681 in 2024, a 60% reduction, according to the Japan news site Nippon.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

PERSPECTIVE FROM YEARS OF BURNING

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: