“It’s like having gasoline out there,” said Brian Steinhardt, forest fire zone manager for Prescott and Coconino national forests in Arizona, in a recent AP story about the increasingly fire-prone West.
Now something else is happening — and at the worst possible time.
Federal firefighters are leaving the workforce and taking their training and experience with them. The inability of federal agencies to offer competitive pay and benefits is creating hundreds of wildland firefighting vacancies.
We all know that today’s wildfires are longer, more damaging and more frequent than ever before. We also know that men and women are putting their lives on the line for less than they’d earn at a McDonald’s.
Vacancies, of course, limit how much federal firefighters can do. If Western communities want to be protected, they need to ensure that their firefighters receive better pay and benefits.
In my 11 years of work as a wildland firefighter, I’ve managed aircraft, trained people and run fires myself, but I also did outreach and recruitment for the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. I know how hard it is for hiring managers to make 2,000 hours of grueling work, crammed into six exhausting months, sound appealing when the pay is $13.45/hour. The pay doesn’t come close to matching the true demands or everyday dangers of the job.
Federal wildland firefighters, by necessity, are transient workers. During the fire season — now nearly year-round — they must be available to travel anywhere in the United States at any time. And to advance in their career, they have to move to other federal duty stations to gain more qualifications.
Finding affordable housing has always been a problem for career firefighters on a federal salary. To make matters worse, federal agencies revoked the “Transfer of Station” stipend for career employees, which helped offset the cost of moving. Just recently, a national forest supervisor also revoked a “boot stipend.” It might sound minor, but it isn’t: When you’re in the firefighting business, boots tough enough to save your life can easily cost you $500.
Some states aren’t relying on the government to act quickly. “We aren’t just waiting for the next crisis to hit,”said California Gov. Gavin Newsom, in establishing an $80.74 million Emergency Fund that delivers an additional 1,256 seasonal firefighters to boost CALFIRE’s ranks. This Emergency Fund is in addition to the governor’s $1 billion budget request for California’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan.
In Washington, state legislators unanimously passed a $125 million package that will enable the state’s Natural Resources Department to hire 100 more firefighters. The legislation furthers the state’s efforts to restore forest health and creates a $25 million fund to ensure community preparedness around the state.
Fire crews work on the Thumbnail Fire, near the Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah. Photo: Jonathon Golden.
Utah’s House Bill 65, recently signed into law, appropriates money to help Utah’s communities offset the cost of wildfire suppression. Most importantly, it commissions a study to evaluate the current pay plan for firefighters within Utah’s Natural Resources Department.
The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Casey Snider, was amazed to learn that frontline wildland firefighters make more money at McDonald’s: “These positions are critical,” he said. “They are the first ones on fires.” This year, Utah has already had five times the number of wildfires it normally experiences in a year.
And firefighters are organizing and speaking up. The Grassroots Wildland Firefighters is working to halt the exodus of firefighters from federal agencies by advocating for pay parity with state and local fire protection agencies. The group also supports initiatives to assist the physical and mental health of firefighters and their families. The statistics they highlight are shocking: Wildland firefighters have a suicide rate 30 times higher than the average. They also experience high incidences of cardiovascular disease and lung cancer.
There is talk on the federal level of creating a permanent, year-round firefighting workforce. I think this is a necessary step, but it won’t fix the workforce capacity issue unless increased pay and benefits are used to encourage the recruitment and retention of federal firefighters.
We all know that today’s wildfires are longer, more damaging and more frequent than ever before. We also know that men and women are putting their lives on the line for less than they’d earn at a McDonald’s.
Our firefighters do all this to protect our lives, our forests and our communities. We owe them at least a living wage and a chance for a healthy life. I hope more states and legislators will start paying attention.
This is a debt that needs to be paid.
Jonathon Golden lives in Moab, Utah, and is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He left firefighting in 2019 to found a consulting company that focuses on conservation and national security.
Same should apply to professional ski patrollers and avalanche pros, search and rescue, EMS… Experience in these roles is dispicably undervalued
i agree wholly with this communication. year after year of increasing fires is the first clue. and in recent years they seem to start and spread in the desert areas. i live in the sonoran desert and we’re battling two huge acreage fires, near globe & superior, arizona, much of which is in the lands of the iconic saguaro cactus. seems to me if we can spend a trillion + going to war in iraq, we could put some money to use thinning forests and paying firefighters a worthy wage……
slash the Pentagon’s budget by half, take the money, the surplussed staff, utilize the fancy military technology and start fighting fires on a meaningful scale!
there is more than enough money, staff, materièl and technology to utilize the pentagon’s resources for domestic use and it makes so much more sense than wasting it abroad for dubious purposes.
EVERYTHING…..we owe them everything. I am a city firefighter and volunteer that dose some brush firefighting so I’m a little familiar with what they do! They hike mountains and dig and rake for hours and hours straight, among a lot of other things. We city guys are spoiled we work out in AC, play crew activities sports or games all day, train and train some more, and then run some calls when the tones drop. We sleep in a bed and eat in a dinning room. They do all that on rocks if they even have time to eat or water left over in their packs. They should be getting free vehicle registration, they should be eating free when going into restaurants in the states they are fighting the fire (most aren’t from that state), etc. They are the true fire FIGHTERS ! GOD BLESS THEM ALL! No one knows about them until one passes away sadly.
It’s not just wildland fire; the Fed hasn’t had a GS-system cost of living adjustment since the 1970s. No one from trail crews to biologists to leasing agents are making money anywhere close to going labor values, and wildland fire is no exception. This isn’t a fire problem, it’s a congress paying for tax cuts by underpaying federal employees problem. This piece also misses that wildland firefighters also get overtime and hazard pay, which add considerably to their incomes and directly compensate for the added rigor and danger of fire positions. It’s a good perspective, but this is a problem for all federal employees, not just wildland fire.
I hope Biden’s conservation corps becomes reality and there can be more preventative work done to make the wildfire crews jobs easier during the season. In the massive forests in the west, I would support more gravel roads to access the remotest areas and more fire lookout towers (which I can rent in the winter).
Google just showed up this, so potentially a wild fire fighter in CA with a high school diploma makes $48k (for 6-9 months work?). But interestingly, if that firefighter can go from CalFire to the Los Angeles Fire Department, they can start to make over $100k for 12 months work.
There’s a really interesting podcast of wildfires at the moment, and how we manage them. I hear calls for “better forest management’, but then I fly from California towards the East, only then can you truly appreciate the scale of the forests and the inaccessible nature of them. And according to the science, have timber companies go in and take out all the big trees, will make the fires worse.
“Since firefighters in California are in huge demand, they get lucrative salary packages, fringe benefits, and various other perks. However, several factors impact the firefighter pay such as certifications, education, employer, number of work experience, and skills set. For instance, firefighters with a technical certificate or high school diploma made between $40,242 and $46,749, while those with a bachelor’s degree earned between $41,270 and $47,605 (information source – salary.com).
California was the second paying state for fighters after New Jersey as per the Bureau of Labor Statistics (as of May 2017). The fireman wages in California was $73,860 per annum and $35.51 per hour. The average annual salary of a firefighter, according to indeed.com (as of October 10, 2018) was $50,095, which was 18% above the national average. Firefighters in Los Angeles and San Jose made $114,349 and $61,881, respectively. As per the statistics of salary.com (as of September 28, 2018), the salary range of firefighters in California was between $37,627 and $62,711. Their average annual salary was $50,169.”