Potential Solutions for Wildland Fire Recruitment Problems

by Charlie Bausman

Wildland Fire season continues to be a significant problem for the U.S. It sounds like a broken record, but fire season is longer, more intense, and involves far more land than it ever has. This is paired with continued challenges in recruiting and retaining Wildland Firefighters, who are most often seasonal employees who earn no income or benefits when not in-season.

After researching the biggest issues associated with the career field, we’ve identified the major problems as they exist today categorized into Combating Wildland Fire and Recruiting and Retaining Wildland Firefighters.

Combating Wildland Fire:

  •  Fuels Accumulation: Decades of fire suppression have led to significant fuel buildup, making wildfires more intense and harder to control.
  • Climate Change: Increasing temperatures, drier conditions, and more frequent extreme weather events exacerbate fire risks.
  • Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI): Expanding development in fire-prone areas complicates suppression efforts and puts more lives and property at risk.
  • Limited Resources: Funding and capacity for proactive fire management and forest health treatments are insufficient to meet the scale of the wildfire crisis.
  • Cross-Jurisdictional Coordination: Wildfire risks span multiple land ownerships (federal, state, tribal, and private), requiring collaboration that can be complex to organize and execute.

Recruiting and Retaining Wildland Firefighters:

  • Low Pay: Federal wildland firefighters often receive lower wages than other firefighting jobs, leading to high turnover.
  • Seasonal Employment: Many wildland firefighters are employed only seasonally, limiting job security and benefits.
  • Intense Physical and Mental Strain: Wildland firefighting is physically demanding and can lead to mental health issues like PTSD, exacerbating retention challenges.
  • Housing and Location Difficulties: Firefighters often struggle with affordable housing, especially in areas near high-risk fire sheds.
  • Workforce Shortages: As fire seasons lengthen and intensify, the need for a year-round firefighting force grows, but recruitment and retention struggles limit available manpower.

Potential Solutions We Can Solve For

  • Utilize US-Military Reserve structure and incentives to recruit/retain Wildland Firefighters: During the off-season, keep Wildland Firefighters in a reserve status while still granting them benefits such as healthcare and ‘points’ towards a retirement system when called in for once-a-month duties like training and prescribed burns. Additional incentives like GI Bill Benefits towards college or trade schools should be provided as a retention tool. This would add more manpower to assist in the fuel accumulation problem and a more readily available force to be called up in the event of early or late-season fires when most crews have been let go.
    • Downside: Many Wildland Firefighters like the work, and like to have the winter off. This would be problematic if a monthly “Drill” schedule were implemented.
  • Centralize the Wildland Fire bureaucracy under the Dept. of Homeland Security and Create Regional Commands: The Wildland Fire community and its leadership is a widespread mix of Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, State, and Tribal. While all work under the FEMA Incident Command (IC) structure, the administrative side of hiring and running fire crews is scattered amongst agencies.Additionally, the discretionary budget of the DHS is $61 billion, far beyond what the Dept of Interior or Agriculture can provide—more resources, better tech that can be implemented to assist Wildland Firefighters and more money.Creating a framework of Regional Commands, similar to the Canadian Provincial Model. Fighting wildfires in Oregon is not the same as in New Mexico, and this should be taken into account. Mutual aid agreements should be put in place between the regions, but enabling a regional focus will help crews train and prepare for specific environments and conditions. It also serves to keep Wildland Fire crews localized, helping to solve a major source of frustration for crew personnel who might travel all over the country during a season, away from their spouses and children.
    • Downside: Federalizing anything can be painful and might not meet the efficiencies hoped for.
  • Increase Pay and/or Provide Barracks Style Housing in exchange for 2-4 Year Contracts: Pay is a major source of contention. At a starting rate of $15/hour, this is understandable. Wildland crews make their money in accumulated overtime, but with crews located in exceedingly unaffordable areas of the Mountain West post-COVID, something will need to give. Increasing pay is the obvious answer, but for those who don’t intend to stay in the fire service for a career, providing barracks-style housing or on-site subsidized housing is a clear and likely more affordable option.

Conclusions

From a relative outsider’s perspective, it appears that combating Wildland Fire is at an inflection point. To this point, it appears to have an outdated organizational structure that hasn’t quite adapted to fill the current needs of fighting fire. With the problem only growing from fire season to fire season, something will need to change.

We’d like to hear your thoughts… email charlie@mtntactical.com

 

Sources:

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