Kylie Mohr | Vox

The government is literally telling firefighters “help is not on the way”

2025-08-07T14:25:15-04:00

This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Every spring, Forest Service fire leaders meet to plan for the upcoming fire season. This year, some employees were shocked by the blunt remarks made during a meeting with forest supervisors and fire staff officers from across the Intermountain West. “We were told, ‘Help is not on the way,’” said one employee, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of losing their job. “I’ve never been told that before.”

Agency leaders already knew it might be a bad wildfire season, made worse by having fewer hands available to help out. According to the employee High Country News spoke to, the Forest Service lost at least 1,800 fire-qualified, or “red-carded,” employees through layoffs, deferred resignation, and retirement offers. In total, 4,800 people left the agency.

“We were told: Don’t commit to an attack thinking the cavalry is going to come,” the employee said. As fire activity continues to pick up across much of the West, that warning rings true.

The Forest Service claims it recently reached 99 percent of its firefighting hiring goal, with almost 11,300 wildland firefighters. But a recent ProPublica investigation and internal communications obtained by High Country News paint a grimmer picture than what the public is seeing.

ProPublica’s review of internal agency data found that more than 4,500 Forest Service firefighting jobs — over one-fourth of all the agency’s firefighting jobs — were vacant as of July 17. The Guardian also reported that vacancy rates were highest in the Pacific Northwest and Intermountain Regions, at 39 percent and 37 percent, respectively.

The Department of Agriculture, which houses the Forest Service, disputes this. “ProPublica’s analysis doesn’t reflect our current fire response capacity,” spokesperson Cat McRae told High Country News in an email. “Their numbers likely come from outdated org charts and unfunded positions.” In an email, ProPublica confirmed that their data excluded unfunded positions. According to McRae, “the Forest Service is fully prepared and operational to protect individuals and communities from wildfires.”

But in a memo shared with HCN, Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz told agency leaders on July 16 that “as expected, the 2025 Fire Year is proving to be extremely challenging.”

“We know the demand for resources outpaces their availability,” Schultz wrote. He requested that all red-carded employees, including IT and human resource staff, be made available for fire assignments. “We have reached a critical point in our national response efforts, and we must make every resource available.”

Much of the Western US is expected to experience above-normal wildfire activity over the next few months. Already, the Forest Service has asked at least 1,400 people with fire qualifications who had resigned to come back. After all, firefighting is a group effort.

“All those people matter,” said Dave Whittekiend, formerly the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache forest supervisor. “Once it goes beyond an initial attack, it takes all the logistics. It’s like setting up a small city.”

Whittekiend, who retired in May, had also attended this spring’s planning meeting for forest leaders in Nevada, Utah, and parts of Idaho and Wyoming, where he heard the same warning about limited help. “It was creating a sense of urgency,” he said. “It was pretty direct: ‘We are seeing changes, and so be careful about how you choose your strategies and what you think you might be able to do with a fire.’”

“We were told: Don’t commit to an attack thinking the cavalry is going to come.”

Whittekiend pointed out that — even before all the layoffs and resignations this spring — the Forest Service sometimes struggled to get through busy fire seasons. Firefighters have been called in from Canada, Mexico, and Australia when resources are stretched too thin, and sometimes National Guard or military troops are deployed.

“We’ve never had all the people that we needed in some fire years,” he said. “That’s been an ongoing trend. It probably accelerated when a whole bunch of us said, ‘All right, we’re out of here’” — including employees in overhead positions, like the people who buy food and organize shower trailers and outhouses for fire camps, as well as staffers who take weather forecasts and do safety checks on firefighting operations. More than 10,530 people are currently assigned to wildfires; as of August 1, there are 35 large fires nationwide.

Meanwhile, just last week, the Department of Agriculture announced a widespread reorganization to further slim down and consolidate the workforce. Fort Collins, Colorado, and Salt Lake City, Utah, were designated as two of the five new “hub” locations and the only offices that will be located in the entire West. The Forest Service will “phase out” the nine regional offices that currently exist, six of which are in the West, over the next year. Standalone research stations will be consolidated into one station in Fort Collins, while the Fire Science Lab in Missoula, Montana, will remain as is.

The elimination of the Forest Service regional offices throughout the West, which divided the territory into the Pacific Northwest, Northern, Rocky Mountain, Southwestern, and Intermountain regions, is expected to cause even more employees to leave. “I’m going to guess that there will be people who will leave rather than move,” Whittekiend said. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said that up to half of staff may not relocate, according to Politico.

It’s a familiar scene, echoing the lackluster response when the Trump administration moved the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado, in 2019. Only three out of the 328 employees who were supposed to relocate to the new headquarters actually did so — despite the millions of dollars the reorganization cost.

Photo illustration image sources: Tipover East Prescribed Fire, Kaibab National Forest, Arizona, in 2017. David Hercher/U.S. Forest Service; A firefighter works the fire line on the Sitgreaves Complex Fire in the Kaibab National Forest in 2014. Holly Krake/U.S. Forest Service; Firefighters start a back fire to help suppress the 2013 Rim Fire, which burned in Stanislaus National Forest, California. Mike McMillan/U.S. Forest Service; Plumas Hotshots in 2008. Courtesy of the California Interagency Hotshots Steering Committee/U.S. Forest Service

Yes, even most unexpected landscapes in the US can and will burn

2025-01-08T16:16:29-05:00

In February 2024, a heat wave persisted for days in the Chilean coastal city of Viña del Mar. The landscape, already affected by an El Niño-supercharged drought, was baked dry. So, when wildfires sparked, they ripped through densely populated and mountainous terrain. In just a few days, the fires — the deadliest in Chile’s history — burned 71,000 acres and killed at least 134 people.

Devastating wildfires like these are becoming increasingly common. Climate change is partly to blame — while research has found that both El Niño and climate change have contributed to intense wildfires in Chile in recent years, scientists disagree whether climate change had a statistically significant impact on these particular February fires. But the Chilean fires also underscore another ominous dynamic: Grasses, shrubs, and trees that humans have introduced to new ecosystems are increasing wildfire occurrence and frequency.

In central Chile over five decades, timber companies have converted natural forests to homogenous, sprawling plantations of nonnative eucalyptus and Monterey pine that grow rapidly in the country’s Mediterranean climate. These trees contain an oily resin that makes them especially flammable but coupled with hotter and drier conditions due to climate change, they can be explosive, says Dave McWethy, an assistant professor at Montana State University.

Our relationship with such nonnative species is fraught. We enable the spread of nonnatives by purposely transporting species to landscapes that haven’t previously existed with them. Take English ivy, a popular choice for stabilizing soil as an ornamental plant. Or the Norway maple, which was introduced to the East Coast of the US in 1756, quickly becoming popular for the shade it provided. In the process, such nonnatives can displace local ecologies and native species, disrupt agriculture, or transmit disease. Once a critter or a plant is introduced, either accidentally or purposefully, it can spread rapidly and outpace efforts to catch them at checkpoints or, as is the case for Florida’s state-sponsored “rodeos” for species like pythons, kill them.

A report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) estimates that the approximately 3,500 geographically invasive plants and animals worldwide cost the global economy $423 billion annually.

Climate change is also shuffling the ecological deck: As Vox has reported, ecologists expect climate change to create “range-shifting” or “climate-tracking” species that move to survive hotter temperatures. Perhaps some of those species will be more fire-prone. “Fires in places that are not used to fires are going to become much worse because of invasive species,” said Anibal Pauchard, co-author of the IPBES report and a professor at the University of Concepción and director of the Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity in Chile.

Such trends are causing wildfires to burn in unexpected places in the US as well. In 2023 for example, a wildfire — fueled by guinea grass, molasses grass, and buffel grass — killed at least 101 people in Maui.

According to research published in the journal PNAS, eight species of nonnative grasses are increasing fire occurrence by between 27 and 230 percent in the US.

This means, due in part to the spread of nonnative species, millions of people in the US will be affected by more frequent wildfires and the unhealthy smoke they produce. As the research shows, invasive grasses are altering historic fire activity and behavior in a variety of locations across the US. This includes those living in the arid West (especially the Great Basin and the Southwest) but also those in more humid parts of the country, particularly people living near eastern temperate deciduous forests, which cover the eastern US, and pine savannah ecoregions from central South Carolina to central Florida.

The nonnative grasses driving wildfire risk in the US

While no one factor causes a big fire to happen on its own, nonnative grasses have played a more important role in recent decades — especially in low-elevation regions without much fire historically, said Seth Munson, an ecologist with the Southwest Biological Science Center in Flagstaff, Arizona.

The annual invasive grass cheatgrass, known for its hairy tops, is found in an estimated 50–70 million acres nationwide, mostly in the Great Basin states. Lands with at least 15 percent cheatgrass are twice as likely to burn as those with a low abundance of the grass, and four times more likely to burn multiple times, according to researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Idaho, and University of Colorado.

According to the latest data, eight of the largest fires on record in the Great Basin have happened since 2010. That includes Nevada’s Martin Fire, which burned over 435,000 acres in 2018 and destroyed large swaths of grazing pastures for cattle and habitat of the federally protected sage grouse.

Another invasive grass, cogongrass flourishes across Florida and the Gulf States, infiltrating traditional pine woodlands. These landscapes are already burning, with harsh human consequences. Wildfires in northwest Florida in recent years have scorched homes, prompted the evacuation of over a thousand people, and cost millions of dollars.

The largest wildfire in Texas state history, only recently contained, damaged or destroyed hundreds of homes, killing at least two people and thousands of cows. Hundreds of wildfires in Louisiana in 2023 also resulted in two deaths. Buffelgrass is taking root all over Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, and red brome is spreading in the Mojave and other deserts.

Highly flammable tamarisk shrubs have taken root in thick stands near streams in the western US, and eucalyptus — one of the primary invasive trees blamed for worsening Chile’s recent wildfires as well as fires in Portugal — increases wildfire risk in California.

What can be done?

Limiting the introduction of nonnative plants, when possible, addresses the problem at its root. But many invasive species already have a foothold somewhere nearby. In that case, early detection of invasive species, by satellite imagery or by people on the ground, is the best way to stop invasives with a variety of removal techniques, be that herbicide or something else, in an attempt to keep them somewhat contained.

Federal agencies across the country, like the one Munson works for, as well as states, tribes, nonprofits, and others, are already monitoring for the movement of invasive species on the landscape and attempting to manage them as they inevitably spread. Work is also underway to help native plants reestablish faster after fires, giving them a chance against invasives angling for the same open space.

You can do your part by finding out which nonnative plants exist in your area, especially those that increase wildfire risk. And if you’re looking to spruce up your home’s landscaping, don’t plant them; consider a native alternative instead.

Wildfires are coming… for New Jersey?

2023-09-12T12:47:26-04:00

This year, wildfires in Maui killed hundreds, marking the deadliest fire in the US in more than a century. Wildfires were once rare in Hawaii, but human activity in recent decades has made them more common and extreme. | Gonzalo Marroquin/Getty Images

All a wildfire needs is oxygen, an ignition to spark it, and fuel to burn. Its crackling embers and flickering flames don’t know the difference between the California foothills, where residents are used to fire, and more unexpected locales, like the New Jersey coastline, the Florida peninsula, or the slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains. As the immense destruction of the fire in Lāhainā, Maui, continues to unfold, experts who study wildfires say the blaze fits a disturbing pattern of fires in the wildland-urban interface, where people and homes mingle with burnable vegetation. “Every single state in the US where we have vegetation, and particularly where we have vegetation intermixing with communities, we have the potential for extreme fire disasters,” said Crystal Kolden, a pyrogeographer who studies fire across time and space at the University of California Merced.

According to researchers and numerous tools mapping wildfire risk, hundreds of cities, towns and communities outside the flammable, arid West that’s known for its wildfires face similarly high risk. The models tell the tale of surprising fire risk for homes near forests, shrublands, prairies, and coastal marshes: They include populated areas in New Jersey’s Manchester and Bass River townships, as well as dollops of development throughout the Eastern coastline that are downwind from over a million acres of pine forests— ripe fuel for fast-moving fires. “That scenario is catastrophic,” said Greg McLaughlin, New Jersey Forest Fire Service chief. “That’s what we plan for.” The state has already seen 13 major wildfires this year, about triple the average.

Homes, towns, and reservations in northern Minnesota are also at moderate to very high risk. In the western corner, prairie grasses are often quick to burn; in the east, flammable spruce and conifer forests surround the gateway communities to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness like Ely. Risk extends throughout the state to communities just north of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area.

Other pockets of high and very high fire risk include the Gulf of Mexico near the Texas-Louisiana border, home to flammable coastal vegetation and large swaths of Florida peninsula, where grasses, cattails, and the dense everglades can easily combust. Communities on the eastern, downwind side of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina and the towns tucked near the heavily forested Appalachian Mountains in southern Kentucky are also surrounded by thick forests and prone to wildfire. Here, there’s precedent: Blazes that started in Great Smoky Mountains National Park swept downwind in 2016 and killed 14 people in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

Wildfire risk is modeled by combining the likelihood and the intensity of a blaze with an area’s exposure and susceptibility. Widely used models include the US Forest Service’s Wildfire Risk to Communities, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) National Risk Index, and Risk Factor, a model created by the nonprofit First Street Foundation that looks at fire and other climate risks down to the neighborhood and address level. Some models use the same data but parse risk differently, looking at just housing units or also factors like building values and population to determine a final risk. Some models are searchable by address or neighborhood, while others summarize risk at a county or state level.

While risk modeling maps aren’t predictive, they can be eerie in hindsight. “Scientifically, physically, we know where these risk regions are,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Los Angeles. “And they’re everywhere.” One model says Merryville, Louisiana, where wildfire recently forced a town-wide evacuation, has a higher wildfire risk than 72 percent of communities in the country; another says the town has a moderate risk of wildfire over the next 30 years. And Lāhainā, for example, had a very high risk of wildfire, more than 92 percent of communities in the country. Now, upward of 115 people are dead and hundreds are still missing. “There are lots of places that are flammable, and there are places that are becoming more flammable, and then there’s places that are becoming more flammable that weren’t on our radar,” said Jennifer Balch, a fire ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder.

A devastating pattern, worsened by climate change

While each fire has its own context, a pattern keeps repeating: fast-moving fires that sweep through communities and catch their inhabitants off guard. Strong winds are a common thread between blazes like the Marshall Fire, a grass fire that destroyed 1,000 homes in Colorado in 2021, the Almeda Fire, which burned 600 homes in southern Oregon in 2020, and the recent fire on Maui. But wind needs to line up with another wildfire risk factor — dry vegetation — to be dangerous. “That really might not happen often at all, barely ever in some places,” Swain said. “But when it does, watch out.”

Places with high wildfire risk include coastal areas with vegetation like Phragmites, an invasive wetland grass that’s found throughout the Eastern seaboard and elsewhere, or cogon and sawgrasses, found in the Florida marshes. Invasive species are often adapted to take over landscapes quickly after fire, pushing out native grasses and providing a carpet of especially flammable fuel for the next blaze.

Many ecosystems evolved with fire as a natural element of the landscape, said Allissa Reynolds, the wildfire prevention supervisor for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources Division of Forestry. But fire suppression policies and the stifling of Indigenous burning practices limited natural and human-introduced fire in the last century, causing a buildup of excess fuel.

Today, climate change further stacks the deck toward a higher risk of wildfire, even in places that have been traditionally too wet to burn with much frequency or severity. Wet conditions can allow fuels to grow, but heat waves can quickly dry them out. “It’s getting easier and easier for vegetation to dry out to critical levels,” Swain said. Wildfire risk then concentrates in the “driest dry spells and the hottest hot spells,” he said. And risk factors don’t have to line up often to be dangerous if and when they do.

That’s happening right now in Minnesota, where most of the state is experiencing some level of drought. The state has already seen almost its yearly average of fires, despite fall, a historically active time, still to come. It’s occurring in New Jersey, where an increasing number of fires are happening outside the usual mid-March to mid-May fire season. And it’s underway in the Gulf Coast during hurricane season, where unusual drought and heat at a time that should be wet are fueling over 600 fires burning in Louisiana, including the largest fire in recorded state history. “While we’re pretty good and practiced at emergency response, not so much on the wildfires,” Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards told CBS News.

When flames meet homes

Between 1992 and 2015, 1 million homes were within the perimeter of a wildfire and almost 59 million more were within roughly half a mile, according to one study. While there’s been increasing development in the wildland urban interface in recent years — to the tune of more than 32 million residential homes — new homes aren’t the whole story. “That’s a broad generalization that I don’t think adequately captures the scale of risks that we’re seeing,” said Kimiko Barrett, a research and policy analyst at Headwaters Economics, a research organization in Montana.

Economics play a role here, too: Rising housing costs mean more populations priced out of urban areas find more affordable housing in the nearby shrubs and woodlands that pose more wildfire risk. “Suggesting that people just shouldn’t keep building out there is a really privileged viewpoint that ignores why people move to the fringes of these areas,” Kolden said. Plus, many Indigenous settlements would be considered to be in the wildland urban interface today, by modern definitions. “People have been living at moderate densities in fire-prone places for a long time,” said Chris Roos, an environmental archaeologist. Tribes used and continue to use fire to steward and manage the land, often lighting many small fires to improve hunting and gathering opportunities as well as lower their wildfire risk.

But wildfires that continue to torch communities prompt questions of not just where we live but how we prepare. “It’s tragic that we don’t currently have this larger education about what to do in a no-notice evacuation event, what to do if you get caught by a wildfire,” Kolden said. Fire-prone areas are already working to mitigate their risk and develop evacuation plans for the worst-case scenario. Members of the Forest Service, land management agencies, local fire departments, and county emergency managers are sitting down throughout Minnesota and the rest of the country to create community wildfire protection plans; the process opens the door to federal funding that can pay for things like creating fuel breaks and turning yard waste into wood chips. Prescribed burning that targets areas with an accumulation of vegetation is a priority in New Jersey, and an almost 1,400 acre thinning project in the Bass River State Forest is slated to start in September, with the goal of removing excess fuel.

It will also take investment in urban environments — like retrofitting old homes with fire-resistant building materials and creating building codes for new development — to curb the wildfire crisis and lessen risk, Barrett said. “The inertia of the political system and us as a society continue to believe we can get through this wildfire crisis if we just focus on the forest and the wild lands,” she said. Wildfire isn’t just a Western problem or a forest problem or a rural problem. Given the right combination of factors, wildfire can occur where you least expect it — in suburbia or in the former capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom.