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Wildfire Response: A System on the Brink?
Abstract
Increasing wildfire activity, decreasing workforce capacity, and growing systemic strain may result in an interagency wildfire-response system less capable of protecting landscapes and communities. Further, increased workloads will likely increase hazards to fire personnel and amplify existing problems with recruitment and retention. In the face of elevated risks and degraded capacity, it is imperative that the wildfire-response system operate efficiently. Viable solutions are urgently needed that enable the system to do more with less and that manage not only for landscapes and communities but also the health and wellbeing of the fire personnel on whom the system relies. Achieving this will likely require rethinking how the interagency wildfire-response system can more adaptively and intelligently deploy fire personnel by leveraging enhanced logistics, operations, and proven fire analytics.
Study Implications: As society grapples with increasing wildfire damage to landscapes and communities, the capacity of the interagency system in the USA designed to protect landscapes and communities from wildfires is degrading. A stressed system will be less capable of protecting life, property, and resources, and increased workloads will likely increase hazards to fire personnel and amplify existing problems with recruitment and retention. We argue that solutions are attainable through increased attention to performance and through more anticipatory, adaptive, and intelligent deployment of fire personnel across fire incidents and around the country.
... As fire seasons in the Western US intensify and lengthen, fire managers have been grappling with increases in the period during which simultaneous, significant incidents compete for wildfire response resources which in some cases outstrip preparedness and strain the capacity of the current system (Podschwit et al. 2019;Podschwit and Cullen 2020;Abatzoglou et al. 2021;Shuman et al. 2022;Cullen et al. 2023; Thompson et al. 2023). This management challenge leads us to explore a key research question: what precursors on the day of ignition are associated with wildland fires that evolve into incidents requiring high levels of response and suppression personnel? ...
... This analysis supports identification of the specific characteristics and scenarios, which have led ignitions to evolve into resource intensive incidents, and thus provides the agencies with wildland fire responsibilities information about preparedness, as well as proactive and reactive risk mitigation (Cullen et al. 2021). Understanding both the natural system and the systems of decision-making that accompany fires which require substantial deployments of response personnel supports holistic risk management in an era of increasing simultaneity of ignitions and competition for resources for both fuel treatment and wildfire response (Thompson et al. 2023). ...
... However, because wildland fire response is an interagency system, large fires typically utilise personnel and equipment supplied by multiple agencies. Because these fires can have a substantial impact on the capacity of the wildfire response system (Thompson et al. 2023), the assignment of resources to these fires is overseen by Geographic Area Coordination Centers. During times of personnel and equipment scarcity, distribution of personnel and equipment between Geographic Areas is managed by the National Interagency Coordination Center. ...
Background
As fire seasons in the Western US intensify and lengthen, fire managers have been grappling with increases in simultaneous, significant incidents that compete for response resources and strain capacity of the current system.
Aims
To address this challenge, we explore a key research question: what precursors are associated with ignitions that evolve into incidents requiring high levels of response personnel?
Methods
We develop statistical models linking human, fire weather and fuels related factors with cumulative and peak personnel deployed.
Key results
Our analysis generates statistically significant models for personnel deployment based on precursors observable at the time and place of ignition.
Conclusions
We find that significant precursors for fire suppression resource deployment are location, fire weather, canopy cover, Wildland–Urban Interface category, and history of past fire. These results align partially with, but are distinct from, results of earlier research modelling expenditures related to suppression which include precursors such as total burned area which become observable only after an incident.
Implications
Understanding factors associated with both the natural system and the human system of decision-making that accompany high deployment fires supports holistic risk management given increasing simultaneity of ignitions and competition for resources for both fuel treatment and wildfire response.
... However, despite these long-standing calls to move beyond suppression, there have been considerable challenges to implementing a risk management approach to wildfire response on public lands (Schultz et al., 2019;Thompson et al., 2023). While there have been improvements in using response strategies other than full suppression (Young et al., 2020), the vast majority of fires (over 85%) are still suppressed and contained at 10 acres or fewer (Short, 2021). ...
... Even when policy is flexible, fire managers may face political or public pressure to minimize certain consequences and suppress fires at the smallest size possible (Calkin et al., 2012;Canton-Thompson et al., 2008). Challenges to adopting a risk management paradigm are numerous and include political, cultural, psychological, and economic barriers (Thompson, 2014;Thompson et al., 2016;Thompson et al., 2023). ...
... This challenge is largely acknowledged in the literature on risk management (Thompson et al., 2023). When making decisions in uncertain conditions, good fire management decisions (including prefire planning, fire response, and postfire recovery) should be judged based on the decision-making process, not the outcome (Maguire & Albright, 2005). ...
One of the dominant ethics of natural resource management (NRM), and arguably Western culture, is consequentialism, which evaluates the ethical merit of decisions based solely on consequences or outcomes of those decisions. When used in NRM, this ethic is largely applied as the default, without interrogation of whether it is appropriate or useful. In this case study, we examine the intersections of consequentialism, decision psychology, and fire response in the United States. We explore how trying to maximize beneficial outcomes creates dilemmas for fire managers who must make decisions despite considerable risk and uncertainty about outcomes. Consequentialism as a guiding ethic may exacerbate risk aversion and fire suppression and ultimately contributes to a dilemma, wherein fire managers trying to reduce negative outcomes may increase the probability of negative outcomes (via catastrophic wildfire) in the long run. In place of consequentialism, we explore how virtue ethics in fire response and moral pluralism may ultimately better support the goals of risk management and positive outcomes. From this case study, readers will gain insight on the challenges of applying ethical theory to current natural resource issues, the way cognitive biases can affect decision-making, and alternative ethics to the dominant consequentialist system in NRM.
... From hurricanes to wildland fires, the co-occurrence of environmental hazards and the COVID-19 pandemic posed operational challenges to emergency and hazard management [1][2][3][4][5][6] . The dual threat of the COVID-19 pandemic and the severe 2020 and 2021 wildland fire years had the potential to strain an already strained and finite fire response workforce 1 who had to balance meeting operational wildland fire management objectives while mitigating disease transmission 2,3 . ...
... The structure and function of the wildland firefighting system presents unique challenges in mitigating COVID-19 risks. These challenges stem from several factors, including high-density working and living conditions, limitations on hygiene practices, exposure to wildfire smoke, and a highly transient workforce that can be deployed and reassigned to vast geographical areas throughout the United States 1,2,7 . Infectious diseases, including COVID-19, noroviruses, and "camp crud", can spread within and between fire crews and other hazard management personnel, particularly within wildland fire camps where hundreds to thousands of dispatched firefighters eat and sleep while deployed to fire incidents 8,10 . ...
Fire agencies across the United States must make complex resource allocation decisions to manage wildfires using a national network of shared firefighting resources. Firefighters play a critical role in suppressing fires and protecting vulnerable communities. However, they are exposed to health and safety risks associated with fire, smoke inhalation, and infectious disease transmission. The COVID-19 pandemic further complicated these risks, prompting fire agencies to propose resource management adaptations to minimize COVID-19 exposure and transmission. It is unclear if and how the pandemic may have operationally influenced wildland firefighting personnel resource use given compounding wildfire and COVID-19 risks. Therefore, we developed generalized linear mixed models that were fit using multiple integrated datasets to detect changes in personnel resource use for years prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic, while controlling for historical fire and landscape conditions, societal risks, and management objectives. Analyses of observed and predicted firefighting resource use revealed reductions in the mean personnel resources used per wildfire per day during the pandemic for models developed across the western U.S. and for various western U.S. fire regions. Notably, the Northern California and the Great Basin Coordination Centers showed statistically significant reductions in ground personnel use during the COVID-19 pandemic. Learning from wildland fire management strategies and resource use trends that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, fire agencies can better anticipate resource constraints that may arise during the compounding threats of severe wildland fire activity and infectious disease outbreaks to proactively prepare and adapt suppression management strategies.
... Moreover, decreasing workforce capacity and systemic strain present significant challenges to wildfire management efforts. The wildfire-response system faces elevated risks, resource scarcity, critical shortages, and workforce fatigue, rendering it less capable of effectively protecting landscapes and communities 7 . Against the backdrop of resource scarcity and a strained fire management system, firefighting costs and negative wildfire impacts continue to escalate, suggesting an immediate need to understand the effectiveness of our suppression efforts. ...
The escalation of wildfires in the USA, coupled with rising firefighting costs and decreasing workforce capacity, underscores the critical need to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of containment measures. However, the existing spatial data that records the locations and types of containment measures and wildfire perimeters contains numerous errors and redundancies. This paper presents a comprehensive fireline Quality Assurance and Quality Control dataset developed from the wildland firefighting operations data reported in the National Interagency Fire Center National Incident Feature Service. This improved dataset contains reliable spatial locations for fireline built during suppression operations, the associated verified fire perimeters, and identifies where containment was success or failure for fires greater than 1000 acres from 2017–2024. The improved final dataset represents critical information that was previously unavailable for assessing the success of fireline operations and incident management resource-use efficiency. The lessons learned from analyses utilizing this dataset are critical for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the United States wildfire management system.
... Lack of resources needed to address fire at the pace and scale exacerbates these problems. A reduced firefighting work force is expected to work through longer and more severe fire seasons (Thompson et al. 2023). ...
Our ecocultural state-of-knowledge report brings together Indigenous Knowledge (IK) and Western Science (WS) to support climate and wildfire adaptation strategies for US public forest landscapes. Our report builds on federal directives to respectfully and intentionally braid IK and WS knowledge systems in a Two-Eyed Seeing approach that informs climate- and wildfire adaptation strategies to conserve public forests.
... Extreme spread events (ESEs), often characterized by high intensity and rapid rates of spread, can overwhelm fire suppression and emergency response capacity, threaten responder and public safety, damage landscapes and communities, and result in high socioeconomic costs and losses [6][7][8]. The frequency and magnitude of ESEs are likely to increase, putting additional stress on an already strained wildfire management system in the US [9][10][11]. ...
Extreme spread events (ESEs), often characterized by high intensity and rapid rates of spread, can overwhelm fire suppression and emergency response capacity, threaten responder and public safety, damage landscapes and communities, and result in high socioeconomic costs and losses. Advances in remote sensing and geospatial analysis provide an improved understanding of observed ESEs and their contributing factors; however, there is a need to improve anticipatory and predictive capabilities to better prepare, mitigate, and respond. Here, leveraging individual-fire day-of-arrival raster outputs from the FSim fire modeling system, we prototype and evaluate methods for the simulation and categorization of ESEs. We describe the analysis of simulation outputs on a case study landscape in Colorado, USA, summarize daily spread event characteristics, threshold and probabilistically benchmark ESEs, spatially depict ESE potential, and describe limitations, extensions, and potential applications of this work. Simulation results generally showed strong alignment with historical patterns of daily growth and the proportion of cumulative area burned in the western US and identified hotspots of high ESE potential. Continued analysis and simulation of ESEs will likely expand the horizon of uses and grow in salience as ESEs become more common.
... Developing an educated workforce is another critical part of tackling the wildland fire issue, especially in the rural West. Land management agencies are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit and retain a skilled workforce, creating challenges in implementing essential ecosystem management projects and effectively suppressing unwanted wildfires (Thompson et al. 2023). Early exposure to fire science education for K-12 students can connect classroom learning with viable career paths in fire and ecosystem management (Mekinda 2012;Thessin et al. 2017). ...
The wildfire issue in the western United States presents a complex challenge that impacts both society and the environment. Implementing K-12 education programs focused on wildfire can play a significant role in addressing this issue. By integrating wildfire education into school curricula, teachers can equip students with the knowledge and skills needed to understand fire ecology, land management, and wildfire preparedness. Early exposure to wildfire science education can also connect students with viable career paths in fire and ecosystem management. We used our position as Cooperative Extension educators in Nevada’s Living With Fire Program to catalyze fire science knowledge through creating a high school wildfire science curriculum that is focused on fire ecology, wildfire preparedness, and career exposure. We used a transdisciplinary approach to create educational materials that are effective, relevant, and accurately represent wildfire in Nevada. We integrated five different knowledge forms (technical, cultural, management, institutional, and student) to create a robust curriculum that includes many different stakeholder priorities and values, while still meeting the needs of students and teachers. Our initial impacts assessment demonstrates that our curriculum instruction is creating learning advances in fire ecology and wildfire preparedness. We assert that this curriculum and other wildfire education programs in our region can increase our overall capacity for living with fire.
... To account for spatial autocorrelation, we created a 500-by-500 m grid and, at the centroid of each cell, recorded the integrated exposure values, flammability hazard class, and land cover. An Anderson-Darling normality test (Thode 2002) on the exposure values indicated that they were non-normally distributed (Online Appendix 5), we used nonparametric statistics (R package nortest; n = 55,292, A = 1165, p value < 0.001). We used wildfire scars for Alaska to identify whether each centroid was burned or unburned between 2014 and 2023 (AICC 2023). ...
Increased wildfire activity has raised concerns among communities about how to assess and prepare for this threat. There is a need for wildfire hazard assessment approaches that capture local variability to inform decisions, produce results understood by the public, and are updatable in a timely manner. We modified an existing approach to assess decadal wildfire hazards based primarily on ember dispersal and wildfire proximity, referencing landscape changes from 1984 through 2014. Our modifications created a categorical flammability hazard scheme, rather than dichotomous, and integrated wildfire exposure results across spatial scales. We used remote sensed land cover from four historical decadal points to create flammability hazard and wildfire exposure maps for three arctic communities (Anchorage and Fairbanks, Alaska and Whitehorse, Yukon). Within the Fairbanks study area, we compared 2014 flammability hazard, wildfire exposure, and FlamMap burn probabilities among burned (2014–2023) and unburned areas. Unlike burn probabilities, there were significantly higher in exposure values among burned and unburned locations (Wilcoxon; p < 0.001) and exposure rose as flammability hazard classes increased (Kruskal–Wallis; p < 0.001). Very high flammability hazard class supported 75% of burned areas and burns tended to occur in areas with 60% exposure or greater. Areas with high exposure values are more prone to burn and thus desirable for mitigation actions. By working with wildfire practitioners and communities, we created a tool that rapidly assesses wildfire hazards and is easily modified to help identify and prioritize mitigation activities.
... The increase in global wildfire activity in many regions where people live has brought into public focus the need for wildfire management and the need to better understand how to improve wildfire management outcomes. Significant scientific attention has been invested in understanding wildfire behaviour and ecology (Shuman et al. 2022), but less is known about the various decision making processes of wildfire management (Fillmore et al. 2021; Thompson et al. 2023). It remains uncertain how and why different management strategies are chosen to manage a wildfire, in large part because the decision making process of key actors must account for an often overwhelming range of elements (Cortner et al. 1990;Thompson 2014;Fillmore et al. 2021). ...
Background
The decision making process undertaken during wildfire responses is complex and prone to uncertainty. In the US, decisions federal land managers make are influenced by numerous and often competing factors.
Aims
To assess and validate the presence of decision factors relevant to the wildfire decision making context that were previously known and to identify those that have emerged since the US federal wildfire policy was updated in 2009.
Methods
Interviews were conducted across the US while wildfires were actively burning to elucidate time-of-fire decision factors. Data were coded and thematically analysed.
Key results
Most previously known decision factors as well as numerous emergent factors were identified.
Conclusions
To contextualise decision factors within the decision making process, we offer a Wildfire Decision Framework that has value for policy makers seeking to improve decision making, managers improving their process and wildfire social science researchers.
Implications
Managers may gain a better understanding of their decision environment and use our framework as a tool to validate their deliberations. Researchers may use these data to help explain the various pressures and influences modern land and wildfire managers experience. Policy makers and agencies may take institutional steps to align the actions of their staff with desired wildfire outcomes.
Background Wildland firefighters are exposed to hazards when working which can, and do, result in serious injury or death. Understanding the activities in which firefighters are engaged when they are injured, the hazards to which they were exposed during that activity and the resulting injury severity is critical to manage the risk of serious injury to firefighters. Aims This study aims to provide an assessment of wildland firefighter injuries. Methods A set of 435 severe injuries in wildland firefighters in the United States from 2019 to 2023 was classified by activity being performed, hazard encountered and injury severity. Statistical summaries were used to contextualize the data and to examine the frequency and severity of these injuries. Proportional odds models tested the impact of activity, region and fire complexity on injury severity. Key results Aviation activities are associated with higher injury severity; there is no statistically significant difference in injury severity among other activities. Region and fire type do not impact injury severity. Injury frequency and severity vary among hazards and associated activities. Conclusions and Implications Given the hazard mitigations in place, reducing injury frequency and severity may be challenging without clearly defined agency level risk tolerances.
Pre-fire mitigation efforts that include the installation and maintenance of fuel breaks are integral to wildfire suppression in Southern California. Fuel breaks alter fire behavior and assist in fire suppression at strategic locations on the landscape. However, the combined effectiveness of fuel breaks and wildfire suppression is not well studied. Using daily firefighting personnel to proxy the quantity and diversity of potential fire suppression operations (i.e., operational complexity), we examined 15 wildfires from 2017 to 2020 in the Los Padres, Angeles, San Bernardino, and Cleveland National Forests to assess how weather and site-specific fuel break characteristics influenced wildfire containment when leveraged during suppression operations. After removing effects of fuel treatments, wildfire and aerial firefighting, we estimated that expanding fuel break width in grass-dominant systems from 10 to 100 m increased the average success rate against a heading fire from 31 % to 41 %. Likewise, recently cleared fuel breaks had higher success rates compared to poorly maintained fuel breaks in both grass (25 % to 45 %) and shrub systems (20 % to 45 %). Combined, grass and shrub systems exhibited an estimated success rate of 80 % under mild weather conditions (20th percentile) and 19 % under severe weather (80th percentile). Other significant determinants included forb and grass production, adjacent tree canopy cover and terrain. Consistent with complexity theory and previous suppression effectiveness research, our analysis showed signs of suppression effectiveness declining as firefighter personnel increased. Future work could better account for the role of suppression with improved data on firefighting resource types, actions, locations, and timing. https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1jtGp4y2D1kEi5
Increased wildfire activity has raised concerns among communities about how to assess and prepare for this threat. We modified an existing approach to assess decadal wildfire hazards based primarily on ember dispersal and wildfire proximity, referencing landscape changes from 1984 through 2014. The original method created multiple maps to capture ember dispersal and spread at different scales. Instead, we integrated this multi-scale information into a single exposure layer and utilized a straightforward flammability hazard classification scheme. Binomial exact and Kruskal–Wallis tested the relationship between exposure values, underlying flammability hazard classes, and wildfire scars, respectively, in three arctic communities (Anchorage and Fairbanks, Alaska and Whitehorse, Yukon) with a range of wildfire histories and amounts of urbanization. There was a significant difference in exposure values among burned and unburned locations (p < 0.001) and flammability hazard classes (p < 0.001). Areas with high exposure values are more prone to burn and thus desirable for mitigation actions. Wildfire fire hazards are extremely high within Whitehorse and Fairbanks, and lower in Anchorage. By working with wildfire practitioners, communities, and residents, we have created a tool that can rapidly assess wildfire hazards and be easily modified to help identify and prioritize areas for mitigation activities.
In 2016, the US Forest Service initiated small-group safety discussions among members of its wildland firefighting organisation. Known as the Life First National Engagement Sessions, the discussions presented an opportunity for wildland firefighters to address systemic and cultural dysfunctions in the wildland fire system. The Life First initiative included a post-engagement survey in which more than 2600 Forest Service employees provided open-ended feedback. In that qualitative subset of results, survey respondents described four main situations in which wildland firefighters commonly accepted unnecessary exposure to risk, related to driving, mop up, aviation and communication. Findings reveal how firefighters experienced social, political and economic pressures upon and within the wildland fire system. They shared that these perceived pressures and their mission-oriented work culture interacted, transforming otherwise unremarkable work operations into situations of unnecessary exposure to risk.
Background
The PODs (potential operational delineations) concept is an adaptive framework for cross-boundary and collaborative land and fire management planning. Use of PODs is increasingly recognized as a best practice, and PODs are seeing growing interest from federal, state, local, tribal, and non-governmental organizations. Early evidence suggests PODs provide utility for planning, communication, coordination, prioritization, incident response strategy development, and fuels mitigation and forest restoration. Recent legislative action codifies the importance of PODs by devoting substantial financial resources to their expansion. The intent of this paper is to explore new horizons that would help land and fire management organizations better address risks and capitalize on opportunities. Specifically, we focus on how PODs are a natural platform for improvement related to two core elements of risk management: how we leverage preparation and foresight to better prepare for the future; and how we learn from the past to better understand and improve performance and its alignment with strategy.
Results
We organize our exploration of new horizons around three key areas, suggesting that PODs can enable climate-smart forest and fire management and planning, inform more agile and adaptive allocation of suppression resources, and enable risk-informed performance measurement. These efforts can be synergistic and self-reinforcing, and we argue that expanded application of PODs at local levels could enhance the performance of the broader wildland fire system. We provide rationales for each problem area and offer growth opportunities with attendant explanations and illustrations.
Conclusions
With commitment and careful effort, PODs can provide rich opportunities for innovation in both backward-looking evaluative and forward-looking anticipatory frameworks. In addition to continued improvement of core PODs elements, attention must be paid to being more inclusive and participatory in PODs planning, to building sufficient capacity to expand PODs applications in meaningful boundary spanning ways, to ensure their continuity and relevance over time through maintenance and updating, and to deliver necessary information to responders to inform the effective management of wildfires. Lastly, ongoing monitoring and evaluation of PODs and related initiatives is essential to support organizational learning and continual improvement.
A severe outbreak of wildfire across the US Pacific Coast during August 2020 led to persistent fire activity through the end of summer. In late September, Fire Weather Outlooks predicted higher than usual fire activity into the winter in parts of California, with concomitant elevated fire danger in the Southeastern US. To help inform the regional and national allocation of firefighting personnel and equipment, we developed visualizations of resource use during recent late season, high-demand analogs. Our visualizations provided an overview of the crew, engine, dozer, aerial resource, and incident management team usage by geographic area. While these visualizations afforded information that managers needed to support their decisions regarding resource allocation, they also revealed a potentially significant gap between resource demand and late-season availability that is only likely to increase over time due to lengthening fire seasons. This gap highlights the need for the increased assessment of suppression resource acquisition and allocation systems that, to date, have been poorly studied.
In 2016, the USDA Forest Service, the largest wildfire management organization in the world, initiated the risk management assistance (RMA) program to improve the quality of strategic decision-making on its largest and most complex wildfire events. RMA was designed to facilitate a more formal risk management process, including the use of the best available science and emerging research tools, evaluation of alternative strategies, consideration of the likelihood of achieving objectives, and analysis of tradeoffs across a diverse range of incident objectives. RMA engaged personnel from a range of disciplines within the wildfire management system to co-produce actionable science that met the needs of the highly complex incident decision-making environment while aiming to align with best practices in risk assessment, structured decision-making, and technology transfer. Over the four years that RMA has been in practice, the content, structure, and method of information delivery have evolved. Furthermore, the RMA program’s application domain has expanded from merely large incident support to incorporate pre-event assessment and training, post-fire review, organizational change, and system improvement. In this article, we describe the history of the RMA program to date, provide some details and references to the tools delivered, and provide several illustrative examples of RMA in action. We conclude with a discussion of past and ongoing program adaptations and of how this can inform ongoing change efforts and offer thoughts on future directions.
In recent years, topics such as depression, suicide, PTSD, and substance use have garnered increasing attention and discussion within the wildland fire community. Yet, little research has examined psychological and behavioral health variables among wildland firefighters. Accurate information about these characteristics is necessary to help frame discussions targeted at wildland firefighter wellness and to lay the groundwork for understanding associations between wildland fire service and mental/behavioral health. To this end, the present study employed a cross-sectional design to describe probable presence of mental health conditions (PTSD, depression, generalized anxiety disorder), past-year suicidal ideation, risky alcohol use and tobacco use among wildland firefighters in the US. A large, convenience sample of current and former US wildland firefighters (n=2,625) was recruited through social media and electronic platforms hosted by firefighter aid organizations and interagency wildland fire groups. Respondents completed a comprehensive anonymous, self-report survey that contained standard health screeners and other relevant measures. The first 600 participants in the study were incentivized by the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation. Wildland firefighters in the sample reported relatively high rates of probable depression (17.3%), probable generalized anxiety disorder (12.8%), probable PTSD (13.7%), past year suicidal ideation (20.1%), past-month binge drinking (57%), heavy alcohol use (22%) and smokeless tobacco use (36.9%). These rates were 2-10 times higher than rates typically seen among the general public. Further, data showed a disparity between the prevalence of depression and PTSD identified by the study screening measures and the rates at which participants reported having been diagnosed by a healthcare provider. Finally, wildland firefighters in the study reported exposures to a variety of stressful events. Results of the study provide preliminary research data suggesting that wildland firefighters may be at greater risk of developing mental health conditions than the general public, and that a significant proportion of those conditions are under-detected and under-treated. Findings highlight the need for health surveillance and evidence-based health promotion and illness/injury prevention program development for wildland firefighters, particularly in psychological and behavioral health domains.
US fire scientists are developing Potential Wildfire Operational Delineations, also known as ‘PODs’, as a pre-fire season planning tool to promote safe and effective wildland fire response, strengthen risk management approaches in fire management and better align fire management objectives. PODs are a collaborative planning approach based on spatial analytics to identify potential wildfire control lines and assess the desirability of fire before ignition. They offer the opportunity to apply risk management principles with partners before the compressed timeframe of incident response. We sought to understand the potential utility of PODs and factors that may affect their use through semistructured interviews with personnel on several national forests. Interviewees said PODs offer a promising shift in the wildland fire management dynamic, particularly by facilitating proactive communication and coordination about wildfire response. Successfully employing PODs will require leadership commitment, stakeholder and partner engagement and interdisciplinary staff involvement. Our work offers insights for national forests and other jurisdictions where managers are looking to strengthen coordination and strategic approaches for wildland fire response by utilising pre-season collaboration and data analytics.
Quantifying fireline effectiveness (FLE) is essential to evaluate the efficiency of large wildfire management strategies to foster institutional learning and improvement in fire management organizations. FLE performance metrics for incident-level evaluation have been developed and applied to a small set of wildfires, but there is a need to understand how widely they vary across incidents to progress towards targets or standards for performance evaluation. Recent efforts to archive spatially explicit fireline records from large wildfires facilitate the application of these metrics to a broad sample of wildfires in different environments. We evaluated fireline outcomes (burned over, held, not engaged) and analyzed incident-scale FLE for 33 large wildfires in the western USA from the 2017 and 2018 fire seasons. FLE performance metrics varied widely across wildfires and often aligned with factors that influence suppression strategy. We propose a performance evaluation framework based on both the held to engaged fireline ratio and the total fireline to perimeter ratio. These two metrics capture whether fireline was placed in locations with high probability of engaging with the wildfire and holding and the relative level of investment in containment compared to wildfire growth. We also identify future research directions to improve understanding of decision quality in a risk-based framework.
Prescribed burns to reduce fuel can mitigate the risk of catastrophic wildfires. However, multiple barriers limit their deployment, resulting in their underutilization, particularly in forests. We evaluate sociopolitical barriers and opportunities for greater deployment in California, an area recurrently affected by catastrophic fires. We use a mixed-methods approach combining expert interviews, state legislative policy analysis and prescribed-burn data from state records. We identify three categories of barriers. Risk-related barriers (fear of liability and negative public perceptions) prevent landowners from beginning the burn planning process. Both resource-related barriers (limited funding, crew availability and experience) and regulations-related barriers (poor weather conditions for burning and environmental regulations) prevent landowners from conducting burns, creating a gap between planning and implementation. Recent policies have sought to address mainly risk-related challenges, although these and regulations-related challenges remain. Fundamental shifts in prescribed-burn policies, beyond those currently under consideration, are needed to address wildfires in California and worldwide. Recent policies to address wildfires mainly addressed risk-related challenges to conduct prescribed fires, but barriers related to resources and regulations need further action, according to a mixed-methods study.
Large and severe wildfires are an observable consequence of an increasingly arid American West. There is increasing consensus that human communities, land managers, and fire managers need to adapt and learn to live with wildfires. However, a myriad of human and ecological factors constrain adaptation, and existing science-based management strategies are not sufficient to address fire as both a problem and solution. To that end, we present a novel risk-science approach that aligns wildfire response decisions, mitigation opportunities, and land management objectives by consciously integrating social, ecological and fire management system needs. We use fire-prone landscapes of the US Pacific Northwest as our study area, and report on and describe how three complementary risk-based analytic tools—quantitative wildfire risk assessment, mapping of suppression difficulty, and atlases of potential control locations—can form the foundation for adaptive governance in fire management. Together, these tools integrate wildfire risk with fire management difficulties and opportunities, providing a more complete picture of the wildfire risk management challenge. Leveraging recent and ongoing experience integrating local experiential knowledge with these tools, we provide examples and discuss how these geospatial datasets create a risk-based planning structure that spans multiple spatial scales and uses. These uses include pre-planning strategic wildfire response, implementing safe wildfire response balancing risk with likelihood of success, and alignment of non-wildfire mitigation opportunities to support wildfire risk management more directly. We explicitly focus on multi-jurisdictional landscapes to demonstrate how these tools highlight the shared responsibility of wildfire risk mitigation. By integrating quantitative risk science, expert judgement and adaptive co-management, this process provides a much-needed pathway to transform fire-prone social ecological systems to be more responsive and adaptable to change and live with fire in an increasingly arid American West.
Prescribed fire is an important management tool on US federal lands that is not being applied at the necessary or desired levels. We investigated the role of policy barriers and opportunities for prescribed fire application on US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands in the western United States. We conducted 54 semi-structured interviews with federal and state land managers and air quality regulators, and with several non-federal partners. We found that lack of adequate capacity and funding were the most commonly cited barriers to increasing application of prescribed fire. Interviewees also emphasised that owing to a lack of incentives and the prevalence of risk aversion at multiple agency levels, active prescribed fire programs depend on the leadership and commitment of individual decision-makers and fire managers. Successful approaches also rely on collaborative forums and positions that allow communication, problem-solving and resource sharing among federal and state partners, and that facilitate dialogue between air-quality and land managers. We did not find that air quality regulation was consistently cited as a major barrier, except in specific locations. Our findings highlight the importance of contextualised investigation into policy barriers and the role of collaborative and multilevel governance approaches for addressing complex land management challenges.
Purpose of Review
Containing and controlling wildfire incidents is one of the main functions of fire management. Understanding how this can be done effectively and efficiently informs many of the preparatory activities undertaken by fire management agencies to limit the impact of wildfires. This second article within a two-part series summarizing the current understanding of wildfire suppression effectiveness details research undertaken at incident and landscape scales and discusses their motivations and implications. The series is concluded with a discussion of the major suppression effectiveness knowledge gaps at all scales with suggestions for addressing them.
Recent Findings
Research across incidents has been undertaken as case studies of specific events and economic analyses of productivity during the containment of large fires. Some recent case studies have demonstrated the benefits of fuel management for suppression effectiveness, while economic analyses have identified the contributions of different resource types to containment and found that productivity models developed using non-wildfire data grossly overpredict operational productivity. Research at the landscape scale has identified the variables important for fire outcomes, such as initial attack success and the effectiveness of fuel management programs, and has also identified the benefits of suppression policy changes using long-term datasets.
Summary
There are many ways that wildfire suppression effectiveness can be defined and measured. These depend on the scale and purpose that they are considered. Suppression effectiveness evaluation is challenging at most scales as it is can be undertaken for a range of objectives, is affected by many dynamic broad ranging variables, and because data is difficult to acquire. As a result, there are still many gaps in our understanding and new methods are required to capture the data required to fill these.
The United States’ National Cohesive Wildfire Management Strategy aims to achieve greater social and ecological resilience to wildfire. It also raises the question: cohesive for whom and for what purpose? In this article, we address the wildfire response goal and what a cohesive response means. Namely, we define a cohesive response as the ability to co-manage across scales for a more effective wildfire response. Our approach is grounded in the reality of the growing complexity of wildfire – both biophysically and socio-politically. We suggest that suppression and fire operations are necessary, but insufficient in the face of this growing complexity as we seek safer and effective wildfire response. Using network-based concepts and drawing from the literature on socio-ecological resilience, we consider how scales can be matched, what can and should be communicated across scales, and what this means for creating more adaptable institutions for more effective wildfire response. Survey results from 21 fires during the 2013 wildfire season are presented to illustrate relative areas of strength and weakness related to wildfire response and how these measurements can feed into processes to facilitate social learning, adaptation and ultimately more resilient socio-ecological wildfire response institutions.
Interagency Hotshot Crews (IHCs) are a crucial firefighting suppression resource in the United States. These crews travel substantial distances each year and work long and arduous assignments that can cause accumulated fatigue. Current dispatching practices for these crews are supposed to send the closest resource while adhering to existing fatigue-management policies. In this research, we designed a simulation process that repeatedly implements an optimisation model to assign crews to suppression requests. This study examines the potential effects of using an optimisation approach to shorten seasonal crew travel distances and mitigate fatigue. We also examine the potential benefits of coordinating crew-dispatch decisions to meet multiple requests. Results indicate there is substantial room for improvement in reducing travel distances while still balancing crew fatigue; coordinating crew dispatching for multiple requests can increase the assignment efficiency, particularly when both fatigue mitigation and travel distances are jointly optimised. This research indicates implementing an optimisation model for dispatching IHCs is promising.
In the western United States and elsewhere, the need to change society’s relationship with wildfire is well-recognized. Suppressing fewer fires in fire-prone systems is promoted to escape existing feedback loops that lead to ever worsening conditions and increasing risks to responders and communities. Our primary focus is how to catalyze changes in fire manager behavior such that responses are safer, more effective, and capitalize on opportunities for expanded use of fire. We daylight deep-seated, systemic drivers of behavior, and in so doing, challenge ingrained ways of thinking and acting that may be inconsistent with current intentions around wildland fire management. We pose the questions of whether all fires are emergencies that require rapid deployment and concentration of suppression resources, whether rhetoric and actions align with policy and guidance, and whether we can unambiguously define and measure what a safe and effective response looks like. Using the Forest Service of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) as a relevant test case for systemic investigation, we argue that fundamental changes in how the fire management community thinks about, learns from, plans for, and responds to wildland fires may be necessary. Our intention is to initiate a broader dialog around the current and future state of wildland fire management.
Significance
When houses are built close to forests or other types of natural vegetation, they pose two problems related to wildfires. First, there will be more wildfires due to human ignitions. Second, wildfires that occur will pose a greater risk to lives and homes, they will be hard to fight, and letting natural fires burn becomes impossible. We examined the number of houses that have been built since 1990 in the United States in or near natural vegetation, in an area known as the wildland-urban interface (WUI), and found that a large number of houses have been built there. Approximately one in three houses and one in ten hectares are now in the WUI. These WUI growth trends will exacerbate wildfire problems in the future.
Significance
Fighting wildfires in the United States costs billions of dollars annually. Public dialog and ongoing research have focused on increasing wildfire risk because of climate warming, overlooking the direct role that people play in igniting wildfires and increasing fire activity. Our analysis of two decades of government agency wildfire records highlights the fundamental role of human ignitions. Human-started wildfires accounted for 84% of all wildfires, tripled the length of the fire season, dominated an area seven times greater than that affected by lightning fires, and were responsible for nearly half of all area burned. National and regional policy efforts to mitigate wildfire-related hazards would benefit from focusing on reducing the human expansion of the fire niche.
Widespread fire activity taxes suppression resources and can compound wildfire hazards. We examine the geographic synchronicity of fire danger across western United States forests as a proxy for the strain on fire suppression resource availability. Interannual variability in the number of days with synchronous fire danger, defined as fire weather indices exceeding the local 90th percentile across ≥40% of forested land, was strongly correlated (r = 0.85) with the number of days with high strain on national fire management resources. A 25-day increase in the annual number of days with synchronous fire danger was observed during 1979–2020. Climate projections show a doubling of such days by 2051–2080. Such changes will escalate the likelihood of years with extended periods of synchronous fire danger that have historically strained suppression efforts and contributed to additional burned area, therein requiring additional management strategies for coping with anticipated surges in fire suppression demands.
Wildland firefighters are exposed to wood smoke, which contains hazardous air pollutants, by suppressing thousands of wildfires across the U. S. each year. We estimated the relative risk of lung cancer and cardiovascular disease mortality from existing PM 2.5 exposure-response relationships using measured PM 4 concentrations from smoke and breathing rates from wildland firefighter field studies across different exposure scenarios. To estimate the relative risk of lung cancer (LC) and cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality from exposure to PM 2.5 from smoke, we used an existing exposure-response (ER) relationship. We estimated the daily dose of wildfire smoke PM 2.5 from measured concentrations of PM 4 , estimated wildland firefighter breathing rates, daily shift duration (hours per day) and frequency of exposure (fire days per year and career duration). Firefighters who worked 49 days per year were exposed to a daily dose of PM 4 that ranged from 0.15 mg to 0.74 mg for a 5- and 25-year career, respectively. The daily dose for firefighters working 98 days per year of PM 4 ranged from 0.30 mg to 1.49 mg. Across all exposure scenarios (49 and 98 fire days per year) and career durations (5–25 years), we estimated that wildland firefighters were at an increased risk of LC (8 percent to 43 percent) and CVD (16 percent to 30 percent) mortality. This unique approach assessed long term health risks for wildland firefighters and demonstrated that wildland firefighters have an increased risk of lung cancer and cardiovascular disease mortality.
Public management scholars have long sought to understand design principles that can promote the adaptability and resilience of complex organizational systems operating in uncertain and turbulent environments. Perhaps nowhere is this need more acute than in developing systems for responding to complex disasters. One concept that has received significant attention in discussion of resilient systems design is the notion of redundancy; however, existing literatures offer contradictory theories as to whether redundant designs enhance or undermine system resilience. Using case study data from three large-scale wildfire events, this article extends the theoretical discussion of redundancy by developing a typology of redundancy strategies and investigating their application and associated consequences in incident response. Our findings reveal four principal ways redundancy can be integrated into system design: backup, cross-functionality, duplication and cross-checking. Further, each redundancy type is associated with its own capabilities for enhancing system resilience as well as its own set of risk factors that, if left unmanaged, could undermine system functioning. Findings demonstrate how understanding both the potential value and risk portfolio associated with each type of redundancy clarifies the management challenge for responders when employing these strategies.
This study examines the production and efficiency of wildland fire suppression effort. We estimate the effectiveness of suppression resource inputs to produce controlled fire lines that contain large wildland fires using stochastic frontier analysis. Determinants of inefficiency are identified and the effects of these determinants on the daily production of controlled fire line are examined. Results indicate that the use of bulldozers and fire engines increase the production of controlled fire line, while firefighter crews do not tend to contribute to controlled fire line production. Production of controlled fire line is more efficient if it occurs along natural or built breaks, such as rivers and roads, and within areas previously burned by wildfires. However, results also indicate that productivity and efficiency of the controlled fire line are sensitive to weather, landscape and fire characteristics.
Wildfire suppression expenditures on national forest land have increased over the last 35 years, exceeding US$1 billion in 2000 and 2002. These increases in expenditure have been attributed, in part, to a century of aggressive wildfire suppression, resulting in a buildup of fuel on the nation's forests. The efficiency of the current incentive structure faced by Forest Service fire managers is analyzed. An alternative incentive structure is presented that encourages fire managers, as they work to limit wildfire damages, to contain costs and consider the beneficial effects of wildfire. FOR. SCI. 51(5):387395.
Billions of dollars are spent annually in the United States to contain large wildland fires, but the factors contributing to suppression success remain poorly understood. We used a regression model (generalized linear mixed-model) to model containment probability of individual fires, assuming that containment was a repeated-measures problem (fixed effect) and individual fires were random effects. Changes in daily fire size from 306 fires occurring in years 2001-2005 were processed to identify intervals of high spread from those of low spread. The model was tested against independent data from 140 fires in 2006. The analysis suggested that containment was positively related to the number of consecutive days during which the fire grew little and the number of previous intervals. Containment probability was negatively related to the length of intervals during which the fire exhibited high spread and the presence of timber fuel types, but fire size was not a significant predictor. Characterization of containment probability may be a useful component of cost-benefit analysis of large fire management and planning systems.
- Flores
Pivoting during the pandemic: How COVID-19 and the 2020 wildland fire year created a novel learning opportunity for USDA Forest Service wildland fire management
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Impacts of the Profession as Recognized by Partners/Spouses
- Grassroots Wildland Firefighers
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Recognized by Partners/Spouses. Available at: https://www.grassrootswildlandfirefighters.com/partnerspouse-survey. Date accessed
10 November 2022.
Aerial Firefighting Use and Effectiveness (AFUE)
- Usda Forest Service
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(AFUE) Report. 2020. https://www.fs.usda.gov/sites/default/
files/2020-08/08242020_afue_final_report.pdf.
El Dorado Incident -Organizational Learning Report
- Usda Forest Service
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Learning Report. 2021. https://www.fs.usda.gov/inside-fs/out-andabout/el-dorado-fire-learning-review-now-available-online.
Confronting the Wildfire Crisis
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USDA Forest Service. 2021c. Confronting the Wildfire Crisis. https://
www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/wildfire-crisis.