If Wildland Firefighters Are "Essential", Why Do They Make $15/Hour? "Exodus" Underway

[hatrack]

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But at exactly the time when the country needs wildland firefighters more than ever, the federal government is losing them. In the past three years, according to the Forest Service’s own assessments, it has suffered an attrition rate of 45% among its permanent employees. Many people inside and outside the fire service believe this represents one of the worst crises in its history. Last spring, as the 2023 fire season was getting started, I asked Grant Beebe, a former smokejumper who now heads the Bureau of Land Management’s fire program, if there had been an exodus of wildland firefighters. He initially hesitated. “‘Exodus’ is a pretty strong word,” he said. But then he reconsidered. “I’ll say yeah. Yeah.” “The ship is sinking,” Abel Martinez, a Forest Service engine captain in California and the national fire chair for the National Federation of Federal Employees, the union that represents wildland firefighters, told me. (For this story, almost every wildland firefighter who agreed to use their full name has an official role with the union; the one firefighter identified by their middle name does not.)

Although nobody could provide precise numbers, leaders like Beebe are especially concerned that the attrition has been particularly acute among those with extensive experience — those like Elkind. It takes years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to train a wildland firefighter capable of overseeing the numerous resources — engines, helicopters, smokejumpers — that are deployed on large fires. As Beebe put it, “You can’t just hire some person off the street into one of our higher-level management jobs.”

The reasons for the exodus are many, but fundamentally it reflects an inattentive bureaucracy and a culture that suppresses internal criticism. Only in 2022 did the fire service acknowledge an explicit link between cancer and wildland firefighters, even though officials have long expressed concern about the connection. And it was only last year that the fire service held its first conference on mental health, even though officials have been aware for decades of the high incidence of substance abuse and divorce among wildland firefighters. But more than anything, wildland firefighters are leaving because they’re compensated so poorly, the result of a byzantine civil service structure that makes it extremely hard to sustain a career. The federal fire service is responsible for managing blazes on nearly 730 million acres of land — an area almost the size of India. Among the five agencies, one dominates in terms of influence and size: the Forest Service, which employs more than 11,000 wildland firefighters, most of whom work from roughly April to October. The hiring system dates to the early years of the agency, when it often recruited from bars and relied on volunteers to suppress wildfires by 10 a.m.

About one third of the workforce is temporary — firefighters who are automatically laid off at the end of each season. Even those who are permanent receive compensation starting at $15 per hour until they accumulate overtime and hazard pay. Because of the way the government classifies their work, it’s extremely difficult for wildland firefighters to increase their base salaries unless they frequently move around the country. Altogether, it’s a pay structure that incentivizes risk taking and a nomadic existence.

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https://thinc.blog/2024/03/19/low-wages-driving-wildland-firefighters-from-the-field/