Feds aid fire fight

Jace Radke

Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2000 | 11:06 a.m.

How to join

Those interested in joining the Forest Service or the BLM as a firefighter can find application information on the websites www.fs.fed.us/fsjobs and www.nc.blm.gov/jobs

After being stretched to the breaking point by a fire season that saw more than 90,000 wildfires blaze across more than 7.2 million acres, the country's firefighting agencies are getting some much-needed help in the form of federal dollars for more firefighters.

The National Fire Plan will disperse $1.5 million to create 3,500 new firefighting positions nationwide, including an estimated 200 positions in Nevada.

About 1.6 million acres burned in Nevada during the 1999 fire season, and another 635,000 acres were scorched during the cooler months, emphasizing the need for more firefighter hand crews and equipment, Nevada Bureau of Land Management spokeswoman Jo Simpson said.

"In 1999 we had more fires, but luckily there weren't a lot of other fires around the country, so we didn't have a hard time getting help," Simpson said. "This year was busy across the country and resources were stretched really thin, making it a little scary there for a while. The new positions are going to help and enhance our firefighting capabilities."

During this year's fire season, which started in mid-February and lasted through October, standing orders for firefighters, helicopters and specialized crews of firefighters went unanswered in what officials called one of the worst years in history. Hand crews made up of prisoners, military personnel and firefighters from Australia, New Zealand and Canada were pushed into service on fire lines across the West.

The BLM estimates that it will hire about 100 additional seasonal firefighters in Nevada, including 50 career-seasonal firefighters, full-time positions that qualify for benefits. The BLM is also estimating it will hire 15 to 20 full-time supervisors, bringing the number of firefighting personnel in the local bureau to more than 300.

The Forest Service crews stationed in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest will add about 80 new firefighting positions, many of them full time, giving that agency more than 140 firefighters in Nevada.

"What this does is increase some of our stations and crews to seven-day-a- week operations," BLM State Fire Management Officer Kevin Hall said. "It guarantees that we'll be fully funded, and will allow us to start our seasonal firefighters a little earlier in the year and keep them a little longer."

New equipment is also part of the national funding measure, with the BLM hoping to get air tankers -- planes used to drop fire retardant -- stationed in Las Vegas and Wells.

The BLM has also budgeted for a new helicopter, four new heavy fire engines and a " hot shot" crew in Elko. The highly trained hot shots work at the flash points between moving walls of flames, digging fire breaks, putting out hot spots and lighting back fires to suck oxygen out of the wildfire. A hot shot crew is also planned for nearby Cedar City, Utah.

The Forest Service expects the funding will supply the Humboldt-Toiyabe with 10 engines and 15 patrol trucks next year.

Rose Davis, a spokeswoman for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, the coordination command for wildland fire efforts across the country, said the added resources are always welcome.

"Last summer we were short on people," Davis said. "The new resources increase our capabilities to attack these fires while they're small and knock them down before they really get going."

Finding 3,500 new firefighters across the country may have been made easier by the 2000 fire season that nationwide burned nearly twice as much land as the 10-year average of 3.78 million acres.

"We trained a lot of crews over the course of the season, and we reached out to a lot of communities for volunteers," Davis said. "We had a lot of crews made up of Jane and John Public. Working for an entire season is definitely more rigorous, but I think some of those people got to see what this is all about, and will come back for more training and fill some of these jobs."

There is always a need for such inexperienced help to fill the seasonal ranks, Humboldt-Toiyabe Assistant Fire Management Officer Grace Newell said, but it will be harder to fill full-time and supervisory positions where experience is a must.

"You don't make firefighters overnight, so it's going to be a challenge," Newell said. "We're looking for engine captains and fire technicians with a minimum of two years of firefighting experience. This is a big chunk of personnel to add when there's already not enough of the experienced firefighters to go around."