Peterson placed a can of Liquid Death on the conference table and glanced around the room before his morning briefing.
“Are you ready for some rock and roll?” he asked.
When the entire Western world is on fire at once, they will be the ones dealing with it.
Peterson manages a staff of 32 at the National Interagency Coordination Center, which sits on a fenced-in federal site adjacent to the Boise airport. Officials from the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and Bureau of Indian Affairs must constantly assess multiple, rapidly changing fire threats and allocate limited resources where they can be used most effectively.
After weeks of intense heat and waves of thunderstorms, there are now so many fires burning that the U.S. has reached readiness level 5. Staff here say this has only happened four times in the past 20 years at this time of summer.
At times like these, there’s no way we can get enough help.
“No fire can get everything it wants,” Peterson said.
The vibe here isn’t Situation Room suits and ties. It’s more laid back and outdoorsy. Short sleeves, jeans, sandals, tattoos. But the work is serious.
On the video screen, CEO Jeff Walther Firefighters from the Pacific Northwest region told the group that a single-engine aerial tanker had crashed the previous night while fighting a new fire near the Falls Fire in the Malheur National Forest.
“Ground crews are searching the scene this morning,” Walther said. “It’s pretty difficult terrain. Smoke is still obstructing the scene.”
“Thank you, Jeff. We, along with everyone in the deployment coordination community, wish you the best,” Derek Hartman, the center’s associate director, told Jeff. “We are deeply saddened by the current situation.”
The Forest Service and Grant County Sheriff’s Office later confirmed the pilot had died.
Coordination Centre staff are familiar with these risks. Nearly all of them were once firefighters, and many of them have been working together for years or even decades, building friendships and trust that help them navigate the logistical chaos of any given day.
Peterson, a third-generation firefighter who sustained a scar on his right cheek during the close call, grew up in California and started his first job as a firefighter two weeks after graduating from high school. He grew up in Paradise, a mountain town that was devastated by the 2018 Camp Fire, one of the deadliest fires in U.S. history. Both of Peterson’s childhood homes were destroyed.
In his 30 years on the job, he’s seen fires grow in size and intensity. Winter fires have burned more than 1,000 homes. Repeatedly burned forests quickly turned to burning grasslands. When he started in the business, he says, a 50,000-acre fire was an extremely rare event.
“It’s the norm now,” he said. “Right now we have six fires burning over 100,000 acres, and it’s not even August yet.”
Peterson acknowledges that rising temperatures due to climate change are a factor, but he also believes the country’s fire problem is worsening due to thinning forests caused by deforestation and the decline of the logging industry that provided a base from which firefighters could operate.
This summer’s fire surge follows two years of relatively few fires, due to abundant rain and snow in the West over the winter. Fire experts say a wet winter means more grass, which, combined with increased heat, can eventually dry out and become firewood.
“Nobody can turn good news into bad news here,” said a Bureau of Indian Affairs official. a fire and fuels analyst at the center.
The year got off to an ominous start with wildfires burning more than a million acres in Texas and Oklahoma.
“There’s no way we’re having a million-acre fire in February,” Larrabee said.
A number of large wildfires have been burning in the Pacific Northwest and California over the past few weeks, and now fires are burning in the Great Basin and northern Rocky Mountains. About 3.8 million acres have burned in the U.S. this year, above the 10-year average of 3.4 million acres.
Larrabee has been tracking indicators of dead trees and vegetation dryness, and while the numbers look OK, he worries they don’t really match up with the “spectacular fire patterns” currently occurring in parts of the West.
“Things that normally provide fire protection, such as green vegetation, are not acting as fire protection in the way that they normally do,” he said.
The biggest threat right now is the Park Fire near Chico, California, which has burned more than 300,000 acres in just three days. Authorities believe the blaze, which is threatening thousands of homes, was started by an arsonist. Evacuation orders have been issued for several areas, including the rebuilding area of Peterson’s hometown of Paradise.
“Once all of this settles down in the fall, this fire will be one of the largest, if not the largest, most destructive fires on record in the country,” Peterson said Saturday.
In this situation, the coordination center must guide badly needed firefighting resources along a constantly changing map.
Firefighters in the Great Basin, where 26 fires were burning in the past day, said Friday they needed all kinds of firefighting and air support, while the northern Rockies, battling 77 fires, are in need of chimney jumpers and personnel to rappel from helicopters.
Food shortages are more pronounced at times like these: All 27 contractors who provide meals to firefighting camps are already contracted, forcing firefighters to buy whatever food they can get their hands on.
A day earlier, demand for infrared flights to survey fire boundaries and rescue new blazes hit a high this year, with 81 requests, and all 91 of the federal government’s single-engine aerial tankers used to drop water and other firefighting agents on the blazes were booked, with none available, staff on the ground reported.
More than 26,020 firefighters have been deployed to major fires alone – the highest number so far this year – and more help is needed.
Peterson met Thursday with officials from Australia and New Zealand, longtime firefighting partners of the U.S. The two countries agreed to send 80 personnel to the firefighting effort, including badly needed middle management such as department supervisors and task force leaders, who will arrive in early August.
The most serious staffing shortages, Peterson said, are at local fire command centers, where there are more than 100 vacancies. These demanding jobs involve answering 911 calls and coordinating the response to new or growing fires.
“Nobody wants to do it anymore because they’re burned out,” he says. “It never stops.”
And there’s no respite ahead: Red flag warnings have been issued across the West, with wind gusts expected to reach 45 mph. Fires are also raging in Canada, and smoke has finally reached Europe just as the Olympics are getting underway, one official noted. Outside the national fire command center, a plume of yellow smoke hung low in the sky above Boise.
At the end of his morning briefing, Peterson reminded staff to look after their own health.
“This is going to be a marathon,” he said.
