By Bob Timmons
Star Tribune
WASHINGTON — Wary of wildfire threats, the U.S. Forest Service is asking as many as 1,400 employees who left the agency in recent months to help fight wildfires this summer.
The request is to employees who resigned amid the Trump administration’s cost-cutting measures but remain on leave through Sept. 30 under a “deferred resignation program.” The Forest Service now wants to put them to work if needed because they have firefighting qualifications, or “red cards,” in addition to their main duties.
Minnesota just experienced one of its most-active and damaging spring wildfire seasons in years.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which oversees the Forest Service, isn’t giving specific numbers of how many employees who work in the Superior and Chippewa national forests in northern Minnesota could be called upon. The department also didn’t say how many firefighters are employed currently in Minnesota. All questions to Minnesota officials in recent months have been directed to agency national headquarters in Washington, D.C.
The Forest Service currently employs 10,856 firefighters (8,985 permanent and 1,871 temporary) nationally, according to a spokesperson for the USDA.
Thousands of Forest Service employees across the country have been fired or left their jobs as part of the federal government downsizing. The Trump administration said firefighters were exempt from job cuts, but it is believed that thousands of employees with firefighting training took buyouts and early retirements. A freeze on hiring summer seasonal workers also affected the agency’s firefighting capacity because some of those workers hold red cards. The cuts are believed to have reduced the agency’s workforce of about 30,000 by 10%.
Former wildland firefighter Ryan Miller of Cook, Minn., said even some people in the firefighting community aren’t sure about the current capacity to respond to blazes.
“We are not just really sure where we stand on the number of firefighters in Minnesota or nationally,” said Miller, who was a federal hotshot crew member in the western U.S. and also worked for the Minnesota and Wisconsin departments of natural resources. He now teaches wildland firefighting at Minnesota North College’s Vermilion campus in Ely.
Miller said when he talks with former colleagues at federal agencies like the Forest Service, National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management, “it is confusion right now.”
Luke Mayfield, president of Grasslands Wildland Firefighters, an advocacy group, said the federal government needed to act because officials recognized that the agency is understaffed as peak wildfire season arrives.
“I think it is something that had to be done,” Mayfield said.
The USDA has said that many of the employees on leave sought to help firefighting efforts if needed before their leave ends. Now, those workers that are interested could be called to help.
When the government began firing land management agency probationary workers in February, a Superior National Forest employee who requested anonymity told the Star Tribune that the forest staff was “in crisis mode.” The agency already was in a hiring freeze for seasonal workers this summer.
The worker also said career employees felt pressured to resign or risk losing benefits if they were fired. The workforce that manages the 3 million-acre national forest “already is 100 employees down” to about 250, the employee added.
Timo Rova, a former fire supervisor in the western zone of the Superior National Forest covering the LaCroix, Laurentian and Kawishiwi districts, said some of the employees with red cards constitute what’s known in firefighting as “the militia.”
“Nonprimary fire personnel are a huge asset to the wildfire and prescribed burning effort,” Rova added. Employees fill an assortment of jobs, from mapping to security to communications — even meal delivery.
“When we have fires like Jenkins Creek and Camp House, the whole district is part of firefighting for a part of each day.”
Despite the Forest Service action, Mayfield said the support gap created by the federal reductions is happening at a volatile time.
“This is a (wildfire) environment that we truly haven’t been in,” he added, “and now we are losing some of our strongest leadership across the board.”
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