COVID-19 creates new challenges for wildland firefighters

With the novel coronavirus creating havoc around the world, the men and women charged with fighting wildfires are developing plans now on what they can do to keep the virus from decimating those serving on the front lines and in support roles.

To do that, national forests like the Bitterroot are looking to add additional firefighters over the next few weeks to beef up local resources so they can hit wildfires hard while the fires are still small. They are also looking at ways to generate a public outreach effort in hopes of keeping the numbers of human-caused fires at a minimum.

Nationwide, the Forest Service plans to add 1,000 new firefighters this season.

In Region 1, which includes northern Idaho, Montana and parts of the Dakotas, the agency plans to advertise for 60 permanent positions and a like number of temporary jobs.

“We’re looking for those individuals who are hard workers, work well on a team, have a sense of adventure and who will look at the Forest Service for excellent job opportunities,” said Nez-Perce-Clearwater National Forest fire staff officer Kevin Pfister.

The jobs will be advertised on www.usajobs.gov starting Monday.

Bitterroot National Forest fire management officer Mark Wilson plans to add up to 17 firefighters to his 80-person crew.

Unlike in past years when firefighters from all over the nation moved from one hot spot the next and large fire camps suddenly blossomed on school parking lots or empty meadows, the focus this year will be on keeping fire crews as local as possible and camps split up and small.

“We’re going to try to maximize the resources that we have locally as opposed to moving resources around as we’ve done in the past,” Wilson said. “We will be doing more dispersed camps. People won’t see firefighters gathering in one spot. The camps will be more self-sufficient. People will be potentially be roughing it a little bit more. They’ll likely be eating MREs as opposed to having a full kitchen.”

On the Bitterroot Forest, fire crews will be broke into modules of five to 10 firefighters who will work together as a unit and do their best to keep enough distance between themselves and other modules to reduce the potential spread of the virus.

“People won’t be moving around an incident as freely as they have in the past,” Wilson said. “They will be assigned a chunk of line and do the best they can to maintain separation. Ideally, the worst thing that could happen is that we would end up with illness in a single module, which is better than the entire crew.”

Even the elite 20-person Bitterroot Hot Shot crew will be divided in three modules.

“While they’ll still be working together, they will be split into three different groups to keep them from interacting as much as possible,” Wilson said.

Wilson said the objective will be to keep all fires on the national forest — including wilderness — small and limit the amount of smoke that’s produced.

Traditionally, the Forest Service could depend on Trapper Creek Job Corps for a crew of close to 50 young first-time firefighters anxious to get out on the line. The Ravalli County-based Job Corps also trained support staff who helped out in the fire camps.

This year will be different.

Training at all of the country’s 24 Job Corps Centers was suspended at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and the students sent home.

Trapper Creek Job Corps assistant fire management officer Justin Abbey said 45 students had signed up for wildfire training this year. After the center was temporarily closed, Abbey and other firefighting instructors at Trapper Creek created a virtual online guard camp training module they sent out to those students.

“Our intention was twofold,” Abbey said. “It was a way to stay in contact with those who had signed up for the fire crew. We could check on their well-being. A lot of them had to return to situations that weren’t good. We wanted to do what we could to ensure they wouldn’t stop moving forward even as the world was coming to a halt.”

The U.S. Department of Labor has currently set May 10 as the date for the Job Corps Centers to restart training, but Abbey isn’t sure that will happen now.

“The Department of Labor has three things to keep in mind as it considers reopening,” he said. “It has to take into account the safety of the students, the safety of the staff and the safety of the communities. … We have students that come here from all over the country. We have to be sure the community is good with it.”

At this point, Abbey said there are about seven students who have remained in Ravalli County. If the center doesn’t reopen in May, his hope is they may be able to hire those seven and create a fire crew with the seven staff members at Trapper Creek.

“If we were able to do that, we could still provide a surge force for the forest this summer,” Abbey said.

If the decision is made to delay reopening the center, Abbey said there’s a chance that Job Corps could follow the model the Bitterroot National Forest has used in bringing on seasonal employees from outside the area, which includes a 14-day quarantine.

“We might be able to do a phased approach at reopening that would bring the firefighters back first,” Abbey said. “In the second phase, camp crew members could maybe return.”

National Interagency Fire Center Acting External Affair Chief Jessica Gardetto said the interagency group is currently developing regional wildland fire response plans that will provide guidance for dealing with COVID-19 during the upcoming fire season.

Social distancing is a challenge when it comes to fighting wildfire.

The Lolo Hot Shots discovered that last week after being dispatched to a fire and immediately faced problems with parking the additional vehicles they required to stay separated.

“Sometimes there’s just not a lot of room to park extra vehicles when you respond to a fire,” Gardetto said. “We’re going to have to work through issues like that.”

The forecast calls for a normal fire year in many areas of the West. In some locations, it could be above normal.

While the focus is on keeping firefighting resources local, Gardetto said there may be cases where that’s not possible. With some local jurisdictions or states saying they won’t allow their fire resources to leave the area or state, public land managers could face problems with finding people to staff the fire lines.

The interagency team is also looking at methods to keep its firefighters safe from the novel coronavirus. They are checking to see if it’s possible to check everyone’s temperature or feasible for firefighters to wear masks while on the fire line.

“There are a lot of things that still need to be worked out,” Gardetto said.