Here’s the link. I didn’t find anything surprising. others?
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Our dedication to service, along with our connection to the land and local communities, is what makes our agency strong. This is exemplified by our employees who work tirelessly to reduce wildfire risk and respond to wildfires and disasters. As we continue this critical agency work this year, and in light of the many hazards we face, I expect each of you to prioritize safety as you perform your jobs.
Reducing the risk of wildfire is a key component of our wildfire strategies. I will continue to support your collaborative work with local governments, states, tribes, landowners, industry and conservation partners to develop strategies that reflect local needs and priorities in our fire risk reduction work. Continuing science-based strategies, including the potential operational delineations, is critical to ensure we do the right work in the right places. We will also continue to work with our partners who hold critical agreements for risk mitigation, including shared stewardship agreements with states and the National Alliance of Forest Owners Fuel Break Memorandum of Understanding. Active forest management, coupled with our continued focus on prevention, and continuing our crucial hazardous fuels reduction efforts, will make the difference needed to restore resilient landscapes, especially in high-risk areas.
There are inherent risks in suppressing wildfires. I expect utilization of all available tools, technology and experience to ensure a risk-informed response. However, this will never mitigate all the risks associated with the work that you do. I want each and every unit to take a tactical pause during your pre-season training, cooperator meetings, and throughout the season as needed, to acknowledge the challenges you face in focusing on the job at hand, rather than the greater uncertainty around us. While I recognize there are many changes taking place in our agency, I want your mind to be as focused as possible while in the midst of fire season.
Fire seasons have been trending longer with more extreme fire behavior, coupled with unprecedented demand for personnel and resources, which has required us to adapt over the past several years. With that in mind, we will continue to focus on safe, aggressive initial attack. We will make appropriate risk informed efforts to fully suppress small fires before they become large, complex incidents to ensure we can protect lives, property, valuable timber and natural resources. It is critical that we suppress fires as swiftly as possible to minimize the amount of fireline exposure and be ready for the next ignition. This means employing direct attack tactics when and where feasible to minimize fire size and time to containment when safe and practicable to do so. As always, we will use all available risk-management tools and deploy resources appropriately depending on resource availability, time of year, communities, infrastructure, natural resources, weather, drought and wildfire activity.
With our current fire conditions, we need to use our firefighting capacity as efficiently as possible. There may be very limited opportunities for in-season prescribed fire or the use of natural ignitions to safely reduce future wildfires outlined in the Interagency Standards for Fire and Fire Aviation Operations (Red Book). We will also use those procedures in Preparedness Level 3. If those opportunities exist, they should be well understood by partners and key stakeholders through open, collaborative preseason and ongoing dialogue, as well as risk shared with both regional foresters and the national headquarters. We will continue to innovate, using technology for fire detection and suppression such as uncrewed aerial systems, satellite surveillance, cameras, tracking and remote sensing, to increase efficiency and accuracy while reducing exposure to firefighters.
To bring added focus and reduce unnecessary distraction during the period when we need to prioritize wildfire response, I expect leaders from our national headquarters to the districts to:
- Eliminate barriers and unnecessary procedures that impede resource capability or mobilization.
- Prioritize employees’ ability to maintain or update their fireline qualifications (red cards) and make red-carded personnel available for fire assignments.
- Roster agency administrators to be available to fill critical needs on fires, as well as to mentor, support and fill in where new line officers have limited fire qualifications.
- Ensure adequate, timely contracting and agreement support, and provide clear direction that fire response is the priority.
- Actively manage the stress and fatigue of all employees engaged in fire response.
- Adjust program output and service expectations as wildfire and all-hazard response grows.
- Continue to prioritize wildfire risk reduction for the communities we serve by conducting vegetation management projects where capacity remains to do so.
I am sincerely proud of the men and women that make up our wildfire program, from firefighters, fire management leaders and agency administrators to dispatchers, support staff and all that participate on incident management teams, including those additional staff that step in to cover other duties as needed. I appreciate your passion, dedication and desire to serve. Your safety, the safety of all fire personnel, and the safety of the public is my highest priority.
Your role in ensuring another successful fire year is crucial. Thank you for your service and commitment. I am honored to serve as your Chief and look forward to meeting many of you in the field soon.
Sounds like a return to the 10 am policy to me.
I would say it sounds like “let’s be careful out there with dangerous conditions and potentially not enough resources.” Maybe I’m too literally minded, but it doesn’t say 10 AM. What would you say instead?
I would interpret this as “sic ‘em”! It doesn’t rule out managed fire but I read it as “heads will roll” if’n you mess it up! I does not say 10:00 AM policy, but it’s dang close to it, and rightly so!
These sentences to me indicate that the USFS will attempt to put out all fires “as swiftly as possible:”
“It is critical that we suppress fires as swiftly as possible to minimize the amount of fireline exposure and be ready for the next ignition. This means employing direct attack tactics when and where feasible to minimize fire size and time to containment when safe and practicable to do so.”
Employing aggressive initial attack/suppression tactics and keeping fires small is exactly what the 10 am policy was about. That policy failed, and contributed significantly to the fire deficit and lack of ecological resilience that we see today.
Not necessarily; the 10:00AM policy was a directive to try and keep fires small because the US seemed to always be at war, and the inventory of young men were most likely toting rifles instead of shovels.
As time moved on, and the FS became a shell of its management potential, the majority of rural public lands were ceded to so called efficiency of government operations. These efforts emptied ranger districts, combined and consolidated for the greater good, and industry became the evil doer of all things. Most of the time, and I’m smarter enough to not say all the time, good, proactive management can and will temper fire effects!
The ability to put fire back on the land has to be managed by those who have a scientific background, and not whomever is carrying the matches! Years and years of built up fuels, from lack of vegetation management, or lack of fire return intervals in non-commercial venues must be treated prior to managing fire – directly or indirectly.
The 10:00 AM Rule is a good directive to shake a stick at but it now suffers from the same hysteria as is around climate change. Given the history of early FS census of employees and the threats of evil doers world wide, it made good sense – still does!
Hi Susan: Why do you say the 10 AM policy failed? I ran reforestation crews for more than 20 years and we never experienced — much less fought — a major wildfire during that entire time. Then Wilderness, EAJA, and ESA “critical habitat” considerations ended the 10 AM rule technically by the late 1970s and practically by the early 1990s and the clearly predicted catastrophic wildfires have taken place ever since. Not fire suppression, but passive fuel management regulations is what made these predictions possible. Field science, not computer models.
I think the idea of a “fire deficit” is interesting, but completely theoretical. It matters — a lot — whether fuel is used to heat a home or produce electricity rather than burning in a wildfire. “Ecological resilience” is another interesting term that sounds “scientific,” but is largely meaningless. This speculation is great for abstract discussions and perhaps legal arguments, but can’t be measured or otherwise clearly defined. And for what purpose?
The 10 a.m. policy failed because in suppressing all fires, including small ones essential to fire-dependent ecosystems, it contributed to the build-up of fuels that were/are neither ecologically appropriate nor sustainable.
The fire deficit is real and has been documented by scientists, for example:
– A fire deficit persists across diverse North American forests despite recent increases in area burned (available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56333-8)
– Wildland fire deficit and surplus in the western United States, 1984–2012 (available at https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1890/ES15-00294.1)
– Fire deficits have increased drought sensitivity in dry conifer forests: Fire frequency and tree-ring carbon isotope evidence from Central Oregon (available at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gcb.14543)
Hi Susan: I’m not sure who decides when a fire becomes “essential” to a “fire-dependent ecosystem,” but I hope that decision-maker doesn’t claim their determination was based on “science.” Or, if so, it is clearly described as “political science.”
Question: People are the only animals that can start and manage fires. Does your definition of a “fire-dependent ecosystem” include any pre-human or non-human landscapes?
“Then Wilderness, EAJA, and ESA “critical habitat” considerations ended the 10 AM rule …” Please explain (citing your sources like SJ did).
Hi Jon: It’s a reading comprehension or selective editing (“bias”) thing. You have excluded the words “technical” vs. “practical” from my statement. Technically, the 10 AM policy was abandoned in 1978. Google will confirm. On a practical basis, the creation of passively-managed landscapes and roadless areas directly resulted in massive fuel build-ups and reduced access to our public forests, enhanced by environmental litigation and resulting in clearly predicted catastrophic wildfires. I have written extensively about this problem for more than 30 years, citing many, many experts and documenting these predictable results as they occurred. It’s all included in my current book, “Spotted Owls, Murrelets, Coho & Their Critical Habitats: An Anthology.” Please note that SJ’s citations were basically tree ring studies used to develop a politicized vocabulary and do not constitute scientific “proof” by any definition.
Google does take you to places that say the 10 AM policy “was abandoned in 1978,” but I couldn’t find any cited document that did that. I doubt that source would cite “Wilderness, EAJA, and ESA “critical habitat” considerations” as the reasons (EAJA became law in 1980).
Associated discussions all seem to say something about treating fire as an ecological process important to sustainable management, and that would have been based on the best available science. Has that science changed?
It seems to me that the risk has changed because burning conditions have gotten worse than those considered in the 70s, not just fuel build-ups but hotter, drier conditions more often and longer – which are climate related. And even if we look at fuel build-ups, that is the result of past and continued fire suppression. When you mix the effects of climate and fire suppression, it doesn’t leave much room for something else. Has there been any research showing that more logging and roads would have made any difference to fires? And balanced that against the ecological cost?
Hi Jon: Maybe your Google is broken. Here’s one example: https://nrfirescience.org/sites/default/files/2023-07/Evolution-of-National-Park-Service_fire-policy.pdf
The reasons they wouldn’t cite the EAJA, ESA, and Wilderness is because that would be stupid. Wilderness “let burn” fires were a precedent to NPS and USFS changing their policies in 1978 — according to cited literature — but EAJA wasn’t even invented until 1980. You seem consistent in your efforts to twist my words into stupid assertions, and I’m thinking it’s more likely a reading comprehension problem on your part.
I’m not denying that people claim that “treating fire as an ecological process important to sustainable management,” — I’m saying those words can’t be measured and are personal value (or legal?) assertions rather than factual or scientific.
And I understand you think that “climate change” is happening and is somehow affecting wildfires, but I’ve never accepted that idea and have written extensively in opposing it — on both scientific and logical grounds. Fuel conditions have definitely gotten worse — a well documented fact — but the climate and fire seasons have been fairly stable for centuries. The 1930s are a good yardstick in that regard.
That article is one of the ones that says the 10 AM policy was abandoned in 1978 without citing a source.
There seems to be a pattern here: I quote your words back to you and you act like you’ve never seen them before. Yes it would be “stupid” to cite EAJA, ESA, and Wilderness, but those were your words.
The other pattern is that you try to refute science with opinion. Not much point in taking this any further.
“Your role in ensuring another successful fire year is crucial.” What are the Chief’s empirical measures of success? It would be nice to know; for firefighters and the public they serve.
Previous Chiefs have focused on a single measure of success — the initial attack success rate — defined as the proportion of known ignitions that remain below 300 acres (other fire agencies, e.g., CalFire, use different acreage limits). The IA success rate varies between 96-98% year-in and year-out. East of the Mississippi, the rate is 100% for most years and most national forests. Generally, the lowest IA success rates are reported in California’s national forests. [Curiously, the initial attack success rate for aerial retardant-treated ignitions is 30%, i.e., much less than for non-retardant ignitions. Note, however, that only 5% of ignitions are treated with aerial retardant.]
Other measures of success might include injuries/fatalities suffered by firefighters and the fire-affected public. Or homes lost. Or total acreage burned (but, is smaller better?). Or acres burned by severity class.
So why does it matter what the Chief means by a “successful” fire season? Because those who don’t know what they are trying to accomplish will be unlikely to have succeeded. In fact, they won’t even know whether they succeeded or failed.
It’s possible that the fire executive order – if and when finalized – will define, more or less, what constitutes success:
https://forestpolicypub.com/2025/04/10/text-of-wildfire-executive-order-your-thoughts/
In addition to the overall priority of immediate suppression, note that the draft order lists “response time measurements” as the first proposed performance metric.
If that isn’t 10am, it’ll do ’till 10am shows up.
So President Trump is going to define the empirical measures of wildland firefighting success? I can’t of anyone better qualified to do so.
Well, he has already defined ‘success at forest management’ (by Executive Order), specifically, by “board feet”. (That’s so last century!)
Hi Ronon: I don’t know how old you are, but I can definitely say — and document — that our public forests and rural communities were in far (far) better shape during the last century than the mess they have become during this. That being said, the idea of measuring trees that will never be sold or harvested in “board feet” (since the 1800s) is probably a poor idea. But a good way to consider merchantable timber values, whether sold or lost.
History says that the Forest Service stopped measuring timber volume in board feet (in timber sales) a long time ago. That sounds a lot like the logic of renaming the Gulf of Mexico.
Well Ronan, looks like you are asleep at the wheel, the current cut and sold report is indeed in board feet. Any other misinformation you’d like to opine on?…..
In fact, Ronan is correct. The Forest Service sells timber in cubic foot measure or by weight. The cut-and-sold reports report in cubic feet, too, but for old-timers and Congress, the reports also convert the cubes to boards. However, if you trust the accuracy of the FS’s conversion factors, I have a bridge for sale that may interest you.
Ah come on Andy, Region 8 has been selling in CCF since 1970, and the conversion you speak of is embedded in the FS Timber Sale Cruise info. There is a standard off the cuff conversion but the actual volumes are shown in CCF and MBF.
Any idiot (almost) can see the two volumes and how they align based on diameter. Call it what you want but the cut and sold reports are in MBF!
Yes, under timber sale contracts, timber volume is not sold in board feet.
And yet, Jim and Bob still dodge the concept of using board feet as a measuring stick for ‘proper forest management’. Maximizing timber volume harvested is not a valid silvicultural method, unless pure profit is what you are ‘managing’ for.
Ronan, once again you are ignorant in terms of managing resources! Nobody said anything about profit, although returns to the Treasury are important, don’t ya think? I believe the American public would like to see a return on their tax $, I know I would…..
Management in silvicultural realm focuses on maximization of growth, CUI, structural stages and relevancy of tolerance in early seral stands. Return on investment is a measure of standards used to assess one treatment over another. Kind’a like shopping at Walmart, or a King Soopers….
The more you opine the more you certify your lack of understanding….
Yet again, this guy resorts to insults, knowing nothing about me, at all. I choose not to give clues to those who would like to shut me up.
Well, looks line “Ronan” has cut off his reply. Same treatment I doled out when I was a Forest Sup; unsigned letter, or false ID and it went straight into the trash can! If you play stupid games…. Well, you know!
Thanks Jim: For the vast majority of time, this blog has been a great discussion forum. But every so often it becomes infiltrated with cowardly (“anonymous and pseudonymous”) trolls, such as this Stargate phony and a few others. I’m glad that Sharon has finally started to filter these guys (“they?”) out. Irritating distractions a best, and real impediments to legitimate discussion in almost all instances.
I’m still trying to understand the dynamics of how this gets started. Everyone starts out talking about their experiences and somehow it degenerates. But only with certain people. And if I stop in the middle it seems to be favoring one side. I am still working on figuring it out.
Thanks Sharon: I think the key red flag is an anonymous or pseudonymous person who belittles or calls real people names. These are the true cowards of the internet and my thought has always been one or two warnings, a verbal spanking, and then banishment. Stargate and Anon/Anony are clear examples. Many of us use occasional salty language or uncomplimentary names, but we are real people accepting responsibility for our words. Likewise, the people who may have good cause to be Anonymous that are respectful, ask good questions, and make positive contributions to a discussion should probably be accommodated. But not the juvenile — and anonymous — trolls, please!
I see that both Bob and Jim are in favor of silencing people who do not align with their ‘superior’ views. Autocrats and their supporters want this for America. They think that the removal of Freedom of Speech is a good thing, for all Americans, regardless of the impacts (including illegal physical harm to offenders).
Someone has to stand up to this autocracy. I am doing that, but it would be dumb for me to identify myself. Yes, I DO fear what this government might do to me (supported by Bob and Jim).
Ronon, Jim, and Bob. I can’t stop in the middle of discussions because it would seem to favor one side, so I am calling “enough.”.
We need to stay on the topic, and the first generalization outside of the topic area or personal criticism will not be approved. I know it starts with just a word or two and escalates.
We can disagree and mostly do, without that stuff. And Bob, I think when you say “occasional salty language or uncomplimentary names” that can start a cycle.
I’m not sure Ronon is a troll, he just goes off the civil posting trail from time to time, as do you.
Note: I just learned that “Ronon Dex” is another fictional character from the Stargate television show and not a real person. If I had known that at the time, I wouldn’t have bothered to reply. Likely the same nonentity that posted earlier using another fictional Stargate name. wow.
Dr. Zybach, you have a better way of conveying the impacts on NF management than I certainly do. And, I’m in lock step on how the environmental laws and movements of the 1960’s impacted public land management. I’ve grown to question them too, as in “were they wrong?”, but know they were not. However, FS failed to adjust how business is done, not realizing the true impacts of the stresses taking place in forest lands. Not harvesting timber and cleaning up fuels does have its consequences….
I find it odd that many naysayers simply bring up hindsight as measure of how things should be. They don’t realize the natural world is a very unforgiving place, where equilibrium between life and death (in the case fire, anyway) turns on life in a natural world, or life in the real world!
I’ve grown into quite a fan of early FS history, it wouldn’t hurt for folks to go back and read (learn) how and why this Agency exists, and successful it can really be….
It’s been months since I’ve commented on here and Bob Zybach is the reason. One of the biggest frequent trolls on here is a contributor and you wonder why things turn to snark so quickly. Are you kidding me?