For those of you who are younger, with the older people retiring and moving on.. I thought it might be interesting to share some of what Chief Thomas was thinking back in the day. I ran across this March 1997 interview..the context was the South Canyon Fire.
Q: What could we best do to improve fire fighting and fire management — from your perspective now, after three years in Washington?
We probably could start by appreciating firefighters a bit more than we have. It’s pretty hard to build a career in the fire business. The grades are not high enough, so you get diverted off into other things in order to make a decent living. If you’re going to college and fighting fire in the summertime, that’s one thing. But when you’ve got these really good firefighters that are coming back season after season, after a while you’re kind of torn up about it because you know that you’ve got them in a dead-end operation. This is like playing professional baseball or something. You can’t make it after so many years. And so you’re torn between being ecstatic when you see that you’re getting them back, and then knowing that you’re participating in keeping them hanging on year after year when there’s nothing you can do for them. You look at these heroes out there, and everybody’s applauding at the end of the fire season — and they go home and cough for another three months. They’ve got no hospitalization, they’ve got no retirement, we don’t pay them enough — and they just keep coming back for more.
You’ve got people in a tough job that doesn’t pay very well, and there’s not much room for advancement. Civil service has been devalued to the point that no matter what you do, you’re wrong. The press beat on you, and you try to make your case for the way you did it — you have to explain why you didn’t fight a fire this way or that way, and what do you hear? “Well, didn’t you make a mistake?” Yeah, it’s real easy fighting one of those fires from a distance, sitting on your butt with a cold one in your hand. Enough of that and after a while you’d think firefighters would look up and say, “I don’t need this.”
I’ve been around long enough to witness many of the big strides made in forestry and wildlife management. And I’ve been lucky to have been a part of all that. When I started out in wildlife conservation, I was out in the field counting deer pellets. Now we look at the big picture with ecosystem management. And we look at the big picture with fire — we used to figure fire was just bad, and it burned stuff up. Now we study the history of fire — how often did it burn? How hot did it burn? What were the consequences of the burn? How do we think our way through this and make sure we do better than we did before?
It’s pointless to complain about where we are. What’s important is to ask, “How did we get here? And how do we now get to a better place?”
So…in 1997, Chief Thomas thought that firefighters aren’t paid/treated well enough (I’ve heard Senator Tim Sheehy say that in the last year) and “civil service has been devalued to the point that no matter what you do, you’re wrong.” So being devalued (even by Admins) is not particularly new.
AS far as I can, Interior is trying to get to a better place with wildland fire and FS wildfire people are likely to benefit in some ways.