Tim of the Hotshot Wakeup interviewed USWFS Chief Brian Fennessy last week. I recommend listening to the podcast yourself. One thing I have discovered is that hearing from someone in their own words can be very different from what is reported.. we all have our own interests. experiences and views. I am so-not a fire person, and I have selected the pieces I found most interesting, especially compared to what we hear filtered through others. The quotes are all from the transcript posted on The Hotshot Wakeup Substack.
After listening, I had two questions 1. why wouldn’t we want experts running things in their bailiwick- when do we listen to the experts and when not? and 2. if NEPA and litigation can be (at least in some cases) obstacles to fuels work, how will the new agency deal with that? Will they “farm it back” to the agencies or stand up a focused NEPA and a litigation team at the Solicitor’s Office?
On working together in the new organization and with the FS:
I wonder how that’s going, OWF, right? And remarkably, remarkably. Man, everybody’s grinding right along. They’ve been working on the president’s executive order since it came out that June. And same with the Forest Service. They’ve got all these committees and work groups. And my observation was they’ve been working together so long.All these groups that they’ve established these friendships and relationships. I’m telling you, Tim, I did not see any frictions. And people are working as hard as I am. You know, I’m getting answers. My email’s 11 at night, you know, on weekends. And not because they feel they have to because they’re passionate about making this work.
And this seems to be a major factor.. wildland firefighting people wanted to make their own decisions (with land manager input).
This administration has been the smoothest thing. They said, look, it’s been great to be able to look across the table at an agency administrator that’s a firefighter. That understands what we need. Yeah. And again, that’s not to marginalize the need for having a line officer or land manager at the table, too. They need to be there because, quite frankly, we many times are not, you know, we can’t speak to the resource values at risk. That’s what they’re there to do. But what we are, are fire subject matter experts. And, you know, the agency, the authorities are largely, you know, through me and on down, To address that, let’s face it, let’s be honest. I certainly know it. I experienced it and I hear it all the time. You know, there are times that strategy is, you know, put into that are being driven by a land manager. And, you know, against many times recommendations of the fire subject matter experts. And I think, you know, there’s a lot of cases, but I think Dragon Bravo, quite frankly, was the end of it.
From what I’ve heard, there are two things going on… a) wildfire folks disagree with land managers on strategies, tactics, and risk; and b) many line officers don’t understand fire and have not worked in fire.
Who’s going to, you know, do the work on the landscape? And we heard that on the interior side. Well, who do you think is going to do the work? We’re going to do the work on the landscape. We are tied directly to the landscape. When you hear things like, you know, well, we’re going to pull away the firefighters from the forest, so they’re moving. These are all verbs, right? The reality is, right? Nobody’s going anywhere. These are organizational changes. We’re not physically moving, you know, people necessarily away. And what I offer, Tim, is this, is I think, you know, to address it, let’s just, you know, the elephant in the room, um, On the DOI side, what I’ve shared with our people is, hey, our people are going to be focused on fire-related work. And that largely means work on the landscape, whatever that is, prescribed fire, whatever it is, that is our focus. Will it be fire suppression? Absolutely. And taking time off. I mean, those are the three Primary things we need to do. The way I look at it, and from everything I’ve learned from our people and talking with them, because I am out there talking with them, is, listen, they’re not probably going to be doing the trails work anymore. They’re not going to be cleaning campgrounds. They’re not going to be doing, they’re going to be doing hazardous fuel mitigation and focusing all of their efforts when we’re not doing fire suppression or training on the landscape.
We are going to accomplish more because we have more people focused on that than we ever have before. So when I hear, well, you know, we’re not, I know we’ll talk about it, about managing fires for resource benefit. No, we’re not, and certainly not this year for obvious reasons.But no, we’re going to make up whatever we haven’t. And listen, this shouldn’t, you know, the work on the landscape should be a 7-24 hour deal. We should be treating the landscape during the day, during the night, on the weekends. We’re seeing technology now that’s going to allow us to do some of that.I try to be on record to say that, listen, just because we are primarily a fire agency, we are not going to suppress our way out of this problem. We all know that. The priority is focusing on treating the landscape, and we’ve got to do it all the time for years and years if we’re going to see an event. Are we short firefighters? Are we short airplanes? Are we short helicopters? Absolutely we are. And I’ll talk about that a little bit later. But again, suppression is not the, suppression is not going to, we’re not going to get out of this. We cannot suppress our way out of this, too. I’m sorry, I got a little bit on a rant there, but I keep hearing that, you know, we’re going to, no, we’re going to accomplish more if the Forest Service does unify, you know, with the Wildland Fire Service. And I get it. I understand why land managers are concerned.All that non-fire work is going to have to be done by somebody else because I need those firefighters, you know, training, preparing for, you know, the fire year and putting those efforts on the landscape. And we are going to accomplish more fuels work than we ever have by doing that.
And so that’s, I just want to make that clear. There’s no pulling away or who’s going to do it. We’re going to do it. We and the land managers are tied together. The landscape, we’re tied together. There’s no disconnecting that. We’re connected to it no matter what.
We do the best we can with what we got. But man, this has gone on for decades and it needs to be addressed whether or not there’s some sort of funding or built in Congress. I don’t know. My sense is we’re going to hear a lot more about this through a variety of different investigations that are going to be concluded soon. But I’ve certainly let my boss and others know that this is a big, big problem and likely hundreds of millions of dollars is fixed. But at some point, you’ve got to pay the piper.
We’ve pushed this off for decades now, and we’re at a point where our system is failing. And it needs to be a big focus.