Wildland Firefighters and Everyone Who Supports You.. You All Did Great This Year!!!

Well, fall is in the air. In our neck of the woods, the aspen leaves are turning and the morning air is cool.

We’ve gotten through another wildfire season. But basically most of the coverage we have seen  in the media during this year has stressed potential future problems, or blamed problems on the current Administration. From a piece by James Peron in Medium:

It’s not the journalists fault; they are selling the public what the public wants. And when they have a terrifying story, or can take a gruesome one and make it sound worse, they sell more papers and that means higher profits. Whatever their politics they are profit-seekers at heart.

I know plenty of journalists would be horrified at this — certainly many who attended the same journalism classes I did —and simply wouldn’t acknowledge it. I actually suspect they don’t see it this way. They are merely reporting the “most important” stories and that means the most horrific news they can find.

They wouldn’t even notice they look for the bad news. It’s just good journalism but it leads to faulty perceptions resulting in bad policies because unscrupulous politicians use fear to buy votes.

Of course there have been problems, including the high rate of burnovers. I don’t know the reasons and it’s possible that a variety of causes contributed to each one. I am against generating overall conclusions until the reports are out. To whom is it important to hurry to diagnose before the facts are in? And why?

But while news folks tend to focus on the latest bad, or predicted future bads, maybe there should be just one story on how well things generally worked in what we were warned would be a devastating fire year. Remember this Outside piece from May of this year?

Why 2026 Could Be One of the Worst Wildfire Seasons in Recent U.S. History

Extreme drought, overstretched crews, and a sweeping Forest Service restructuring are converging into what experts fear could be the most volatile fire year in U.S. history.

Doesn’t it seem odd that this article focuses on the Forest Service instead of the real wildfire reorganization at Interior?  I wonder why that is?

Some experts like Duncan disagree, saying that although these cuts and changes aren’t directly targeting firefighters on the ground, they erode the foundation that keeps those crews operating safely.

“Morale is terrible right now,” Duncan said. “We lost a lot of folks through DOGE cuts, and more through delayed resignations and early retirements. There’s a huge network of support behind the scenes to help the firefighters doing the actual work, and a lot of those folks have left. With the proposed reorganization, getting rid of offices and research stations, we’re losing even more of that support network.”

Of course, moving peoples’ offices doesn’t make them unavailable for fire assignments.  But it meets the “sounds vaguely plausible” and “fits the narrative” criteria.

But the good news story is that everyone pulled together- the folks in the brand-new USWFS, the Forest Service, States, counties, and crews of all kinds- even folks from other countries, and we got through a really bad fire year.

This is due to the effort of people, some working without proper housing, without communications capabilities that most of us take for granted in this day and age, and all the other difficulties that are could easily be enumerated.  Of course, some of us need to focus on what is not working and fix it.

My concern is that we don’t give appropriate attention, value, and gratitude to the people who are making this work- firefighters, support folks, those doing the Wrok while people are gone on fires, and the families of firefighters.  All are part of the whole who have made this season, scary going into it, work.

So thanks to all of you!!!!!