Forest Service hampered by lack of senior staff

updated 9:10 p.m. ET July 6, 2007

SAN DIEGO - Weeks into a wildfire season that has already burned parts of Catalina Island, Los Angeles and Lake Tahoe, swaths of California’s flammable national forests are some days protected by nothing more than luck.

On any given day, about 40 of 271 U.S. Forest Service engines remain in firehouses rather than on patrol, idled by a shortage of supervisors. Meanwhile, the combined effects of sustained drought, last winter’s freeze and a searing heat wave has dramatically raised fire danger levels this season.

An exodus of highly trained mid- and upper-level firefighters from the career ranks of the federal agency is at least partly to blame for the fact that 13 percent of the service’s 3,600 full-time positions in California are vacant.

“When you start leaving holes in your organization so that on a given high-danger day you can’t provide coverage, you’ve set yourself up for trouble,” said John Marker, a retired former Forest Service district ranger on the Sequoia National Forest.

Retirees return to jobs
Nationally, fire planners from all five federal agencies that handle firefighting are dealing with the departure of a generation of top managers hired during a firefighting expansion in the late 1970s. That has left behind too few career firefighters qualified to run engines, oversee forests or command large fire operations.

As forests from the Mexico border to Canada reassign engine crews, top-level teams working for other agencies are simply hiring recent retirees. Of 50 people working on one federal interagency team based in the Great Basin states, 10 are due to retire in the next two years, and a handful have come out of retirement as emergency hires this season.

“We haven’t been able to fill out teams so we keep bringing back the old warhorses,” said Paul Broyles, who heads the team.

California has been hit harder than other states because the high cost of living has deterred recruits from moving here, and state and local agencies are siphoning federal managers with higher pay and better benefits.

Forest Service officials have filled nearly 800 positions since last October but are still short about 470 people.

“There are a lot of people lower down in the system who are five or six years away from being able to compete for leadership jobs,” said Ed Hollenshead, regional director of fire and aviation management for the Forest Service. “It’s like a slinky — sometimes it’s bunched up, but right now the slinky is stretched out.”

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