How Bad Is This Fire Season In California Really Going To Be?
San Jose Mercury News (CA)
Jul. 11 It s not quite noon, but it s already getting hot as Alan Huston pushes his way through thickets of dry, prickly brush on a parched hillside overlooking the town of Los Gatos. If a fire broke out here, all this stuff is going to burn, said Huston, a researcher in San Jose State University s Fire Weather Research Lab. There are some healthier-looking big trees over there. But a lot of this? his voice trailed off as he waved his hand over the water-starved landscape dotted with multimillion-dollar homes. Not looking good.
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California Lacks Federal Firefighters as Dangerous Season Looms
Firefighters watch as smoke rises from a brush fire scorching at least 100 acres in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles this week. The Forest Service is struggling to recruit and retain wildland firefighters in California.
Ringo H.W. Chiu
The Associated Press
Federal wildland firefighter jobs in California are sitting open even as the West heads into what’s likely to be a brutal fire season.
That’s not just a problem for California where wildfires have in recent years been among the largest and most dangerous in the country but for the whole region, because federal crews travel to other states to beat back major fires.
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As another wildfire season looms over California, the U.S. Forest Service is running short of the most experienced and elite firefighters in the country the forestry crews known as hotshots, who travel the nation putting out wildfires, according to interviews with union officials and agency employees.
A combination of low pay, competition from state and local fire departments and exhaustion from fire seasons that are longer and more devastating than in the past has eroded the federal government’s ability to hire new firefighters and retain the most skilled. Nowhere is this more true than in California, where entry-level Forest Service firefighters in certain parts of the state earn less than the minimum wage of $14 an hour, and staffing levels have plummeted ahead of a fire season that scientists say could be especially active.
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