Despite manpower shortage, state is ready for early wildfire season
Jun 1, 2016, 11:29 AM | Updated: 1:38 pm
Washington’s Department of Natural Resources wild land fire recruits embark on intensive trainings with the National Guard in Yakima. This is a new strategy to make sure different firefighting units are better acquainted with the terrain – and each other – to get a leg up on fires before they start. (photo courtesy of the Department of Natural Resources)
(photo courtesy of the Department of Natural Resources)
Fire season is getting underway, as concert-goers witnessed when a wildfire ripped through 600 acres of grassland near the Gorge in Grant County over the weekend. That has the state scrambling to mobilize resources.
The State Department of Natural Resources relies heavily on college students as seasonal firefighters, but a big chunk of their manpower remains missing until classes are over.
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However, DNR spokesperson Sandra Kaiser says that there are contingency plans to make sure crews are available in the meantime.
“You know, we have arrangements with states around us – Idaho, Oregon, California – we regularly will send firefighters to help them; they send firefighters to help us. So there’s certainly a lot of partners and a lot of resources when we need to call on them,” Kaiser explains.
And after two back-to-back record fire seasons, trainings for the rest of the crews have been moved up by a full month.
“We’ve been training our helicopter crews that drop water and flame retardant on fire,” Kaiser said. “We just completed that in Cle Elum. We have 13 more engines – fire engines – on the landscape that we’ll be deploying, most of those in Eastern Washington where we have the most fire. And we have three very robust training sessions for firefighters – one that we’ve just completed in Yakima. And that was DNR firefighters with the National Guard, which will give us more folks on the landscape if things get bad. We’ll have two additional training sessions – one at Deer Park near Spokane June 18-26, and one on the west side at Rainier from June 20-30.”
The Department of Natural Resources has spent the spring beefing up its fleet of firefighting equipment, adding three additional fixed-wing aircraft, for a total of six, which can drop flame retardant from the air, stopping wildfires from burning out of control.
Kaiser says personnel are also pre-positioning fire engines for quicker responses.
“Where we have been able to move things ahead, we’ve certainly done that,” Kaiser says.
