It has been one of the hottest winters and now spring is on record in Arizona this year. There has never been a hotter March recorded in Phoenix than last month. The Valley's temperatures were an astonishing 12 degrees above normal.
And on top of that, it's been incredibly dry across the state, too. This was the 13th driest March on record across Arizona. And in Flagstaff, where we expect to see snow every winter, March left them 58 inches behind normal this year. And all of that means we could be looking at a tough wildfire season coming up.
John Truett is state fire manager and officer for the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management, and he joined The Show to talk more about what we might expect this upcoming wildfire season.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, John.
JOHN TRUETT: Good morning.
LAUREN GILGER: All right. So, this year we saw, as I outlined there, like an incredibly warm winter, a spring heatwave that didn't really let up and, you know, any snow that had fallen in the north country has pretty much melted. What does all of this mean for wildfire season?
JOHN TRUETT: Well, what it means is it’s going to cure out our fuels faster than normal. And there’s no real moisture in the soil right now, so we’re not going to get a very long greenup if at all. So right now we’re on that downward trend of our greenup and getting into a cured state in our, in our fuels out there, across the state.
LAUREN GILGER: So when you say a greenup, like every year in the spring you expect rain and then the green to come, right, the grass to, to grow, the trees to bloom, and then it dries out in the summer, but this is coming early?
JOHN TRUETT: Yeah, and that's just the cycle of our vegetation out there. Every, every spring we get a greenup no matter what kind of rain we get, but it's a short duration this time and, you know, we're already four to six weeks ahead of time on our curing out of our vegetation.
LAUREN GILGER: OK. So does that mean a wildfire season could start earlier than normal this year?
JOHN TRUETT: The potential is there, as you’ve seen a couple, uh, in the last week or so, a little bit of cooler weather in and out, but yeah, it’s, uh, going to be definitely an early start. We’re having fire starts now. They’re not getting outside of a single-day burning period yet, but that is very close at hand.
LAUREN GILGER: OK. I remember after some wet winters in the state saying, you know, all of that water means there's more grass, there's more greenery, and that bodes badly for wildfire season when all that dries out. Is there some kind of silver lining here in the fact that we just haven't had much rain so there won't be quite as much green to begin with?
JOHN TRUETT: In a normal cycle, yes, but if you remember, recall last fall, we had an abundance of rain, which created an above-normal grass crop. So, yeah, the cycles are a little bit off, but in a normal year, we get less rain, we’ll get less growth, and a little bit less what we call fuel loading out there of our vegetation.
LAUREN GILGER: OK. All right. Your department and Governor Katie Hobbs announced recently this new AZ Fire Cam system. It's 360-degree view cameras that are kind of placed around the state that—I think the idea is you can detect smoke early. What might these do for catching those fires right away?
JOHN TRUETT: It’s, it’s more of a detection, uh, tool for us. We, we’ve got ‘em out in an area what we call low frequency but high value at risk. So our response times are really going to be based on our staffing, and our staffing is, you know, it’s low at best. So these’ll give us at least the intel that we have a, a fire start, and when we look at that, that image of that, that smoke, we can tell how hot it’s burning and if it’s going to be a priority, you know, right off the bat. We can launch more resources to it that — if we have ‘em available.
LAUREN GILGER: Right. So let me ask you about resources. We've reported in the past on this kind of ongoing major shortage of firefighters, particularly, I think, wildland firefighters around the country and here as well. How do you try to get folks on board? What—what's the department doing to try to make a dent there?
JOHN TRUETT: For us, it’s on our recruiting side. You know, unfortunately, we’re, we’re just limited on how many firefighters we can hire, and we’re at maximum as, as we speak now. So really, we needed to add more positions to the statewide Arizona state firefighting workforce. When it comes to our, our local government, our fire departments, our fire districts, they’re having shortages as well, uh, just kind of based on their budgets and their availability to hire out there just because of the shortage of any type of funding that those individual departments have.
LAUREN GILGER: Huh. So that's interesting. So it's not a matter of getting people into the field, it's a matter of having the budget to hire them?
JOHN TRUETT: Exactly. We, uh, we’re very short-staffed, uh, when it comes to a statewide fire department, per se. And, you know, we could use a few more folks and a few more permanent positions to provide that coverage and that public safety throughout the state.
LAUREN GILGER I mean, that's got to be a concern, especially as we're looking at these kind of increasingly dangerous wildfire seasons across the state, and as you're saying, this one could start early. Why, why isn't the funding there? What's the conversation like with policy leaders?
JOHN TRUETT: It’s all about what we call FTEs and, um, you know, full-time employees, and we’re, you know, always, you know, talking with, with the legislators, talking with, uh, the folks downtown, uh, to, you know, just to make ‘em aware that we have an increasing fire danger out there. We have increasing urban sprawl beyond these, these fire district boundaries that become the responsibility of the state and it’s just, uh, needing to keep up with the growth of the state is what we’re trying to advocate.
LAUREN GILGER: So I always wonder this because we've seen the temperatures, especially in the summer here, not just in the Valley but across the state, go up, you know, so much in recent years. How much harder does the job get in fighting wildfires when we see these temperatures rise and you see, you know, 110, 115 sometimes, when you're also out there fighting a fire?
JOHN TRUETT: Yeah, it’s just again, it’s, it’s on how we manage our personnel out there. You know, obviously, you can’t go, you know, 10 hours straight when it, when the, when our fire environment is like that. So we make sure we give ‘em breaks, at, at the proper time. You know, and it’s all about physical conditioning, and, um, you know, we really rely heavily on the science behind, the physical science behind, you know, hydration and, and rest-work and, and all that. So we pay a lot of attention to it, but we can only do so much on an extreme environment.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, absolutely. Let me ask you lastly, there are reports that Arizona should be expecting what's being called like a super El Niño this year, which could, you know, be good news. It could bring cooler temperatures, some much needed rain to the region. Maybe a lot of rain, in fact. Are you looking at that? Could this mean a wetter monsoon season, help things out when fire season gets underway?
JOHN TRUETT: Yeah in our, in our business, the fire service, we work real close with the National Weather Service, you know, because fire is a science behind it and weather is one of the driving factors of it. And what we've been, uh, talking with the National Weather Service is that super El Niño coming in. It’s all going to be about timing. It could be coming in, you know, as early as July, but as late as the fall.
So it’s really the timing of when all that comes and kind of add to our monsoon season, but it’ll be late in, in some of our opinions and some of the, the facts that we're getting from the National Weather Service. It may not come in until late July or August. So it'll help a little bit, but that may be a, you know, a little bit, a little bit too late.
LAUREN GILGER OK. All right. John Truett, state fire manager and officer for the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management, here with a wildfire season preview. John, thanks so much.
JOHN TRUETT: Oh, thank you.
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