State and federal agencies across Arizona have put fire restrictions in place, as the danger of wildfires increases with hot and dry conditions. Firefighters in California are already battling several wildfires there — and there have been some fires in Arizona this year, as well.
Calkin is principal of Calkin Wildfire Consulting; until last April, he was a senior research scientist with the U.S. Forest Service. He joined The Show to talk more.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: Dave, when you look at all the various conditions out there, what do you see region-wide coming up this fire season?
DAVE CALKIN: Yeah, I mean, we’ve suffered through historically low snowpacks throughout most of the Interior West, significant droughts on the coastal states, and some unusually warm spells throughout.
And the "super El Niño," I’m not a meteorologist, but it seems like that could add fuel to the fire, if you will. So, we’re set up in conditions that could lead to a very bad fire season. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it will. There’s been plenty of years where there’s been drought, but the ignitions just didn’t happen, or they didn’t happen at the wrong place at the wrong time, and we didn’t see bad fire years.
But the conditions are there such that we could experience a really bad fire year, and there’s a lot of reasons to be concerned beyond just the fire weather and the climate and the drought.
MARK BRODIE: Well, and it sounds like, based on some of your writings, that one of the reasons to be concerned beyond sort of the the nature of what’s going on outside is the potential response of firefighters. It sounds like there are fewer of them and fewer teams, and the response is maybe not what you would like it to be.
DAVE CALKIN: You know, the number of firefighters, primary firefighters, has remained relatively stable over the last five to 10 years and maybe it’s actually increased over time. But what hasn’t kept pace is kind of the infrastructure, the incident management teams, the overhead positions, the people that are typically associated with federal wildland management organizations — like the Forest Service, BLM, Park Service — that aren’t primary firefighters, but they engage in fire management.
A lot of the incident management team leadership comes from that group of people, and those are the people who have left the agencies over the last year and a half like myself.
Further, you know, it’s not just this episodic event with this administration. The number and participation in incident management had been declining significantly over the last decade at a time when we need even more of those folks around.
MARK BRODIE: When you talk about people leaving the agency, leaving this sort of this line of work with the federal government, how much experience has walked out the door and what kind of impact might that have?
DAVE CALKIN: We really don’t know is the biggest challenge, I think. Fire management is really complex. People participate in it from all sorts of different areas. There’s a large number of retirees, there’s volunteer firefighters, there’s municipal firefighters who all come in and work in the system.
The thing that has me concerned is the management of this system, and that’s where we know we’ve lost people. We don’t know how many, but we do know that the number of incident management teams is somewhere between 35 and 38, which is considerably less than five to 10 years ago. And really importantly, the way we’ve gotten to 38 staffed teams is by these teams sharing resources. So, there may only be one safety officer amongst three teams.
The other thing we know is when we hit scarcity, when we really get busy, the quality of our decisions goes down. And at that very time when we’re getting the busiest we can be, the decision quality goes down and people become even more fatigued, and it’s kind of a cycle of exhaustion in the system, and that’s when bad outcomes happen.
MARK BRODIE: I’m curious what you make of the comments that the Interior secretary made not that long ago talking about how suppression was going to sort of be the strategy, at least for now, with dealing with wildland firefighters.
DAVE CALKIN: Yeah, this is kind of contradictory, it might seem at first glance. It would seem that if you tried really hard and made fires as small as possible, there’d be less of it there and you’d need fewer people. The reality is the times when fires escape is when fires are really hard to put out.
And so there are very few incidents where we’ve decided to be really unaggressive that causes significant problems. It causes a lot of political attention, but they’re really rare events. So, when somebody like the secretary or the chief of the Forest Service come out and say we’re going to be even extra aggressive this year, it actually increases scarcity. Even though there might be a little bit less of fire on the ground initially, there’s going to be more exhaustion.
And there’s a couple of reasons. First, the system itself is designed to fill every legitimate order. So, when there’s still resources around, if you call for a resource, you will get it. When a secretary or a chief says we are going to be very aggressive this year and make all fires go away as quickly and aggressively as we can, that suggests to the people order as much resources as you can because it is politically damaging to your career if you didn’t do everything you possibly could.
So, we overorder initially, and that starts the system down a cycle of scarcity. More resources are used than necessary, and that makes them tired and unavailable for other fires. And we get later into the season, fatigue increases, and as we said earlier, that’s when decision quality goes down and the likelihood of accident goes up.
The other thing it says is if you’re a local manager and you have fire resources at your location, you should hold on to them because if a fire occurs and you don’t have resources available, then you’re going to have a bad outcome and you’re going to get blamed.
And we saw this last year, when the same kind of tone came out of the secretary and the chief of the Forest Service, of we are going to suppress every fire as aggressively as we can. And what happened though was, even though we had half as much fire as we has historically had on the Forest Service lands, we spent a record amount of money on suppression.
So, a very quiet year and we spent a lot of resources. We exposed firefighters to the hazards of the environment, and we had very little fire on the ground. What happens when we have a lot of fire on the ground? That’s what I’m worried about.
MARK BRODIE: So, you mentioned how expensive last year’s fire season was. Are you confident that the resources are in place to deal with whatever comes this year, especially after what was spent on fires in 2025?
DAVE CALKIN: No, not at all. Given the tone of these orders from leadership and the potential of a really busy fire year, I think we are going to get fatigued resources that will influence the quality of the decisions being made.
I think our incident management teams are going to be spread thin, and our largest incident management teams, instead of managing one large complex fire, they’re going to be asked to manage three or four at the same time.
Our smaller teams that are used to managing fires that maybe get up to a couple of thousand acres and have 100 people on them are going to be asked to manage fires much larger than that with more challenges, more resources.
And then the other challenge in here is many people in the system who are higher up will reach a pay cap where they no longer are financially incentivized to participate in fire management. And given the morale of the workforce, the likelihood that they’ll volunteer their time to participate in the system is probably lower than it’s ever been.
MARK BRODIE: Dave Calkin is principal of Calkin Wildfire Consulting and is a former senior research scientist with the U.S. Forest Service.
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