Mammoth Times

Grim, grim and grimmer

There is little good news for the summer wildfire outlook

By Wendilyn Grasseschi Times Reporter

There is no way to sugarcoat it.

A lack of enough wildland firefighters this summer due to an inability to recruit a full complement of firefighting crews and engines is colliding with one of the grimmest ‘fire prediction’ outlooks ever given to local officials.

The bevy of bad news hit the Mono County Board of Supervisors early last week when several local firefighting managers and land managers from the Inyo National Forest and the Bureau of Land Management gave the supervisors an in-depth update on the potential fire season ahead.

The bottom line comes down to two intersecting and serious problems: local agencies overall have only been able to ‘staff up’ to about 75 percent of their full staffing and, the fire activity outlook is even worse than the outlook was going into last summer; a season that saw more of the state burn than any other season on record.

Those facts had local officials already talking about the potential for a full Inyo National Forest shutdown at some point this summer as a possibility, along with a possible very early campfire ban, according to Lesley Yen, the Inyo Forest’s Supervisor. Shutting down the entire forest to any type of use is something that was unheard of until two years ago but has since been used twice; a testament to the rapidly growing threat of

wildfires in the forested areas of the Inyo.

Here are some of the main bullet points given to the supervisors by Yen and several other fire and land managers during the one-hour presentation:

• December was the last substantial rain that the California has seen. The Sierra snowpack for the state was at 38 percent of average at the end of March and much of what was left has melted off already. The California drought index is showing projections that those areas that are in ‘extreme’ drought now will be ‘exceptional’ drought in the very near future as the summer months progress.

• The moisture within woody fuels or brush is already extremely low meaning the fuels can burn more easily.

• The weather conditions, even with recent rain and snow, have not allowed for recovery of these fuels.

• Critically dry wind events as experienced recently could persist into the next few weeks, at least.

• The federal firefighting agencies have been plagued for the last handful of years with staffing issues and this year is no different. In fact, it is probably one the worst years, they said. Statewide, the federal land agencies are at about 70 to 75 percent of their fully staffed capability. That means that roughly only three quarters of the modules that would normally be staffed statewide, and locally, the Eastern Sierra is in about in the same boat. Typically, the BLM would have nine engines staffed seven days a week and so far for this summer, most likely, two of those nine engines won’t be staffed at all. The majority of the others will probably be staffed five days a week, rather than the seven that the BLM had hope for. “We’ve gone from 10 to 20 years ago to just having a huge applicant pool and being able to fill all those positions... to over the last five years to a continuously dwindling amount of applicants for our positions,” said one fire manager. “And I’m sure that there’s a number of reasons. The biggest one we hear is obviously that the pay is too low; we lose a lot of real highquality firefighters to other agencies that are better paying. Another reason is the local cost of living. And then also honestly, I just think there’s a change, a generational change, as well as far as the amount of work people want to do and there’s a change in the amount of people that actually want to have outdoor occupations.”

• Stage One fire restrictions could come sooner than usual; this means no campfires outside of any develop sites where there is a fire ring.

• Stage Two restrictions means no fires anywhere on the forest even in developed sites and that could also come sooner than

normal.

• The last option is to close the entire forest which managers said was out of their ability to control; the decision is made at the Washington D.C office level. Although such a decision was once very uncommon, land manager said it was time to consider it as a real possibility at some point this summer, if conditions on the ground to not change dramatically.

None of the news was good and the managers urged the public

to begin to be ready for a very tough fire season ahead.

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2022-05-12T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-05-12T07:00:00.0000000Z

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