Last Thursday, as nearly 1,000 firefighters and support staff battled the Bachelor Complex and Flat Top and Firestone fires surrounding Bend, dozens of people filled a room at the Deschutes County Road department office building to learn more about what it takes to join the U.S. Forest Service as a wildland firefighter. The in-person recruitment event is one of many hosted by the Forest Service in Oregon and Washington.
Since August, the Forest Service has toured the Pacific Northwest hoping to recruit new people to fill hand crews, engine crews, hotshot crews and more ahead of next year's inevitable fire season. This is the second year of the recruitment program, according to Jason Heinz, who handles regional workforce development for the Forest Service.
It's an attempt to shore up what some have called an exodus of wildland firefighters. According to an investigation by ProPublica published earlier this year, the Forest Service, the agency in charge of most of the country's wildfires, has suffered an attrition rate of 45% among its permanent wildland firefighters. Heinz says that recent numbers put the attrition rate for the Forest Service as a whole at just 2%.
Now, USFS is looking to fill roughly 200 entry-level, permanent seasonal positions to start next spring. It's a tall order for a department that consistently goes with 20 to 25% of its positions unfilled, according to Heinz's own estimates.
The hurdles to joining and remaining with USFS are many: $15 per hour base pay, weeks away from home on assignment with back-to-back work for months at a time, grueling physical labor and exposure to numerous health risks, including toxic smoke and chemical retardants, to name a few. And for permanent, seasonal employees like the kind being recruited now, employment is only full-time for six months of the year.
Heinz said USFS offers retirement packages and healthcare benefits to its employees, and that the hourly pay average increases when considering hazard pay and overtime hours. However, he would not estimate how much an employee is likely to make during the six-month employment, citing too many unknowns, like fire activity levels next year and frequency of deployment. Each employee is guaranteed at least 40 hours a week of work during their 13 weeks on the job.
As we see intimately in the West, filling these positions each year is critical for protecting communities large and small from increasingly large, frequent and intense fire seasons. And many who appreciate the work and camaraderie of the service are drawn to the experience, Heinz said.
"If you're hardworking, love working outdoors and want to try something that will test you, both physically and mentally, I think the Forest Service is a great opportunity," Heinz said. "And I have created, you know, a career out of it. And I think anyone that's interested in this type of career or position can make a career out of it as well."
Alder Henshen, a 22-year-old resident of Bend, attended the in-person recruitment event last week. Henshen said he knows the work is hard and requires being away from family and friends for weeks at a time. He's also aware of the wildland firefighter shortage but is applying despite those concerns.
"It's the preserving of the forest," he said when asked what he found most important about the work. "And it's a dying trade," he added.
—This story is powered by the Lay It Out Foundation, the nonprofit with a mission of promoting deep reporting and investigative journalism in Central Oregon. Learn more and be part of this important work by visiting layitoutfoundation.org.