Terry Gerton Your coalition is urging Congress to include the Fix Our Forest Act in the Defense Authorization Bill. So I just have to ask off the top, why does a forest management bill belong in the NDAA?

Tyson Bertone-Riggs Yeah, it’s a great question. Ultimately, wildfire is a national security issue. What we’ve seen is over time, wildfires are impacting military readiness. We also have wildfire issues on military bases. And the military is ultimately called out to respond to wildfires quite frequently. In 23 of the last 25 seasons, National Guard or reservists have been mobilized to be out on wildfire. There’s also Air Force Reserve and National Guard that are utilized through the C-130 [Modular Airborne Fire Fighting System] MAFFs program to respond to wildfires. So very much a close nexus between the two.

Terry Gerton What happens when we start to think differently about wildfires at a national or a national security level as opposed to say a local land management problem?

Tyson Bertone-Riggs Yeah, I mean ultimately the system that we have now and I think the direction that we’re moving is a coordination between a lot of different levels of government. So we have local forces that respond, we have state firefighters, we had federal agencies as well and at times U.S. military becomes involved as well. So that system is ultimately national, it’s not just a federal system, but it does require coordination across federal entities and federal agencies play a really key role in that sort of mobilization structure. FEMA, for instance, is ultimately responsible for the incident command system that’s used for fires at whatever scale folks are responding.

Terry Gerton So what would you hope would be different if you put this bill in the NDAA rather than either treating it on its own or putting it in an ag bill or something like that?

Tyson Bertone-Riggs Yeah, ultimately, you know, I would be happy to see this bill pass, however it passes. That’s what I would say. But we do think that this is relevant from a national security standpoint. Again, wildfires are impacting military readiness. We see a clear nexus here, and it’s an opportunity to act. This is an urgent crisis that’s facing the U.S. If you think back to the L.A. Wildfires, you see massive loss of life, significant impacts to property. If you think about this summer, almost anywhere in the country, you probably experienced smoke. If you’re in the D.C. area, you would have seen the smoky skies come in in part from Canada, but also in part from the West Coast and the fires that were burning there. So this is a, it’s an urgent issue. It’s a crisis. And it’s something that we really can’t afford to wait on.

Terry Gerton What then are the specific provisions in this bill that would help address the issue that you’re talking about, where we don’t have wildfire season anymore, we have perpetual wildfires?

Tyson Bertone-Riggs Yeah, it’s a big bill. It has quite a lot going on in it. To shorthand it a little bit, we have provisions that I would say are focused on mitigation. So, those are risk reduction on the front end before a wildfire ever starts. Largely, those were focused on the natural environment. So we see quite a few provisions that would streamline planning and permitting, and that would reduce litigation on federal projects to reduce wildfire risk. We also see a community risk reduction program. We’re particularly excited about that. There are few programs in the federal government that currently assist in that space. And this does include the creation of a community-risk reduction program and expansion of an existing community wildfire defense grant program. There’s an entire provision on science and technology that would create a wildfire intelligence center. You can think of that as a bit of a fusion center where federal agencies would be in coordination. Providing mapping, modeling, predictive services to the wildfire community for risk reduction, for response, and also for post fire recovery. This would be something that would be accessible for state, local, and tribal government as well. And while we have bits and pieces of those functions scattered across the federal government, we don’t currently have them unified in a way that allows for unified procurement, that allows better command and control over that system. And so we see this as a huge opportunity there as well Other provisions of interest include prescribed fire coverage, so this would include insurance liability waivers for prescribed burners, prescribed fire being a critical piece of how we get in front of this problem and reduce risk, as well as many provisions on things like white oak restoration, post-fire recovery, and others.

Terry Gerton Tyson Bertoni-Riggs is the managing director for the Alliance for Wildfire Resilience. So Tyson, I wanna come back to a couple of pieces that you mentioned there inside the bill. Touches everything from, as you said, fuels reduction to permitting and technology. Where do you see the biggest gap right now in how the nation or communities respond to wildfires?

Tyson Bertone-Riggs Yeah, right now I think it is in the built environment. It’s with communities themselves. So we have few programs that address risk reduction in the built environment. FEMA does have the BRIC program, but less than 2% of the funding from BRIC has ever gone to wildfire-related programs. So creation of a dedicated community risk reduction program would be, I think, the biggest bang for the buck. We have the largest delta between where we are now and where we need to be.

Terry Gerton And you also mentioned the joint wildfire intelligence center. I get that from a military perspective, but you’re trying to force then agencies who sort of collaborate into working together in the same room. How would that help and how would it actually work?

Tyson Bertone-Riggs So I think part of the way that it would help is a greater ability to do things like set data standards. And that applies outside of the federal system as well. Right now we have each state that is managing their own data sets when it comes to wildfire risk and the work that’s been accomplished. Something like the Fire Intelligence Center would be an opportunity to help to streamline some of those processes and ultimately be a carrot for state and local government to participate in that system because they are also a service provider. I think you’re right. You hit the nail on the head that it’s always tricky to get coordination between existing federal entities. And I’ll say, having worked as the staff co-lead for a federally chartered commission on wildfire, one of the recommendations where they leaned the strongest towards centralization of functions was in the Fire Intelligence Center recommendation. Ultimately, this is a space where we heard from agency staff that having those functions scattered and those budgets scattered across multiple agencies This can be a real challenge. So, unifying some of those functions, providing a director of those services, and starting to bring those employees in, whether that’s on essentially a loan basis, or if they have to shift their actual designation of hire. That can provide some real efficiencies of scale, and keep the agencies from, as I think you know, they can be somewhat turfy when it comes to budgets and the way that they play together.

Terry Gerton Certainly one of the things we’ve seen, and I think this idea brings together your community response answer before and the intelligence center is that natural disasters do not respect manmade borders, right? And so certainly wildfires go across community boundaries, state boundaries. Would you hope that that kind of intel or fusion center might start to normalize levels of investment and preparedness?

Tyson Bertone-Riggs That’s a great question. I think we could hope for that. Part of the challenge right now is, it’s hard to look across all of those different boundaries and see what your investment is really buying you. Right now, the federal government puts quite a lot of money into this space, but so do states and so do local governments. Until we can get a holistic picture of where we should be investing, prioritizing our investments, and also seeing the best result from those investments. It can be hard to have a whole picture. It’s often a bit of a scattershot approach that we have right now for lack of that whole picture of the scenario.

Terry Gerton The Trump administration has put forward some plans to reorganize the wildfire response at the federal level. What about those plans do you think is insufficient?

Tyson Bertone-Riggs Well, I think what they’re calling for right now is one of many possible pathways to get to a future that we need. We have ultimately spoken about the values that we needed to see in a functional system, and there are a lot of different ways to get there, but ultimately I think the biggest piece that we’re missing out on right now is a redesign of the workforce. The system we had two years ago, the system that we had 10 years ago was ultimately not serving us as well as we needed it to. And so I would encourage people to look forward and talk about what kind of system we need, and that probably involves a significant investment in the wildland fire workforce, and not just the response component, but also in the mitigation workforce and in the post-fire recovery workforce.

Terry Gerton Tell me a little bit more about what you would envision for that workforce because it has historically been a temporary seasonal firefighter workforce. What are you imagining it would be in the future?

Tyson Bertone-Riggs Yeah, it’s a fascinating story how the wildland fire workforce has evolved. It really was other duties as assigned for foresters for a long time. You had volunteers that would come into that system. You eventually had seasonal employees that would come into that system, and it’s been a slow professionalization over time. I think that this is really the conversation that we need to have in the coming years, is what that system starts to look like. Do we need 24/7 coverage? Because at the moment we don’t really have that sort of scenario. Do we need full national mobilization? That may be something that we have to look at as well. And again, making sure that we’re paying attention to the workforce for mitigation as well as for response. Right now, a lot of the firefighters that we’ve have are gone for the entire summer while they work on these things. They’re gone for 16-hour days, they’re away from their families. It’s an unsustainable model and ultimately one that they’re not getting paid enough to do. Low pay has been a major retention problem for the federal workforce and for states as well, so, I think looking at that entire system, building the workforce that we need really does require a hard look at the systems that we have and where we need to be.

Terry Gerton And that sort of brings us back to where we started about this firefighting bill being in the NDAA. What would you imagine the intersection between the professional wild firefighting workforce and the military workforce could be if this bill passes?

Tyson Bertone-Riggs Yeah, I think there are a lot of opportunities to look to the military model for what some elements of the wildland fire workforce could look like. This came up in the commission discussions as well. It was an idea that maybe we need to be offering more comprehensive health care coverage. We need to be looking at some of the technology and science that’s utilized in the military space for the wildland fire workforce as well The technologies are really pretty old that we’re using right now. And so I think there is a lot of there are a lot lessons to be learned from the military