With fire season under way, national forests thin on senior staff

"There are a lot of people lower down in the system who are five or six years away from being able to compete for leadership jobs," said Ed Hollenshead, regional director of fire and aviation management for the Forest Service. "It's like a slinky — sometimes it's bunched up, but right now the slinky is stretched out."

The hardest-hit areas include the Angeles and San Bernardino National Forests, where only 60 to 70 percent of engines are being regularly staffed because there are too few qualified supervisors to go around, according to Mike Dietrich, acting deputy director of fire and aviation for the Forest Service's Region 5, which encompasses all of California.

Those forests border on heavily populated urban areas, potentially raising the risk to people living nearby.

"It's going to take them longer to get to these fires," said Doug Campbell, a retired Forest Service fire planner who now trains various agencies on fire behavior. "I don't want to predict what's going to happen, but my feeling is it's going to result potentially in more acreage (lost) and more large fires."

None of the big fires so far this season have gotten out of hand because of short staffing, and officials say they're confident California has enough resources available to get through the next six months.

With 1,600 seasonal hires, the Forest Service is fielding 5,200 firefighters this year. Chiefs on the state's 18 national forests, which cover about 20 percent of the state, can call on their counterparts in other federal firefighting units or the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, which has 8,400 people available this summer — including about 20 captains hired over from the Forest Service, said Ken McLean, deputy state director of fire protection.

The state's robust mutual aid system also activates thousands of engines working for myriad municipal and county departments in large fires.

Firefighting crews and equipment from other parts of the country are also being moved into California and the rest of the West, said Tom Harbour, the national director of fire and aviation for the Forest Service.

"We move those assets around to cover gaps in specific area, and the focus for us now is the West," Harbour said.

Despite the shortages of engine crews, the Forest Service's teams of smokejumpers and hotshots are filled. Engine crews are being moved around the state as weather-related fire risk levels change, Hollenshead said. The region has also won an extra complement of 15 federal helicopters to beef up capacity for initial attacks in the first crucial hours of a blaze.