A 10-foot high-tech map pinpoints the real-time location and status of every plane and helicopter fighting fires in forests and grasslands across the country.
Next to it, wildfires are identified on a similar map. Facing the maps, workers in the coordination center for the National Interagency Fire Center are arrayed in defensive lines like fire crews in the field.
From this building on a 52-acre secured compound they track the whereabouts of up to 15,000 ground crews and five federal agencies attacking fires from Alaska to California to Florida, dispatching a pair of 737 jets to deploy fresh firefighters when local crews are overwhelmed or too exhausted to continue. They can have firefighting aircraft anywhere in the country assigned within five minutes of getting a call for help.
"We make sense out of chaos," said Rose Davis, a public affairs officer and one of 500 workers at the Boise-based center.
The center was created in 1993 to help coordinate responses to wildfires, and has helped standardize techniques and terminology to make firefighters from different agencies interchangeable parts. That allows for quick responses with cobbled-together crews.
PRIORITY FIRES
"When there is one geographical area demanding a lot, we can normally handle that with one arm tied behind our back," said Tim Murphy, deputy assistant director with the Office of Fire Aviation of the Bureau of Land Management.
"But when multiple resource areas start burning, then the prioritization becomes more keen."
So far this fire season, wildfires have scorched about 3,700 square miles, and firefighters battled some 40 active large fires at midweek.
The center's unofficial and incongruous banner, tolerated if not condoned by higher-ups, is the Jolly Roger, the skull and crossbones on a black background tucked discreetly in cubicles but displayed boldly in outlying buildings.
The center is made up of the Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National Association of State Foresters, the United States Fire Administration, and the National Weather Service.
Weather data from 2,000 remote sensors scattered across the country transmitted by satellite is used to make decisions about where fire crews might be needed next and to move supplies in advance from 11 pre-positioned caches, located mostly in the West.
FLYING THE JOLLY ROGER
The center's buildings include a cavernous warehouse that is the nation's main repository for firefighting supplies. With fire season in full swing, the center is shipping meals, ready to eat (MREs), crates of the fireproof green pants and yellow shirts that are the trademark of wildland firefighters, hand tools,and everything else needed to keep thousands of firefighters in the field.
The largest and most prominently displayed Jolly Roger is in the BLM smokejumpers building, where the 4-foot-tall standard dominates the front of a briefing room for the paratroopers of firefighting.
Base manager Eric Reynolds compared smokejumpers to high-seas buccaneers.
"They are independent and they know what to do. And they are highly disciplined when it comes down to it," Reynolds said.Associated Press via Anchorage Daily News
