Is It Time To Panic? Massive Resource Shortage As Fires Burn And Teams Are Committed To Hurricane Relief.

The good news and the bad news.

The October surprise I wrote about on Monday is no longer a surprise… Fires around the nation have come back to life with widespread Red Flags and heavy winds, and suppressing those incidents has become increasingly difficult with an already thinning workforce. On top of that, we had multiple new starts, and Hurricane Helene scooped up several Teams with around 1,500 personnel from the wildfire world sent to help.

There is also the urgent push to complete prescribed fires around the country before funds run out, along with the people available to complete that work. Already this week, a few Rx burns have escaped, adding to the resource drain. Put all that together, and you get a national memo that has gone out urging Regions to stop prescribed burning until further notice. I’ll lay out those details below.

The National Multi-Agency Coordinating Group (NMAC) will take over resource allocation nationwide due to the Preparedness Level moving back up to 4, and will also take over Team dispatching nationwide. This week, there have been many cases where crews have shown up to fires and escaped burns that have one day left of availability, so even though hard-set shutdown and layoff dates were put in place last month due to funding, extensions are now being granted across the nation for Hotshot crews and other resources due to the need for incident support.

All of this coming in October has induced panic in the system.

Before I dive into the National resource allocation and Rx memo, I think it’s appropriate to share the good news first.