Abstract
A severe outbreak of wildfire across the US Pacific Coast during August 2020 led to persistent fire activity through the end of summer. In late September, Fire Weather Outlooks predicted higher than usual fire activity into the winter in parts of California, with concomitant elevated fire danger in the Southeastern US. To help inform the regional and national allocation of firefighting personnel and equipment, we developed visualizations of resource use during recent late season, high-demand analogs. Our visualizations provided an overview of the crew, engine, dozer, aerial resource, and incident management team usage by geographic area. While these visualizations afforded information that managers needed to support their decisions regarding resource allocation, they also revealed a potentially significant gap between resource demand and late-season availability that is only likely to increase over time due to lengthening fire seasons. This gap highlights the need for the increased assessment of suppression resource acquisition and allocation systems that, to date, have been poorly studied.
Highlights
An accounting of available wildfire suppression resources is critical for determining whether a proposed strategy to manage a large wildfire is likely to succeed or is even feasible
As Geographic Area Coordination Centers (GACCs) work to plan how to respond to future incidents, the uncertainty surrounding resource availability can make for sub-optimal decisions
These Type 1 crews are a large part of the response system in California loss highlighted a key challenge for the multiagency fire system: agencies make decisions and their loss highlighted a key challenge for the multiagency fire system: agencies make independently regarding the resources they have on staff, which impacts the resources decisions independently regarding the resources they have on staff, which impacts the available to any interagency effort to respond to fires
Summary
An accounting of available wildfire suppression resources (i.e., firefighting personnel and equipment) is critical for determining whether a proposed strategy to manage a large wildfire is likely to succeed or is even feasible. In the US, resource assignments depend on a highly complex, three-tiered, multiagency system [1] Within this system, local dispatch centers are responsible both for sending resources out to respond to initial fire reports and for filling resource orders from large fire incidents. Geographic Area Coordination Centers (GACCs) are responsible for facilitating regional-level resource sharing between non-neighboring local areas and supplying additional resources once local resources are depleted [2]. Coordination Center (NICC) is responsible for facilitating resource sharing between geographic areas and supplying national resources to geographic areas once regional and local resources are depleted [1]. Each fire season, this system oversees the distribution of firefighting resources that travel extensively to provide support for large incidents [3,4]. Data;Open available available at https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/nifc::national-gacc-boundaries/about, 28 Febhttps://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/nifc::national-gacc-boundaries/about, accessed accessed
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