The U.S. Forest Service's Morale Crises

By Marisa Gerber Staff Writer June 17, 2022 6:30 AM PT “We are facing a dire retention issue,” an exasperated firefighter wrote in his viral resignation letter this spring. “We are losing people at a terrifying rate.” In a story this week, my colleague Alex Wigglesworth showed that the letter written by a squad boss of the elite Truckee hotshot crew for the U.S. Forest Service was only the latest example of how dire the crisis of confidence has become among federal wildland firefighters. Morale, several current and former firefighters told her, was at an all-time low — the byproduct of low pay, mental trauma and the exhaustion of battling ever more destructive fires. Forest Service firefighters, typically classified as forestry technicians, have a starting annual base salary of somewhere between about $25,000 and $32,000. President Biden’s infrastructure bill signed into law in November called for the creation of a new classification and an increase of either $20,000 or 50% — whichever was less — in areas deemed hard to recruit or retain personnel in, but after more than six months no raises had yet been given. “We’re getting paid $15 an hour to put our lives on the line,” said one firefighter who recently left the agency. Such departures are only compounding the increasingly dire personnel shortages. As California braces for another brutal fire season, only 62% of federal firefighter positions here are filled, according to a source within the agency. Officials recently announced that they’d been unable to fill some 1,000 temporary firefighter positions and were now looking to make emergency hires by shortening the onboarding process. According to a recent survey of more than 700 current and former wildland firefighters, nearly 80% of respondents reported mental health issues they attributed to the stresses of fighting fires. An assistant engine operator told The Times that, due to low pay and trauma, he was thinking about retiring. He’d already gotten a second job to try to make ends meet — now working 80-hour weeks — and he said experiencing close calls, as well as the deaths of co-workers, had affected his mental health.