Firefighter and public safety are always the highest priority.
- Wildland firefighters work to protect lives, property, and natural and cultural resources when responding to wildfires.
- With each new fire start, fire managers assess risk to identify safe and appropriate management actions. Firefighters may not engage a wildfire until risk is mitigated to an acceptable level.
Local wildfire response is based on the national coordination system.
- The national coordination system is designed to allow wildland fire resources to rapidly scale up or down as needed. This allows for geographic areas with a lower risk of wildfire to dispatch resources and personnel to geographic areas with a higher risk.
- Over 95% of wildfires are controlled during the first 24 hours of initial response.
Wildland fire programs continue to adopt new technologies to improve suppression efforts.
- The use of uncrewed aerial systems (UAS/drones), remote smoke and camera detection systems, improvements in communication capabilities, are a few of the new technologies that fire programs are using. Updated data and modeling programs are improving fire suppression and fuels management.
The wildland urban interface is becoming increasingly complex for fire suppression.
- The last 10 years of wildfire activity has been some of the most destructive and costly in U.S. history. The complexity of fire suppression has increased due to urban sprawl, an overabundance of fuel (vegetation), longer and hotter summer temperatures, and extreme weather conditions. The public can find more information in regard to being prepared for wildfire season at NFPA - Firewise USA®.
Be smoke ready.
- During wildland fires, air quality can change quickly. Know your risk to wildfire smoke and plan ahead to reduce exposure. For recommended actions, as well as smoke forecasts and current information, visit: www.airnow.gov/wildfires/.
Recreate responsibly: The public plays a valuable role in wildfire prevention.
- On average, 85% of all wildfires are caused by humans each year. Many of these wildfires occur near roads, communities, and recreation areas and threaten public safety.
Wildland fire programs apply fuels treatments to reduce wildfire risk to communities and natural and cultural resources.
- Wildland fire agencies apply a variety of fuels treatments (mechanical thinning, prescribed fire, restoration) to reduce the amount of available fuel (vegetation) that fuels unwanted wildfires. By proactively removing fuel, fire agencies are better protecting local communities from risk of wildfire.
