America's wildland fire management has high stakes these days. No one knows that better than Jerry T. Williams, director of Fire & Aviation Management at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service.

Williams, who started his career as a firefighter 36 years ago and was a smokejumper for seven years, has a master's degree in fire science from the University of Washington and a bachelor's degree from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore.

Williams' experience in wildland firefighting leadership roles includes positions at the district, forest, regional and national office levels. In 1999, he co-led development of a national strategy designed to protect communities, watersheds and species at risk in fire-adapted ecosystems. The strategy became a basis for the National Fire Plan.

Before his appointment in April 2001 to his current post headquartered in Washington, D.C., he was director of Aviation, Fire and Air in the Northern Region, headquartered in Missoula, Mont.

Williams also has a very personal stake in the safety of wildland firefighting: his son David, a student at the University of Montana, works summers on a Hot Shot crew.

We've had the National Fire Plan for three years, and just last year we saw passage of the Healthy Forests Act of 2003. The president's National Fire Initiative is another document that federal agencies are implementing. Do you think that we'll see major progress in the treatment of hazardous fuels in 2004?

I think all these initiatives are real strong steps in the right direction. Is the problem going to be solved this year? No, it's not. I characterize this as being in something of a race to a train crossing — that train is moving awful fast. The drought situation throughout much of the West is making this all the more urgent. But the fact is that over some 70 million acres, the forest condition has deteriorated significantly during the past 100 years.

We're not going to fix this problem in a year or two or three. We're talking about several years — maybe several decades — before we're able to restore healthier, more resilient conditions across much of the West. This is a long-term problem that requires long-term commitment and long-term resolve.

Will the elections in November affect these initiatives?

I don't think so. There's been strong bipartisan support in terms of recognizing this problem and acting on it. Before President Bush's administration came into office, the Clinton administration was taking up the same cause. Different administrations are going to be bringing different values or perspectives perhaps, but the underlying theme across this country is that we've got a significant wildfire problem. Passage of the Healthy Forest Initiative, increases in funding and so forth going back the last two administrations show a stronger and stronger political commitment to confronting and dealing with it.

Last year's 29 wildland firefighter deaths made it the deadliest year in wildland firefighting since 1994. Why was last year such a particularly deadly year in wildland firefighting?

This question is closely tied to the first question, and I'd go back even to the 1999 Storm King Fire or the South Canyon Fire, where 14 fatalities occurred. After that we contracted a corporation called Tri-Data, trying to get at the bottom of why these fires are occurring in such dangerous ways. We conducted a survey of all wildland firefighters across the federal government and included state wildland firefighters. We asked firefighters what's the one single thing that could be done to improve their margin of safety on the fire line.… The surprise was that close to 80% of the respondents said we need to do something about the volatility of the fuels.

From a program standpoint, the single most important thing that we can do to better ensure the safety of firefighters is going after the fuels problem that dominates the landscapes where we wind up fighting fires.

There are a lot of other things that we can do. When we look at the fatalities, 70% of all fireline fatalities occur during extended-attack operations. That occurs in the transition as a fire is growing from a small fire that we thought we could contain, moving toward a larger fire that is beyond the capabilities of those on site to control it. It's in that transition period, where command is getting confused and overwhelmed, where we experience the lion's share of our fatalities.

What is the Forest Service doing to improve firefighter safety, particularly with regard to leadership?

We've introduced policy requirements to deal with that. It would have all incident commanders declare a control objective as a means of establishing for themselves and their crew what their limits of ability are on that fire. It would be something as simple as, “We're going to keep this fire between the river and the road” or “We're going to have this fire controlled by 1800 hours today.” They know that when that objective is exceeded or somehow compromised, they have to step back and re-evaluate their strategies, their tactics and re-assess their command abilities to deal with a fire that's different from a fire they thought they were dealing with.

We're also beefing up the leadership training for incident commanders this year. We introduced simulation training for all Type-III ICS that deals specifically with these transition fires and basically runs them through a simulation and prompts them with a series of problems or a series of challenges that they need to adequately respond to. And most of the people that have gone through that training have found it very, very useful, so we're encouraged by that.

We're also getting started on a quality-assurance program that looks at the gamut of factors that influence firefighter safety. I mentioned the fuels situation, but we're also looking at the span of control and program oversight. And very importantly, we're also looking at some of the land-management factors being brought to bear.

This might be a place to mention that we've started doing a different kind of after-action review in the Forest Service…. The new review process has three phases. The second phase is the traditional fire review — how was the incident managed? But importantly, the first phase now looks at what's happened on this landscape over the past maybe several decades that may have predisposed or somehow influenced the rate of spread, the intensity and the severity of the wildfire.

We're looking at factors like the accumulation of fuels. We're looking at factors in terms of public expectation for the land as reflected in the land-management plans. We're looking at demographics in terms of growth at the interface. And the thing we're finding, at least on these two preliminary reviews, is that unintentionally we've been managing the land for a whole series of resource objectives — everything from wildlife habitat to visual quality to watershed protection — and in some cases, we're inadvertently managing the land for greater levels of biomass and higher levels of flammability. As a predisposing factor, this gets tied to firefighter safety in a real important way that we need to be paying a lot more attention to.

The same is true in terms of growth at the interface. A lot of the forested land 20, 40, 50, certainly 100 years ago did not have the social influences that it does today. We find ourselves often times in an interface fire making the priority the protection of homes and structures. That often occurs at the expense of perimeter growth on the remainder of the fire and in time that makes for a dangerous situation and certainly a much more complex situation as the fire has moved from maybe a couple hundred acres to several thousands of acres. So those are the kinds of things that this review is trying to get at.

Going back to what are we doing to better ensure firefighter safety, I think I'd have to include stronger focus on the predisposing influence of fuels; policy during extended-attack operations; a quality-assurance program; and better, more focused training on the extended-attack phase of firefighting where the majority of our fatalities occur.

A lot of those firefighter deaths are still occurring in the air, so let's talk about what's being done to improve wildland aviation safety.

Following the fire season a couple of years ago, after a horrific pair of accidents in which we basically saw the wings fold on two air tankers, we commissioned a Blue Ribbon Panel and asked them to come and take a look at our aviation program…. It was remarkable, and one of the most telling findings in my mind was that the aircraft that sustained these accidents were operating in an environment that was beyond their design limits.

For years, the Forest Service and the other federal agencies and the states have benefited from excess military aircraft. That has a lot of draw to it. When you can get a tool as expensive as an airplane for not very much money, that's very, very attractive. But what we found is that the tradeoff in getting less expensive aircraft is that not always are those aircraft necessarily designed for the operating environment for which we have them planned. Since that time, we've been running all our air tankers through an assessment. Sandia National Labs, a recognized aeronautical engineering lab, has been testing and evaluating the air-worthiness of these aircraft for this mission environment.

We're also starting to put stress meters on these aircraft to get a better understanding of the kinds of stresses that are occurring in wildland firefighting for air tankers.

For many years, we've been making gains in the aviation side of our firefighting. A few years ago we introduced a system called Safenet, which is a very professional, neutral kind of a way to better understand the accident potential in the air tanker, lead plane, helicopter aviation environment. It's a place [on the Internet at http://safenet.nifc.gov] where pilots and air managers are encouraged to write down and document near misses, near accidents and accidents and tell managers what's happening.

The professionalism in our aviation community is reflected in the fact that people are willing to do this and are enthusiastic about doing it. It gives us a better idea of trends and what management can do to ensure a safer flying environment.…

Fundamentally, I think the biggest challenge that we're confronted with right now in the aviation program is the fact that we've got an aging fleet. We are doing all possible to modernize that fleet and to introduce newer air tankers, newer aviation that is better suited to the environment and the risks of this environment that the aviation program has to deal with every fire season.

What are some of the new technologies the Forest Service is working on bringing into wildland firefighting, and what is your vision of what the firefighter of the future will be, say, three to five years from now?

Let me back up a little bit and maybe lay out how I see the wildland firefighting work that we do.

Fundamentally, I think that we deal with four distinctly different kinds of wildfires. The first is the small, initial-attack fire — about 95% of all the fires we confront every year are in this category. We attack aggressively and quickly contain it and control it and it's suppressed with relatively small effort and little notice.

The next kind of fire that we deal with is the one I mentioned a little earlier, that's the transition fire, or extended-attack fire. Those require a lot more effort for us to control. We do that with strong attack that's followed up with strong reinforcement. These are the fires I mentioned where 70% of our fatalities occur, but these are the fires that we've really got to work at to contain within two or three burning periods. Those fires account for about 4% of all the fires that we deal with every year. And on the average, I need to mention the Forest Service deals with about 10,000 wildland firefighters every year.

The third kind of fire is what I will call the large fire. That's the fire where you'll often see the incident management team in place, and either a Type-I or Type-II team. They're going to manage this fire for several burning periods, but eventually they're going to bring to bear the forces to put that fire to rest.

The fourth kind of fire is what some are calling the “megafire.” That's a fire that will often be on national headline news at night on TV. It's the fire where we not only have incident management teams on it; we probably have several incident management teams on it and likely an area command as well. And this is the kind of fire where, owing to the fuels or the drought, we're going to be there until we get a significant break in the weather.

I characterized these four kinds of fire because I think it's important for us to look at how we develop strategies and tactics and approaches that are tailored to the unique demands and characteristics of each of those four kinds of fires.

Fundamentally, strategies are flawed if we attempt to use the same tactics and the same strategies on every fire except try harder or throw more resources at it. And that's where I think the importance of recognizing the discreet differences between these four fires is important.

I think we get into trouble on the extended-attack fires, and the reason that we suffer the fatalities that we do is that we tend to treat them just like the small fires except we try harder. Instead of adjusting our strategies and tactics and reintroducing a higher level of command, we simply try harder, and I think that gets us in trouble.

I think we get in trouble with megafires … because we tend to treat it like we do the large fire except we throw more stuff at it.

I mentioned an important statistic with the extended-attack fire, the fact that 70% of our fatalities occur there, but the statistic that's staggering with the large and so called megafires, these fires only account for 1% of all the fires that we deal with. The so-called megafires probably only account for 1/100 or 1% of all the fires we deal with every year. But between the two of them, this 1% of the 10,000 fires accounts for more than 85% of the total dollars that we spend fighting fires, and they account for over 95% of the acres burned resulting from wildfires.

I mention this because we're looking at developing what we're calling a “megafire management model” that challenges the notion that more is better, the larger these fires become. We're starting to look at different strategies and tactics that emphasize point protection over perimeter control, for example. We're working with the JFK School of Government at Harvard. We're working with the Special Forces Command at Fort Bragg, N.C. We're working with people that we think can help us modify our approaches in dealing with these fires.

One of the things that we learned from the Special Forces people is that they operate with some basic tenets in mind. “Exploit every advantage” is one. Seek every opportunity in battle. One of the ways they seek advantage, Special Forces will tell you, is that they “own the night.” They've been able to capitalize on technology that enables them to fight when their enemies can't.

We are looking at why we are trying to go toe-to-toe with these large megafires in the middle of the burning period when we have virtually no advantages. We're starting to borrow that [philosophy] from the military and other technologies to start using night vision, to start using GPS more widely and enable our people to work more effectively at night when we have more advantages in terms of controlling wildfires.

The Missoula Technology and Development Center is really taking a strong lead in that area. I'm excited about not only looking at the fact that we deal with four different kinds of fires, but looking more seriously at tailoring strategies, tactics and operational approaches in dealing with those fires.

What other new technologies might you be bringing into the picture?

We're going to be trying to marry night-vision technology and GPS technology with fire behavior modeling. It's not out of the question that within the next few years we'll have the technology so that an incident commander in the middle of the night will have bright-screen technology that not only shows his or her location, the location of all the people on that fire but the perimeter of the fire, the location of hazardous areas on the fire, and the direction and rate-of-spread on the fire. We're attempting to move toward a model that in wildland firefighting will have us “own the night” just like the Army's Special Forces does.

It makes a lot of sense when you stop and think about it. During the daylight hours, in the middle of the burning period, we don't have anything going for us. It's the hottest part of the day; it's usually the windiest part of the day; the relative humidities are the lowest. We are at every disadvantage. Why wouldn't we do all that is possible to shift to that time of day or night when it's still, when the temps are down, when the humidity is up?

In Part II of his interview with Wildfire magazine, Williams talks about the role Fire & Aviation Management plays in homeland security, an update on the Blue Ribbon Panel convened to study last year's Southern California firestorms and cooperative efforts with local firefighting forces to control wildland-urban interface fires.