Frazier Park, California, March 2021: The interior of a Forest Service truck at a roadblock. GAO recently cited the loss of two subject matter experts and the inability to fill those positions due to the White House-ordered general federal hiring freeze. Image: Glenn Highcove / Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffThe Forest Service has strong capabilities to track aircraft and vehicles on the ground, but is less able to track and communicate with individual firefighters, the GAO has said, citing staffing shortages as setting back an effort to improve that capability.
“The ability to communicate amid changing conditions and hazards helps ensure that firefighters can receive critical situational awareness information” such as a fire’s intensity and rate of speed and weather conditions, the GAO said. However, communication mostly occurs over radios–“which limits sharing important safety information”—for reasons including lack of cell phone coverage in remote areas and the difficulty with making connections over satellite phones through forested areas and through smoke.
“Forest Service officials identified several challenges the agency has faced or continues to face in its efforts to improve the agency’s communications, tracking, and mapping capabilities for wildland firefighters, ranging from having too few staff with the required mix of technological and firefighting expertise to continuously evolving, expensive technologies.
Those officials further “identified several efforts planned or underway for improving communications, tracking, and mapping capabilities for wildland firefighters. However, loss of agency staff and budget uncertainties led the agency to postpone, pause, or reduce the scope of some of these efforts, according to Forest Service officials,” the report said.
The GAO cited for example the loss of two subject matter experts and the inability to fill those positions due to the White House-ordered general federal hiring freeze. Officials told GAO they have since filled the positions, but they “did not explain whether they had fully replaced lost expertise or whether they will be able to conduct all efforts that had been postponed, paused, or reduced in scope.”
The report comes as the Forest Service’s parent department Agriculture has announced plans to consolidate in a new U.S. Wildland Fire Service there wildland firefighting capabilities of several Interior Department components, as required under a June executive order.
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