Who Fights the Fires

Right now, more than 5,000 people are assigned to fire incidents across the corridor we track, working for at least five federal agencies, eleven state agencies, hundreds of county and rural fire districts, tribal nations, private contractors, and, in two states this season, the National Guard. Most people under smoke this week could not say who is actually on the ridge above their town. This is the anatomy of the system, what it fights with, what genuinely works, and what the rest of us can do that helps rather than gets in the way.

The Agencies

Federal.Five agencies field wildland firefighters: the U.S. Forest Service (the largest, on 193 million acres of national forest), and four Interior agencies, the Bureau of Land Management (dominant in the Great Basin sagebrush country now burning in eastern Oregon), the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National Park Service, and the Fish & Wildlife Service. Their incident response is coordinated through the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) in Boise and its geographic area coordination centers; when you see “Preparedness Level 5” on our homepage counter, that is NIFC saying the national system is fully committed.

State.Each corridor state runs its own force on state and private land: CAL FIRE (the largest state fire agency in the country, roughly $4 billion budget), the Oregon Department of Forestry, Washington DNR, and the Idaho Department of Lands among them. States also activate mutual aid, this season Idaho declared a disaster emergency and deployed the National Guard, and Washington’s Guard has flown helicopter bucket missions over the Spokane complex.

Local, tribal, contract, and inmate crews.Rural fire districts and city departments provide the structure protection when fire reaches communities, Spokane’s defense this month was fought street-by-street largely by municipal and district engines. Tribal nations field their own wildland programs and some of the most experienced burn crews in the country. Private contractors supply a large share of engines, water tenders, dozers, and 20-person crews on federal incidents. And California’s conservation-camp program still fields inmate hand crews for roughly $5–$10 a day plus sentence credits, a fact worth knowing when you thank “the firefighters.”

The Crews and the Machines

The elite of the hand crews are the roughly 100 Interagency Hotshot Crews, 20–22 person teams that cut line directly against the most dangerous fires with chainsaws and hand tools. Smokejumpers parachute into remote starts to catch fires small. Helitack crews rappel or land by helicopter. Engine crews (Type 3–6 wildland engines) patrol, mop up, and defend structures; dozer operators cut mineral-soil line at scale. Overhead, the air show that dominates news footage: large and very large air tankers (up to a DC-10 dropping 9,400 gallons of retardant), scooper aircraft, and helicopters from light recon ships to Chinooks and Skycranes with 2,000+ gallon buckets and tanks.

One evidence note the footage never carries: aircraft do not put out fires.Retardant slows spread so that people on the ground can catch it; research and after-action reviews consistently find air attack is ineffective without ground crews to anchor it, and largely futile in the wind-driven conditions under which megafires make their biggest runs. The decisive work is the unglamorous kind, hand line, dozer line, and burnout operations that remove fuel ahead of the fire on the crews’ terms. That is why the workforce numbers below matter more than the aircraft count.

The Workforce, in Its Worst Year

The federal side entered 2026 degraded: roughly 11,300 federal firefighters on board versus 11,900 the prior year, after thousands of departures through deferred-resignation and early-retirement programs, on top of the loss of ~6,000 Forest Service employees overall and the most sweeping USFS reorganization in 121 years (our full accounting is in The 121-Year Dismantling). Surveys this summer report rising burnout and morale problems in the remaining workforce, and fire bosses openly describe juggling scarce crews between simultaneous megafires. Entry-level federal wildland firefighters still start near $15–$20 an hour for some of the most dangerous seasonal work in the country, and the permanent pay fix has been left to stopgap supplements for four consecutive years.

How to Actually Help

Before fire arrives: the highest-value thing a resident can do is make their own home defensible, clear the 0–5 foot zone, screen vents, clean gutters and roof. Every home that doesn’t ignite is an engine crew freed for the next street (the evidence is in our companion piece, What Actually Stops a Megafire). Sign up for county alerts, know your evacuation zones, and go when told, crews divert to rescue holdouts at real cost.

During an incident: stay off fire roads, keep drones grounded (a single hobby drone halts all air operations), and don’t self-deploy donations to fire camps, logistics systems exist and unrequested goods become someone’s disposal problem. Cash to verified local relief funds beats goods every time (our vetted list is maintained on the How to Evacuate, and How to Help page).

For the firefighters themselves: the Wildland Firefighter Foundation (wffoundation.org) is the organization crews themselves point to, it supports families of the fallen and injured firefighters, usually within 24 hours. Grassroots Wildland Firefighters advocates for the pay, housing, and mental-health reforms the workforce numbers above make urgent. The Eric Marsh Foundation, named for the Granite Mountain Hotshots superintendent killed at Yarnell Hill in 2013, supports wildland firefighters and their families in crisis. And if you are between 18 and 35, AmeriCorps conservation corps and agency apprenticeships remain the front door into the profession the West is currently losing.

The people on the line this month are fewer than last year, paid less than the work merits, and holding a season that is running 38% above the ten-year average. They are also, by every after-action account, the reason Spokane’s losses stopped at hundreds of structures rather than thousands. Know who they are. Make their job smaller.