Response

When wildfires threaten communities, infrastructure, or landscapes, the U.S. Wildland Fire Service responds with trained personnel, specialized equipment, and strategic decision-making. Our priority is to safeguard human life while protecting property and valuable natural and cultural resources. We work closely with federal, tribal, state, and local partners to deploy the right resources and tactics to address each incident. 

A Growing Challenge 

Wildfire response has become increasingly challenging in recent decades with fire seasons stretching year-round and wildfires growing more extreme. 

The number of wildfires on Interior-managed and tribal trust lands increased by 26% from 1992 to 2022. The size of the fires also increased over this same period, making them more complex and time-consuming to contain. This is reflected in the growing cost of Interior’s suppression operations, which nearly tripled over the past few decades, from $161 million in 1994 to over $466 million in 2023. 

A number of factors contribute these increasingly extreme and damaging wildfires:  

• Pervasive droughts and faster snowmelt have lengthened fire seasons into fire years.
• Vegetation that can fuel extreme wildfires has accumulated due to a century of wildfire suppression.
• Population growth and home construction in wildfire-prone areas means that fire-dependent landscapes are increasingly mixed with homes that need to be protected from fire.
• The spread of invasive annual grasses is causing rangelands to burn more frequently.
• Insect infestations are increasing the amount of dead, standing timber, providing more fuel for wildfires.  

How We Respond to Wildfires 

Wildfires are complex, dynamic environments. Fire managers carefully evaluate each situation to determine the most appropriate strategy to reduce threats to communities, infrastructure, and natural resources while ensuring firefighter safety. 

When wildfires threaten communities or cherished landscapes, we strive to extinguish the fire when possible and otherwise to control its movement and growth. 

Common tactics our wildland firefighters use to stop a wildfire include: 

• Applying water or fire retardant, either on the ground using pumps or wildland fire engines or by air from helicopters or airplanes.
• Removing burnable vegetation, either using hand tools or heavy equipment.
• Setting carefully planned controlled fires to rob the approaching wildfire of fuel. 

In some situations, wildfires that do not endanger lives, communities, or infrastructure may be managed to allow the fire to play its natural ecological role. This approach can provide benefits such as reducing overgrown vegetation, returning nutrients to the soil, promoting native plan regeneration, and creating diverse wildlife habitat. 

Fire managers must react quickly to changing weather, topography, and other conditions, and they may apply different approaches to different areas of a single fire.