Wildfire Wednesdays #141: Hermit's Peak/Calf Canyon Fire

Hello Fireshed community, 

Today marks exactly two years since firefighters at last contained the historic Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire on August 21, 2022. 

Families, communities, forests and watersheds in Northern New Mexico are still recovering from the destructive wildfire. In fact, the Santa Fe National Forest is hosting two public meetings next week to present and gather public input on recovery efforts and long-term recovery planning.

Meanwhile, forest, water, and fire managers are rebuilding support for prescribed fire as an essential land management tool – one not without risk, but key to reducing future risk of catastrophic wildfires.

This Wildfire Wednesday features a review of the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire, including: 

• How the Fire Began 

• The Costly Road to Recovery 

• Post-fire Flooding: A Prolonged Disaster 

• Prescribed Fires Remain a Crucial Tool for Reducing Wildfire Risk 

• Additional Resources 

Best, Maya 

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How the Fire Began

Hermit’s Peak, April 10, 2022. Source: U.S. Forest Service

HPCC Wildfire Boundary. Source: Inciweb

In April 2022, a Forest Service prescribed fire just outside of the Pecos Wilderness area of the Santa Fe National Forest became the Hermit’s Peak wildfire when erratic winds carried embers outside the boundary of the planned burn area and ignited multiple fires in surrounding forests dried out from severe drought.  

About two weeks later, the Calf Canyon Fire began spreading on National Forest land nearby when a pile burn ignited by the Forest Service in January resurfaced. The pile had smoldered underground for months through several snowstorms, an event “nearly unheard of until recently in the century-plus of experience the Forest Service has in working on these landscapes,” Forest Service leaders wrote in a review of the escaped prescribed fires. 

The two wildfires merged due to unprecedented wind events and historically dry fuels and soils and burned more than 530 square miles over four and half months, until firefighters contained the blaze in late August. 

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The Costly Road to Recovery

Mora Valley, June 28, 2022. Source: Inciweb

The Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire, the largest wildfire in New Mexico history, triggered evacuation orders for more than 27,000 people and destroyed over 900 structures, including 433 homes. Most of the land burned – 58% – was privately owned. 

Because the Forest Service was responsible for igniting the fire, Congress and President Joe Biden allocated almost $4 billion to compensate victims of the fire and subsequent floods. As of July 2024, while still processing and receiving additional claims, the federal government had paid out 5,633 claims totaling $926.7 million.  

Payments covered economic damages, up to five years of flood insurance coverage, and natural resource restoration projects for landowners. Additional recovery efforts in years following the burn have included aerial seeding of the burn scar and flooding prevention work by federal agencies and local organizations. 

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Post-fire Flooding: A Prolonged Disaster

High-severity wildfires burn not only vegetation but also soils, changing the chemical and physical properties of soil such that it becomes hydrophobic, or water-repelling. This reverses forests’ sponge-like ability to soak up rainfall and instead makes burn scars susceptible to debris flows and flash floods.  

The Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire damaged soil in over half the burn scar, causing floods that killed at least three people, washed out buildings and infrastructure, and contaminated the city of Las Vegas’s water supply with ash and debris in 2022. The National Weather Service received over 75 preliminary reports of flash floods and debris flows in the burn scar from June 2022 to June 2024. For multiple years following the fire, surrounding communities expect to be at elevated risk for flooding.  

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Prescribed Fires Remain a Crucial Tool for Reducing Wildfire Risk

The Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire spurred the Forest Service to pause all prescribed burns pending a 90-day review of its national prescribed burn program. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore said the decision “reflected the growing recognition that extreme conditions resulting from drought, weather, dry fuels, and other climate change effects were influencing fire behavior in ways we had never seen before." The prescribed burn that became the Hermit’s Peak Fire had been ignited in “much drier conditions than were recognized,” the review found.  

“We cannot guarantee that prescribed fires will never escape, but the alternative to using this proven tool is larger, more destructive wildfires.”

— Santa Fe National Forest Supervisor Shaun Sanchez  

The review underscored the necessity of prescribed burns as one of the most effective tools for forest, fire and water managers to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires, protect watersheds, and increase the resilience of forests. Over a century of fire suppression in fire-adapted forests of the Southwest has, in combination with climate change, created conditions for high-severity wildfires that threaten people, property and drinking water sources and threaten forests’ ability to regenerate. Prescribed burns, on the other hand, facilitate a return to low-severity fires that promote forest health and increase firefighters’ success in safely managing fires. Of the about 4,500 prescribed burns conducted by the Forest Service annually, 99.84% have gone according to plan, the review noted.  

The Forest Service resumed prescribed burning with updated guidelines aimed at further reducing the risk of escaped prescribed fires. New requirements include daily, higher-level review of prescribed burn plans; more localized weather data; heightened consideration of drought conditions in burn plans; long-term monitoring of burns; and more extensive public outreach about prescribed fires, among other changes. 

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Additional Resources

• Visit the New Mexico Forest and Watershed Restoration Institute’s Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Story Map for numerous maps, photographs, and graphics illustrating the spread and aftermath of the wildfire. 

• View this blog post in an easy-to-read PDF format on the Greater Santa Fe Fireshed Coalition’s Briefing Papers webpage. Other briefing papers on the webpage cover topics including: 

• Stewarding the Greater Santa Fe Fireshed 

• Source Water: Fire and the Santa Fe Municipal Watershed 

• Containing Wildfire: The Medio Fire Success Story 

• Pollinators and Wildfire 

• Post-fire Impacts 

• Forest Type Conversion 

• Fire History in the Greater Santa Fe Fireshed 

• NEPA 

• Insect Defoliation in the Greater Santa Fe Fireshed 

• The Intersection of Bird Habitat and Forest Restoration in the Southwest 

Wildfire Wednesdays #140: Wildland Fire Workforce

Hi! I am Maya Hilty, a new Fireshed Coordinator with the Forest Stewards Guild. In this role, I support the Greater Santa Fe Fireshed Coalition; conduct home hazard assessments; facilitate fuels reduction projects on public and private lands; and grow our Fireshed Ambassador program, where neighbors influence neighbors to make communities better prepared for fire. I will also be contributing to Fire Adapted New Mexico Learning Network into the future, including authoring Wildfire Wednesday blog posts. 

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Hello Fireshed community, 

As of today, almost 28,000 firefighters across the U.S. are battling 95 large fires burning over 3,400 square miles. 

For the past five years, an annual average of ~59,100 wildfires, including both natural ignitions and human-caused fires, have burned almost 12,000 square miles across the nation each year. That includes roughly 2,800 fires per year in Arizona and New Mexico – more than 7 ignitions per day on average, if the fires were spread evenly throughout the year – which have burned 1,150 square miles, or approximately the size of Bernalillo County, annually.  

Many of us take for granted that, where fires ignite, firefighting resources will quickly follow. However, for reasons explored below, those resources are stretched increasingly thin during severe fires or during the most fire-prone times of the year. 

This Wildfire Wednesday features an overview of the wildland fire workforce, including: 

• The Wildland Fire Workforce: A Who’s Who

• Challenges in Wildland Fire Management

• Enacted and Proposed Policy Changes

• Additional Resources

Best, Maya 

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The Wildland Fire Workforce: A Who's Who

From the local to federal level, here’s who fights wildfires.

As outlined by the Santa Fe County Community Wildfire Protection Plan as well as U.S. Forest Service and Department of the Interior materials, the wildland firefighting workforce includes responders at the: 

• Local level. This includes, for example, the Santa Fe city and county Fire Department Wildland Divisions. 

• State level. The New Mexico Forestry Division created two full-time crews in 2024 and trains additional firefighters for hire in an emergency. The Division also collaborates with a state prison in Los Lunas to run the Inmate Work Camp Program, through which the state hires four to six crews of people who are incarcerated to respond to wildland fires alongside other professional firefighters.

• Federal level. This year, the federal wildland firefighting workforce includes roughly 11,300 firefighters in the Forest Service and 5,750 firefighters employed by four agencies in the Department of the Interior: the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service. Half the federal wildland firefighting workforce is only employed seasonally, for a maximum of six months, according to data from 2022.

In 2023, costs to suppress and contain wildfires amounted to nearly $3.2 billion in federal firefighting costs alone. Still, the Forest Service, which employs most federal wildland firefighters, needs more funding to meet their capacity needs to address the “ongoing wildfire crisis,” agency leaders say. 

Silver City Hotshots fighting New Mexico’s 2022 Calf Canyon Fire

A handcrew on New Mexico’s 2022 Hermit’s Peak Fire.

A fire engine in the foothills near Albuquerque in 2018

A helitack crew training in Missoula

Smokejumpers approaching California’s 2023 Muddy Fire

A handcrew in the foothills near Albuquerque in 2018

Firefighters have a wide range of specialties, from members of handcrews and hotshots, who construct and patrol firelines; engine crews; smokejumpers, who parachute out of airplanes to reach fires in remote areas; helitack crews, who reach fires by helicopter; equipment operators; dispatchers; and other support staff. For more info, visit this Forest Service webpage about firefighting jobs. 

Collaboration is key

Thanks to mutual aid and joint powers agreements between tribes and local, state, and federal government agencies, the geographically closest firefighting forces often respond to the initial report of a fire regardless of their jurisdiction over where the fire started. 

Firefighting agencies also share an Incident Management System that enables initial responders to more seamlessly scale up a response. In northern New Mexico, that usually means soliciting help from a Southwest Area Incident Management Team. 

If a wildfire grows beyond the capability of teams in the Southwest Area (one of 10 wildfire Geographic Area Coordination Centers across the U.S.), the Boise, Idaho-based National Interagency Coordination Center assumes responsibility for mobilizing more resources from elsewhere across the nation. Because there is often a greater need than there is availability of firefighting personnel and equipment, the National Multi-Agency Coordinating Group comprised of state and federal fire management leaders ultimately oversees where to allocate firefighting resources.

In addition, the United States has ever-evolving agreements with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and Portugal that enable the countries to share firefighting personnel and equipment. The U.S. considers requesting international help when ~60% or more of domestic wildland firefighting personnel are committed to fires, and the U.S. has received assistance in the form of aircraft or up to 600 personnel from Canada, Australia or New Zealand most years over the past two decades, as detailed in this 2022 paper in the journal Fire. 

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Challenges in Wildland Fire Management

"Over the last few decades, the wildland fire management environment has profoundly changed. Longer fire seasons; bigger fires and more acres burned on average each year; more extreme fire behavior; and wildfire suppression operations in the wildland urban interface (WUI) have become the norm.” ~ U.S. Forest Service

Growth in fire seasons and severity

Due to factors including climate change, fuel build-up from fire exclusion, and expansion of the wildland-urban interface through continued construction of the built environment in previously undeveloped areas, wildfires have become larger, more severe, and more destructive. For example, the land area in the U.S. burned annually by wildfire has doubled over the past 20 years. Meanwhile, fire seasons have become longer – more than 80 days longer in the western U.S. – straining seasonal and regionally shared firefighting resources.

“We all recognize now we have a fire year, but we continue staffing for a fire season,” fire managers reflected in a review of the destructive 2022 Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire.

Resource strain and scarcity

As we transition out of the months traditionally considered the Southwest fire season – from April to July, when monsoons typically begin – more state and federal firefighting resources will flow to California and the Northwest, and fewer will be readily available to county and community fire managers in the Southwest.

Changes to the workforce

Agencies of varying sizes across the country are struggling to retain and recruit firefighters. In March, the investigative news organization ProPublica reported that the Forest Service has had an attrition rate of 45% of its permanent staff in the past three years. ProPublica and other news outlets reported several factors contributing to attrition in the Forest Service, including low pay, with starting wages of $15 per hour that do not reflect the demands of the job; inadequate attention to physical and mental health problems faced by firefighters; and the growing difficulty of the job as severe fires and extended fire seasons translate more frequent deployments. 

A 2022 Government Accountability Office report similarly identified low pay as the primary barrier to the recruitment and retention of federal wildland firefighters, among other barriers such as a poor work-life balance; mental health challenges; and limited workforce diversity.

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Enacted and Proposed Policy Changes

“The existing wildfire management system has not kept pace with demands.”

— National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy, 2023 addendum

Bolstering the wildland firefighting workforce

Federal agencies have made some headway in recent years to address challenges facing the wildland fire workforce, including raising the pay of wildland firefighters. In 2022, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law raised the minimum wage of federal wildland firefighters from $13 to $15 per hour and provided firefighters with a temporary pay increase of at least $20,000 per year, which lawmakers extended through September 2024. 

For the upcoming FY25 fiscal year that begins October 1, the Biden administration has proposed a permanent pay increase for wildland firefighters, along with investments in firefighter mental and physical health and increases in the number of permanent (rather than seasonal) positions. Those proposals are currently making their way through Congress. 

A 2023 update to the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy recommended additional solutions, such as ensuring that recruitment efforts reach firefighters of diverse backgrounds and identities. In 2022, 84% of federal firefighters were men and 72% were White. Increasing the representation of women and marginalized groups will not only make the wildland firefighting world more just but will grow the dwindling applicant pool for firefighting positions. 

As outlined in the national strategy, the nation ultimately needs a larger permanent firefighting workforce to tackle the year-round work of wildfire mitigation, preparedness, prevention, and postfire recovery, in addition to what we typically think of when we hear wildland fire workforce: wildfire response and containment. 

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Additional Resources

For more information about the rewards and challenges of a career in wildland firefighting, check out this Preparedness Guide for Wildland Firefighters and Their Families from the National Wildfire Coordinating Group.