Inside the command center that is deploying resources to the wildfires in America

Peterson, his can of Liquid Death on the conference table, looked around the room before the morning briefing.

“Ready to rock and roll?” he asked.

When the entire West is on fire, this is the party to deal with it.

Peterson manages the 32 employees of the National Interagency Coordination Center, on a gated federal campus adjacent to the Boise airport. The staff, from the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and Bureau of Indian Affairs, must constantly balance the threat of multiple fast-moving fires and deploy their limited resources where they can do the most good.

After weeks of extreme heat and thunderstorms, the U.S. has now reached a level of fire preparedness of 5. Officials say that has only happened this early in the summer four times in the past 20 years.

In times like these there is never enough help.

“No single fire is going to achieve everything they want,” Peterson said.

The vibe here isn’t Situation Room suits and ties. It’s more casual and outdoorsy: short sleeves and jeans, sandals and tattoos. But it’s serious business.

On the video screen is Jeff Walther, a sales representative from the Pacific Northwest region informed the group that a single-engine firefighting plane had crashed the night before while fighting a new fire near the Falls Fire in the Malheur National Forest.

“Ground crews are out this morning trying to locate,” Walther said. “Pretty tough terrain. Smoke is still blocking the area.”

“Thanks Jeff, and certainly our thoughts from here, along with everyone in the dispatch coordination community, hoping for the best,” Derrek Hartman, the center’s deputy manager, told him. “I feel terrible about the current situation.”

The Forest Service and the Grant County Sheriff’s Office later confirmed that the pilot had died.

The coordination center employees are familiar with these risks. Nearly all of them were once firefighters. And many have worked together for years or decades, building a camaraderie and rapport that helps them navigate the logistical maelstrom of any given day.

Peterson, a third-generation firefighter with a scar on his right cheek from one of his close calls, grew up in California and got his first job as a firefighter two weeks out of high school. He grew up partly in Paradise, the mountain town that was devastated by the 2018 Camp Fire, one of the deadliest fires in U.S. history. Both of his childhood homes were destroyed by the flames.

In his 30-year career, he has seen fires grow in size and intensity. He has seen a winter fire that destroyed more than 1,000 homes. Forests that have been repeatedly ravaged by flames and turned into fast-burning grasslands. When he started, he said, a 50,000-acre fire was a very rare event.

“That’s the norm,” he said. “Right now we have six fires burning over 100,000 acres. And that’s not even in August.”

Peterson acknowledges that rising temperatures due to climate change are part of the story, but also believes the decline of the logging industry — whose clear-cutting helped thin the forest and provide firefighters with a place to work — is to blame for the nation’s worsening fire problem.

This summer’s rapid explosion followed two relatively mild fire years, as abundant winter rain and snow fueled the West. To fire experts, wet winters mean more grass, which eventually dries out and turns to kindling as the heat rises.

“We can turn good news into bad news like it’s nobody’s business,” said Steve Larrabee, a Bureau of Indian Affairs official who analyst of the fire and fuel center.

This year got off to a grim start as wildfires in Texas and Oklahoma burned more than a million acres of land.

“We just don’t get million-acre fires in February,” Larrabee said.

In recent weeks, there have been many large fires in the Pacific Northwest and California. Now, the Great Basin and Northern Rockies have also caught fire. This year, about 3.8 million acres have burned in the U.S., more than the 10-year average of 3.4 million acres.

Larrabee tracks drought statistics on dead trees and vegetation. He worries that while the numbers look good, they don’t really match the “spectacular fire behavior” now occurring in parts of the West.

“These things that are normally fire barriers, like green vegetation, don’t act as fire barriers like they normally do,” he said.

The biggest crisis right now is the Park Fire in California, near Chico, which has grown by more than 300,000 acres in less than three days. Officials suspect an arsonist started the inferno that now threatens thousands of homes. Evacuation orders have been issued for several communities, including what has been rebuilt of Peterson’s hometown of Paradise.

“It will be one of the largest (if not the largest) and one of the most destructive fires ever in the country when it’s all over in the fall,” Peterson said Saturday.

Amid all this, the coordination center must direct much-needed firefighting resources across an ever-changing map.

On Friday, firefighters in the Great Basin, where 26 new fires had broken out the day before, said they needed all types of firefighters and aviation support. Meanwhile, the Northern Rockies, battling 77 new fires, wanted smokejumpers and people rappelling from helicopters.

Shortages are becoming increasingly apparent at such times. All 27 caterers contracted to feed the camps have already been committed, so the crews will have to buy whatever food they can find.

The day before, demand for infrared flights to map fire perimeters and help fight new blazes had peaked this year, with 81 requests. And the federal government’s 91 single-engine air tankers — used to drop water or fire retardant on fires — were all reserved, too, with zero available, officials here reported.

26,020 firefighters have been deployed to major fires alone, the highest number so far this year. More help was needed.

Peterson met officials from Australia and New Zealand, longtime firefighting partners of the United States, on Thursday. Those countries agreed to send 80 people, including much-needed middle management positions such as division supervisors and task force leaders, to the fight, arriving in early August.

The most critical shortage, Peterson said, was in local fire dispatch centers, where there are more than 100 vacancies. These grueling jobs include handling 911 calls and coordinating responses to new and growing fires.

“Nobody wants to do it anymore because they’re just burned out,” he said. “It never ends.”

And there’s no respite in sight. Red flag warnings were in effect in the west, with winds expected to reach 45 mph. Smoke from the Canadian fires, which were also raging, had finally reached Europe, one worker noted, just as the Olympics were getting underway. Outside the country’s firefighting center, yellow smoke hung low over Boise.

At the end of the morning briefing, Peterson reminded his staff to take care of themselves.

“This is going to be a marathon,” he said.