GRAND RAPIDS — Warm, sunny skies shone down on wildland firefighter students covered head to toe in thick protective wear, yellow hard hats and vests stark against the green foliage of the Minnesota North College-Itasca campus.
They hiked along the trails from one lesson to another, learning everything from operating water pumps to digging backlines to using a chain saw.
The Minnesota Wildfire Academy in Grand Rapids, hosted by the Minnesota Incident Command System, is the state’s largest interagency wildland fire training event. This week, June 2-6, marked the academy’s second year back after the COVID-19 pandemic. Nearly 430 registered students participated from local fire departments as well as tribal, state and federal wildland fire agencies.
These firefighters from Greater Minnesota and neighboring states came to take part in the classroom and hands-on instruction at the academy and will go on to fight fires both within the state and across the country.
This training is crucial to developing the wildland fire service, said Meghan Ring, an assistant lead instructor at the academy.
“We have a generation that's been doing fire for decades who are in the process of going through that retirement phase,” Ring said Wednesday.
“So getting these newer generations of firefighters coming in and learning the skills and the trade and being able to take over that responsibility moving forward, I think, is super important.”
This year’s training came as the heat faded from the Camp House and Jenkins Creek fires and the Horse River Fire in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Wildfire seasons in Minnesota have been starting sooner due to drier weather in the past few years, and the fires have been growing bigger and hotter, Ring said.
She said with fires starting sooner and overlapping with the timing of the academy, responding firefighters may be less available to train others.
"Up until about a week ago, we were getting pretty concerned if we would have instructors to come teach for us because so many of them have been plugged in on these fires up the shore or up in the Arrowhead," Ring said.
The fires bring awareness to the need for more people in firefighting careers, said Kelly Sande, the incident commander for the academy.
Recruitment and retention for fire services has been a problem over the past decade. Before the pandemic, the academy saw upwards of 600 students, he said.
The nationwide goal is to have 11,300 wildland firefighters by mid-July before the busiest part of the national fire season, according to the U.S. Forest Service. The Forest Service had more than 9,400 wildland firefighters as of May 3.
“Even though this isn't enough capacity to meet the needs of the continuing wildfire crisis, this is the number of firefighters we are able to support with existing infrastructure, funding and other resources,” the Forest Service states on its website.
The challenges of recruiting new firefighters and keeping existing ones stem from issues such as low pay for the job’s risks and physical demands as well as poor work-life balance and a lack of diversity in the workforce, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Still, some people are eager to join the force, like first-time academy student Joey Chapa. He said he tried to volunteer as a firefighter when he heard about the local wildfires but was not able to with his lack of experience. Chapa went through basic training this week, pursuing his passion for conservation efforts.
“I'm just trying to get into the field as quick as possible any way I can to combat human destruction on the environment,” he said.
“I already see that there's enough people helping other people, but in my eyes, there are not enough people helping the environment.”
Though the number of students registered for training in Minnesota this year was generally lower than previous years, it was “certainly adequate enough” to host the academy, Sande said.
“It takes repetition to hone those skills and get better at them,” he said. “So whether or not it's a busy fire season, we still need to maintain our efficiency or our ability to do our job.”
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