No benefits for many firefighters

Now that the weather has changed and the fires are slowing down, the kudos will end. What won’t be talked about is many of these firefighters for the federal government are seasonal temporary workers and get no benefits, including the three who died and the one that is in the hospital recovering.

Hotshot crews are 75 percent temporaries, and I’d estimate about 50 percent of smokejumpers are temporaries. You wonder where all the resources were when they were needed this season? I heard U.S. Forest Service chief Tom Tidwell say at a meeting two years ago that the Forest Service had reduced its workforce by 35 percent in the past decade due to budget cuts.

For all of you that spout the popular cut-government rhetoric, where do you think the cuts come from, the top? Not. The Forest Service has 273 highly paid officials sitting in D.C. overseeing the fire organization nationally. In 2000, President Clinton gave $1.3 billion to fully staff the organization. Today only California is close to fully staffed. The rest of the nation has cut their permanent force and uses temporaries.

I know some of these temporaries who have been doing this every year for over 30 years.

Ron Angel

Cocolalla, Idaho