U.S. and Australia have long fought fires together. Climate change threatens joint efforts

MELBOURNE —  As flames engulfed swaths of Los Angeles County this month and U.S. fire authorities scrambled to coordinate help from overseas, one longtime firefighting partner was left off their list: Australia.

Mexico and Canada both sent personnel and equipment to the front lines, and the Australian government publicly offered to help as part of a longstanding agreement with the United States.

But U.S. officials never requested it.

They knew that Australia, heading into its own fire season, was already dealing with a recent fire in Victoria state that burned more than 187,800 acres and took 21 days to contain.

“Requests for international assistance are typically sent first to the countries experiencing the least wildfire activity as they are more likely to be able to send firefighters and equipment,” said Erin McDuff, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Office of Wildland Fire.

“Australia, in particular, has recently experienced numerous severe wildfires that have taxed their available firefighting resources.”

Yet the absence of Australian help amid two of the most destructive fires in California’s history speaks to the increasing fragility of such international agreements in the age of climate change.

For more than 20 years, the agreement between the U.S. and Australia has operated on a simple principle: Located in opposite hemispheres, the two countries’ fire seasons have historically been asynchronous, allowing the side with less fire activity to send firefighting personnel or equipment to the other.

But climate change is extending fire seasons across the world, spreading existing resources thin. Many now fear that the system of cooperation is beginning to crack.

“Resource-sharing agreements are becoming absolutely vital as countries are affected by prolonged outbreaks of extreme wildfires,” said Rick McRae, a wildfire management expert at the University of New South Wales Canberra.

“But if you look at California alone, there’s just been a continuous run of bad events,” he said. “The usual concept of fire seasons has had to be abandoned.”

: :

Would more help from Australia have made a difference?

Some experts have said the sheer intensity and speed of the fires rendered it pointless to simply throw more people and equipment into the mix. Even with more than 10,000 firefighters battling the flames, ground crews in L.A. have said they were overwhelmed, and planes that spray fire retardant were often hamstrung by the winds.

“If we had 100 air tankers there, would it have done any good? I don’t know. Maybe not,” said Joel Kerley, the chief executive of 10 Tanker, an Albuquerque-based aerial firefighting company contracted by the U.S. Forest Service to combat the L.A.-area fires.

“But I’m at a point right where you gotta try. We are getting our butts kicked by these fires, and something has to change.”

Kerley knows the difference that international assistance can make.

A former aviation manager at the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs, he was one of the 200 federal firefighters the U.S. sent to help Australia five years ago during a catastrophic series of bushfires known as Black Summer.

It was the traditional low season for wildfires in the western U.S., and the crews were returning a favor from two years earlier, when Australia and New Zealand sent over 138 people to help fight fires in Northern California in August.

The Black Summer fires burned through 60 million acres, destroying over 2,700 homes and killing at least 34 people. Kerley had arrived at the peak in December 2020 to find his Australian counterparts, most of whom were volunteers, barely hanging on.

“None of them had days off,” he said. “They were exhausted, and we just provided relief for them to get some rest.”

It was a textbook example of the U.S.-Australia arrangement working as intended. But the L.A. fires have upended this model of seasonal exchange, with detrimental implications for other countries too.

The majority of Kerley’s DC-10s normally undergo maintenance during the winter, with one or two made available to respond to requests from South America. This week, he has calls with Argentina and Ecuador, which are battling intense wildfires, but he already knows he has to turn them down.

“The international competition for resources that’s going on right now — that’s a real problem that needs to be addressed,” he said.

“There’s just simply not enough to go around.”

: :

In Australia, this realization has already set in.

In October 2020, a royal commission launched in the wake of Black Summer recommended that the country build up its own fleet of firefighting planes.

“The severity of the 2019-2020 bushfires highlighted the difficulties in obtaining additional aircraft from overseas at short notice,” the report said, noting that nearly every large air tanker used in those fires had been contracted from overseas.

“The use of northern hemisphere-based firefighting aircraft is becoming problematic as the bushfire season is extending in both hemispheres, making it difficult to call on additional resources from overseas.”

Many now say it is time for the U.S. to stop relying on foreign help and thinking of firefighting as seasonal work.

“The U.S. wildland fire workforce was largely built on the foundation of seasonal workers,” said Robin Wills, who recently retired as chief of fire and aviation at the National Park Service’s Pacific West Region. “Many key firefighting resources, like federal hand crews and aviation assets are unstaffed in the winter.”

He said that as fire seasons get longer with a warming climate, it is clear that this system has become outdated.

“Fire staff today commonly work 1,000 hours of overtime by September,” he said. “My crews have been away from home for 90 to 100 days. These firefighters are in need of rest and recovery and will likely be unavailable for large fires in January.”

These problems are compounded by the drain of staff at federal agencies such as the Forest Service and Department of the Interior, which together hire most of the country’s firefighters.

The U.S. Forest Service recently lost 45% of its permanent employees over a three year-period, ProPublica reported last year, attributing the decline to low pay and difficult working conditions. Despite efforts from federal agencies to transition to a more permanent, year-round workforce, some are leaving for better-paying jobs in the private firefighting industry.

The situation in California is especially dire: Fire chiefs in the state have said that many Forest Service stations there are sitting empty because there is nobody available to oversee them, The Times reported last year.

: :

Even as firefighters make progress in L.A., Kerley, of 10 Tanker, said that the response there has not been a sustainable one.

“It puts pilots in an unsafe position,” he said.

After three months without flying, his pilots were suddenly sent to what he called the “Super Bowl” of aerial firefighting, battling 40-mph crosswinds at a time when they would normally be heading into training for yearly recertification. He said some told him that it was “some of the most difficult flying that they’ve ever done in their careers.”

“Firefighting needs to be a year-round job and a professional organization just like the U.S. military,” Kerley said. “We want 365-day coverage. So what does that look like? What is that going to cost? How do we do that? That is the first question to ask.”

Could the L.A. fires be America’s Black Summer — the wake-up call he says the U.S. desperately needs?

Kerley hopes so.

“If this isn’t the Pearl Harbor moment of wildland firefighting, I don’t know what is,” he said.

Times staff writer Kim reported from Seoul and special correspondent Petrakis from Melbourne, Australia.