With California likely facing a long fire season this year, the push for additional firefighters is already underway in Sacramento.
According to State Sen. Mike McGuire , Cal Fire is understaffed and has a retention problem. McGuire has introduced a bill in the legislature to hire more than 1,000 additional Cal Fire firefighters to staff engines and hand crews., which as of Tuesday night was 570 acres and 5% contained.
Tim Edwards, the president of the Cal Fire Local 2881 union, said the crews were able to make an aggressive attack on it because there aren't any other major fires burning right now, but if it would have started later in the season, crews could have been stretched thin. Edwards said it's critical to increase staffing and the state budget for Cal Fire to hire and retain more firefighters.
Tom Bird, a resident who was evacuated from his home due to the Old Fire, says he appreciates all the effort from the Cal Fire crews.Bird has vineyards along the hillside scorched by the Old Fire that started late Tuesday afternoon - the same hillside burned by the Atlas Fire which caused so much damage in Santa Rosa in 2017."The men and women of Cal Fire working really hard up here, keeping us real safe up here," said Bird."We've been under-staffed for multiple years.
"Now we're having hundreds of thousands of acres every year, multiple times a year, and there's just not enough resources to go around and Cal Fire being understaffed just highlighted that," the union president went on to say. About 350 of those proposed new firefighters would work on engines. The others would be hand-crews, replacements for the inmate crews that were eliminated during COVID.
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