According to Utah Fire Info, more than 71,000 acres have burned this year, just 20,000 acres short of what burned all of last year.
As the hot summer sun settled in on Utah over the past weeks, the demand for wildland firefighters like Riley Pilgrim has grown immensely.
“In my career of over 25 years, this could be one of the driest spells we’ve seen,” said Pilgrim, who now serves as a battalion chief for Unified Fire Authority. “We don’t often see large fires in Utah that early in the season. So when we had those two down south, that kind of was a warning to all of us up here in the north.”
Since 2000, he’s worked on hand crews, handled incident command and traveled across the country.
“A lot of these firefighters that are out there — that’s their summer,” Pilgrim said. “From June to October, they’re going from fire to fire to fire.”
It’s become even more taxing now, as the National Interagency Fire Center recently raised their preparedness level to a 4 (PL4).
“When we get to a PL4, we start to become stretched for resources,” said Jordan Nesbitt. “Whether that’s complex incident management (CIM) teams, aviation, engines, hand crews.”
WATCH: Neighboring communities step up to help Monroe amid fast-growing wildfire
Nesbitt works on Great Basin CIM Team 4, which took command of fighting the Deer Creek Fire over the weekend. Team 3 is now at the Monroe Canyon Fire and she says they were the last available for our entire region.
In this situation, they can pull resources from elsewhere.
“They could come from the southeast, they could come from like the Oregon/Washington area, California,” Nesbitt said.
But what does that generally mean for Utah’s firefighters?
“When we see it get to PL3, 4, or especially 5, that’s kind of a warning to us that we’re not going to see a lot of help,” said Pilgrim.
Here in the Salt Lake area, Pilgrim says they’ve already deployed dozens of Unified firefighters to wildland fires across the state. But he says those efforts will never come at the jeopardy of their own communities.
“You know, if we start to feel like we’re going to need our people here, we’ll start holding people back,” Pilgrim said. “We just always want to ensure that our community comes first.”
But with his wildland background, Pilgrim recognizes all the hard work that’s being done.
“It’s a different way to serve,” said Pilgrim. “You’re not necessarily serving a community, but you’re impacting the places we recreate. There are homes at risk, there are values at risk, and we’ve got a lot of people dedicated to solving those problems.”
So he hopes others will do their part to help give them a reprieve from all the fire activity.
“Hopefully not, but it’s a matter of time before another fire starts,” Pilgrim said. “So we just can’t caution people enough to be careful.”
In addition to the stretched resources, central and southern Utah is under a Fire Behavior Advisory until July 26. This is a result of the critically dry fuel conditions that have spread throughout the region and can lead to extreme fire behaviors.
