Release No. 0261.02

of
Secretary of Agriculture Ann M. Veneman, Interior Secretary Gale Norton and Labor Secretary Elaine Chao at the joint fire training apprenticeship signing to create an Interagency Fire Apprenticeship Program

Tuesday, June 25, 2002

SECRETARY VENEMAN: I am very pleased today to introduce Secretary Norton and Secretary Chao to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for this event today, and I'm very pleased that all of you could be here as well.

I also want to thank and acknowledge Rick Brown who is here. He's the president of the National Federation of Federal Employees. Craig Howells, who is one of our current Forest Service apprentice firefighters. He's been through this academy we're talking about today, and he's now stationed in Missoula, Montana.

Christine Keavy who's a BLM, Bureau of Land Management firefighter, who last year completed a firefighter apprenticeship program, and she's stationed in Idaho.

And Hattie Hobbs [ph], a student firefighter from the Forest Service's Pine Ridge Job Corps Center, who is on rotation from the fire lines in Colorado and represents the Firefighter Apprentice of the Future.

I also want to acknowledge our Undersecretary for Natural Resources and Environment here at USDA, Mark Rey. He's going to provide a fire update before we take the Qs and As today.

Forest and wildland fires are on the top of everyone's mind today as hundreds of thousands of acres out West are burning, particularly in Arizona and Colorado, and we are just at the beginning of this fire season.

A few weeks ago, I was in Arizona meeting with the firefighters and community leaders the day after the Prescott fire was contained, and last Thursday, I was in Colorado where I visited the Hayman fire and saw firsthand how our firefighting forces, federal, state and local, are meeting the challenges of that devastating fire.

We all knew that this was going to be a tough fire season and the events of the past several weeks have proven just that.

Early this year, Secretary Norton and I announced an increase in our firefighter force by six thousand, and the purchase of 600 new pieces of equipment to fight fires.

With the current fire situation, our ability to respond to fires that threaten homes, communities and our natural resources comes down to the men and women who put their lives in harm's way to protect others every day.

Training and development is a critical part of maintaining a prepared, competent and safe firefighting force, and that's why we're here today to sign the national apprenticeship standard for the first-ever interagency apprenticeship academy for wildland firefighters and fire managers.

It is estimated that 30 percent of our federal wildland fire workforce will be retiring in the next five years. We need an aggressive, coordinated approach to recruitment, retention and training, so that we will have the workforce necessary to protect our precious land.

This agreement is yet another step in the unprecedented level of interagency cooperation in this administration. This facility will be housed at McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento, California.

Secretary Norton and I were just in Idaho last month for a wildland fire management conference that we convened with Western governors at President Bush's request. The purpose was to discuss wildland fire and forest management issues and endorse the implementation strategy for the ten-year fire plan.

That plan calls for the aggressive management of wildland fires and the reduction of hazardous fuels in an effort to protect communities and restore ecosystems.

We've seen the devastation and destruction of these fires, the homes and businesses lost, the families evacuated, the natural resources destroyed. Our teams are working hard to protect these communities and contain the fires. They deserve our praise and our sustained commitment.

Last week, President Bush declared Colorado a disaster area and today he will visit the fire area in Arizona, or has visited in Arizona with FEMA Director Joe Allbaugh, and he has also now declared Arizona a disaster area for purposes of fires.

The President also last week authorized the release of $120 million in contingency funds to assist with our firefighting efforts, which are being pushed to the limit in this horrible fire season, and when in Colorado last week I also announced that the Interior Department, USDA and FEMA, along with the State of Colorado, have joined forces to help train Colorado municipal firefighters to assist in fighting wildland fires.

We started the training of these firefighters yesterday. We are committed to continue in every effort to contain the fires and prevent future devastation, but it will take a strong and coordinated effort, working with local communities, federal and state officials, and a great deal of long-term planning to get this job done.

Today is another example of those planning efforts. Having a strong, ready, and trained viable firefighting force is critical to maintaining our preparedness, and both Secretary Norton and I thank Secretary Chao and the Department of Labor for taking the lead on setting the standard for this academy program. Thanks also to Rick Brown and the National Federation of Federal Employees for their active role in this partnership.

Now it is my great pleasure to introduce my friend and colleague, Secretary Gale Norton.

SECRETARY NORTON: Thank you very much. When our agencies began working on this proposal, we had no idea how timely it would be. More than 2 million acres have burned so far this year and we've not yet entered the ordinary peak of the fire season.

This is more than twice the ten-year average. In fact we are far ahead, more than a million acres ahead of where we were in the 2000 fire season, which was widely regarded as the worst season in the last 50 years. Obviously we have a very difficult fire season.

To those who have lost their homes and their businesses, the fires burning throughout the Western states are catastrophic. While houses can be rebuilt and communities eventually recover, there's no way to fully heal from such traumatic losses.

We can't put a price tag on a lost family photograph, or recover a family heirloom. We know that more than trees, shrubs and grass burn in an uncontrolled fire. We know that memories can burn, too.

Thanks to the National Fire Plan and the support of the Bush administration, we'll have more people, more aircraft and more fire engines than ever before in the history of our country, that are headed to stopping those fires.

The strength of our firefighting contingent and their abilities are the subject that we address today, and not just for the immediate term, but for the long term of our fire program.

As Secretary Veneman noted, the Federal Land Management Agencies are expected to lose about 30 percent of their firefighting workforce in the coming years because of retirement, although we do have today more than 320 managers on the scene in addition to those we had two years ago.

Building the fire management skills of current and new fire managers is critical to the National Fire Plan.

The document that we will sign today commits the Departments of Agriculture, Labor and Interior to work together to develop acceptable standards and to develop an academy that will train skilled and competent fire managers for the future.

The National Interagency Joint Apprenticeship Academy for Wildland Fire is a joint venture of the three departments with the Forest Service in the role of oversight and management.

The academy will be located in Sacramento, California. Now anyone can apply to the program and apprentice graduates can receive college credit at local universities for completing the academy. At present, there are 500 registered in the program. We can use them all when they graduate. Between our agencies, we expect to hire more than 3,000 new employees per year until we reach the identified levels of fire suppression sufficiency, three to five years from now.

We expect this program to provide more skilled fire management workforce, to develop future leaders for all wildland fire and the aviation management programs, and to address critical training and safety issues.

And we all know that the fire season and the kind of situation that we face today is something that has come about because of long-term management. We need to reduce the fuels that are present in our forests throughout the nation.

In too many places, for too many years, aggressive suppression allowed dense accumulations of fuels to build. The composition of our forests and rangeland changed. When fires strike these overgrown forests, they tend to burn hotter and faster and exhibit more volatile fire behavior.

The changes that we need to make are not ones that can be done this year. They're changes that need to be done for the long term. That's why we're looking to the future with this program, with training new managers for our systems. We expect to see a cadre of trained fire managers emerge from this academy, with skills that will help fight fire, but it will also promote efforts to prevent future catastrophic fire devastation.

The present and future firefighters deserve our thanks and praise. They put their lives on the line, daily, to save the lives and property of others, while the inferno rages. I'm very happy to welcome to our firefighting program--Secretary Veneman and I have been working together a lot on this. We're delighted to have as a partner in this the Secretary of Labor, Elaine Chao.

SECRETARY CHAO: Thank you.

Well, good afternoon. I'm delighted to be here with Secretary Veneman and also Secretary Norton, and also, Rick, it's nice to see you here as well. Rick Brown of the National Federation of Federal Employees.

Let me also thank Tony Swupe and Steven Opitz [ph] from my Department, the Department of Labor, for helping to make this apprenticeship program possible.

What we are doing today is very, very important to our country. As we're all aware, this comes at a time when the Western states are in the midst of the most incendiary fire season in memory, as you have heard. It also comes at a time when the nation is beginning to face a critical shortage of qualified firefighters, and this interagency apprenticeship agreement that we are signing today will put thousands, as you have heard, of new, well-trained professionals into the field.

It will also open up exciting and rewarding career paths for Job Corps students like Hattie Hobbs, a student firefighter from our Pine Ridge Job Corps Center. We're so proud of her.

And it's also going to help us address critical firefighter training standards and safety issues. Over the next five years, over 2,000 apprentices will go through one of the most demanding and comprehensive apprenticeship programs that we have sponsored to date.

They will learn everything, from building personal safety shelters to rappelling off helicopters. No other generation of firefighters will be as well prepared and drilled in safety as this one, and this is the way it should be, as we have to tackle one of nature's most powerful forces--wildfires. “Breathing smoke,” as they call firefighting, may be hard work, but it is immensely rewarding, and popular work as well.

Last year alone, over 800 student volunteers from Job Corps Centers across our country worked with professional firefighting crews. Because of their work, they protected thousands of acres of land and lives.

In fact firefighting is rapidly becoming one of Job Corps most sought-after career paths, because it opens up opportunities in fire departments, the forestry industry, and of course conservation work as well.

So the U.S. Department of Labor is truly proud to join with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Interior, to help develop such a necessary and enriching apprenticeship program. Our Department stands ready to partner with other federal agencies and trades to develop similar creative apprenticeship programs.

Registered apprenticeship programs are the best way we know how to bridge the skills gap and to help young people and dislocated workers find a lifetime of job opportunities and new interests. So I'm delighted to be here and to join these two Secretaries, and their Departments, in ensuring a new future, a very rewarding future, and a very valuable future for the individuals involved and for our country. Thank you.

SECRETARY VENEMAN: “ Thank you very much, Secretary Chao. It's a delight to have you in our Department.

It's now my pleasure to call on Rick Brown from the National Federation of Federal Employees for brief remarks, and this association has been a valuable partner in the development of this program as well.”

MR. BROWN: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, Secretaries Chao, Norton, Veneman.

I'd like to take a quick moment to thank the people that actually did the work on behalf of the union, of sitting down. I spent many hours in a lot of different locations working together with management to help bring this to fruition. Mike Williams, Bill Doog [ph] and Eric Klemmer [ph], Todd Paine [ph] and Barbara Drake, as well as the management officials from the BLM, Park Service, the Forest Service and Department of Labor.

By working together, labor and management have crafted a plan that combined training programs from several different agencies that will protect and provide training to the men and women on the front line of these very dangerous situations.

The entire effort shows how much can be accomplished when we all work together. With the shrinking workforce, this effort will provide new opportunities and jobs, and replenish the shrinking workforce.

By having more highly trained employees, it will allow for a quicker response, which will help reduce damage that is done by these fires.

Lately, the federal employee has not been getting the recognition I think they deserve. But if you've been watching recent events unfold in these fires that have been destroying the lives and lands, you'll know how important these people are and how important the job is that they perform.

With the continued effort of the work that these folks do every day, and with the locals and councils working together, the American people and their property will be a lot safer.

On behalf of the National Federation of Federal Employees, an affiliate of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, we commend the brave firefighters who put themselves in harm's way to protect American lives, lands, and property. For that, we cannot thank them enough.

I was thinking about it on the way over here. Our union's motto is "We work for America every day." These folks certainly live up to that model. Thank you very much.

SECRETARY NORTON: Thank you.

And now I'd like to introduce someone who really knows what it's like to be out there on the front lines. Christine Keavy is one of our employees in the Department of the Interior with the Bureau of Land Management. She's a 26-year-old graduate of the 2001 Joint Apprenticeship Program.

She is a graduate of Boise State University in Idaho where she majored in education. She currently works in Boise as the assistant training officer for the Lower Snake River District of the BLM. She's worked on initial attack fires in Dispatch and as a fire investigator trainee.

She's assisted in the investigation of more than fifteen fires. She is now a trainee, as incident commander type 4, information officer type 3, helitack crew person and initial attack dispatcher. I'd like to introduce Christine Keavy.

MS. KEAVY: From my experience going to the academy, I started out only after four years in fire, and kind of on a narrow path and a lot of the firefighters do that. They want to get out there, they want to fight the fire, but they're not really sure what's going on around them and I think that's a lot of what this academy did teach me. I had formal fire training with a lot of hands-on experience in all aspects of fire in classroom settings and the hands-on setting during the fire season.

The diversity of opportunities has helped me be experienced with most aspects of firefighting. As I'm out on a fire line now, through this academy I know what's going on all around me rather than just going out and suppressing the fire.

I've had the opportunity to work in investigation prevention activities, fire training, dispatch, helicopter and air operations, and all of those things make me very aware of what's going on around me and help me be a safer, better firefighter, and ensure the safety of my crew and other human life and property. This has given me also the background to develop my career in fire management.

I have a base now. I understand where I want to go and what I need to do to make a difference in the fire world, and I hope that the up-and-coming academies will also do the same and make everybody safer and more well rounded, and better fire managers of the future.

SECRETARY VENEMAN: “ Well, thank you very much. That was truly inspiring and we appreciate all of you being here and we appreciate all that you're doing. We now are going to sign this historic agreement. I think you've all had the opportunity to hear just what we're trying to accomplish with this and I think both from the standpoint of creating the federal workforce for the future and protecting our public lands and our communities, this is truly a very important thing that we're doing today”

VOICE: All right.

SECRETARY CHAO: I'd like to reward both Secretary Veneman and also Secretary Norton with a certificate of registration.

This certificate verifies that the program is in accordance with the basic standards of apprenticeship as established by the U.S. Department of Labor. So if I can ask my trusty assistant to come here. This is--this is for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and I'm delighted to be handing it over to Secretary Veneman.

SECRETARY VENEMAN: “Thank you.”

SECRETARY CHAO: And the second one is for U.S. Department of Interior, and I'm delighted to be handing it over to Secretary Norton.

Thank you all very much. It's a great apprenticeship program, look forward to working with you, and thank you all for participating as well.

SECRETARY VENEMAN: Great. “ Thank you so much. Did you want us to stand up and hold them?

“Now before we take questions, I would like to call on Undersecretary Mark Rey to give a brief update on the current situations with the fires today”.

MR. REY: Good afternoon. Today, we are at national preparedness level 5. That's the highest level of preparedness. We reached that level earlier in the fire season than we have since we began reporting these statistics.

We have very high to extreme fire danger reported in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Kansas, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. Throughout the West we have seven large fires in excess of 10,000 acres burning at the present time, two fires that have been of particular note, the Hayman fire immediately south and west of Denver is now 70 percent contained. The fire remains at 137,000 acres. An estimated 1300 people are still under mandatory evacuation orders but that situation has been relatively stable for the last few days.

The second fire of particular note is the combined Rodeo and Chediski fires in northeastern Arizona. Those fires continue to experience extreme fire behavior. The fires have burned together to combine 331,340 acres. Evacuations and evacuation advisories are in place for the communities of Show Low, Heber, Overgaard, Linden, Lakeside, Pinetop, and Honda, Arizona.

To date this year, there have been 47,314 fires ignited. We have burned over 2.5 million acres to date. As Secretary Norton indicated, that's approximately two and a half times the year-to-date ten-year average, and roughly 1.2 million acres over where we were in the year 2000.

So we are seeing an extremely difficult fire season. Notwithstanding the difficulty of the fire season to date, and even with 47,314 ignitions, all but roughly less than 2 percent of them have been suppressed upon initial attack, and for each of the roughly 630 homes that have been lost, for each of those lost 20 homes have been saved by the efforts to date.

SECRETARY VENEMAN: “Thank you, Mark, and we will now proceed to questions.”

QUESTION: Billy House, the Arizona Republic. If I understand correctly, you're saying that the Departments aren't at the full level of preparedness identified in 2001 for the National Fire Plan, particularly in numbers of firefighters. So I guess that begs the question, why not? And are we going to have enough firefighters given the early problems this season?

SECRETARY VENEMAN: “ I'll have Mark go ahead and answer that question. Also, if you don't mind identifying yourselves and speaking into the microphone. We do have people on the box here, so people are listening-in remotely and getting a chance to listen to this as well. So thank you for doing that”.

MR. REY: We're presently at full-preparedness. We typically add additional firefighters as the season progresses, because the season inevitably gets more difficult as we move into August and September. Right now, firefighters are not a limiting resource. We have adequate forces deployed on the fires we are fighting and we have some additional crews in reserve.

We also have contingencies for later in the season to involve the military, should we need them, as additional firefighters, and through cooperative agreements that we have with Australia and New Zealand, to bring in Australian and New Zealand crews as well. As you know the seasons are reversed in the Southern Hemisphere, so they often come up here during a bad fire season and assist us. We send our firefighters down there during our winter months.

QUESTION: If I could ask the Secretary--sorry. Mike Sorhan [ph] with the Denver Post.

If I could ask Secretary Veneman and Secretary Norton, in general, what is the Federal Government going to do to protect the West? And we're looking at--we're hearing decades before even the current acreage of, that is at high risk to catastrophic wildfire because of fuels, we're hearing decades to clean that up.

Can anything be done to shorten that amount of time?

- SECRETARY NORTON: First of all, we have, as you have indicated, a long-term problem that we need to deal with. There are several different levels. One of those is on fire suppression activities. We already have over 5,000 more firefighters this year than we had in the 2000 fire season, and increased amounts of equipment available to deal with the fires.

So in terms of fire suppression activities, we have ramped those up and will continue to ramp those up. We have tremendously increased cooperation in order to better utilize those assets. We have worked very closely with the states.

We've recently signed an agreement with the Western Governors Association and we have worked on several projects, cooperatively, between Interior and Agriculture, that had not been brought to this level of cooperation in the past, and our new program in training municipal firefighters is an indication of our closer working relationship with local firefighters, and so I think we have a good program in place, that we can continue to enhance in dealing with the fire suppression efforts.

In terms of fuels treatment, in trying to reduce the hazardous fuels within our forests caused by decades of build-up, that's not going to be a "quick fix," and we can prioritize that and try to deal, first of all, with those areas at the wildland/urban interface, and that is part of what's called for in our agreement with the Western governors.

So we're treating those areas that are close to homes that might be affected. We have active programs underway in both Departments to reduce through prescribed burns and mechanical thinning the fuels within the forest areas.

One of the things that was recognized on a bipartisan basis in the agreement with the Western governors is that we have to find commercial products, commercial use for some wood products that would be derived from those thinning activities, you know, the smaller trees that are taken out as a result of thinning, and that is necessary because this has to be a self-sustaining process.

I mean it's not just that we go through once, thin out the forest and we're done. It's something that has to become a regular part of our management and the agreement with the Western governors is that we have active management of both state and federal forests, and that's something that we have agreed to as a long-term commitment.

SECRETARY VENEMAN: “ If I might just reiterate the fact that I think we really do have unprecedented interagency cooperation. I think we've signed four or five or maybe even six agreements with the Department of Interior just in the last several months in terms of our cooperative effort, and I might also add that President Bush himself is very committed to fuels management.

As I mentioned in my remarks, Secretary Norton and I, at his request, with Western governors, convened a conference in wildland fire management just recently, and one of the purposes of that conference is to get scientific experts to really help us begin to assess, and continue to assess, I should say, the issue of fuels management and how do we best prioritize to reduce the fuels, so that we will not get the kind of devastating fires that we're seeing this year”.

QUESTION: If I could follow up real quickly. It seems like the Federal Government, despite all the conferences, and cooperation and measures you're talking about, the Federal Government seems overwhelmed at this point by forces. Is it?

SECRETARY NORTON: We have the ability to deal with the fires as they come up. We have vastly more resources than we've had before. We're dealing with something that is different than the natural fires that have been part of the ecosystems for eons. What we're seeing is the combination of incredible drought combined with decades and decades of build-up of fuel in our forests, and that combination is not something we can turn around overnight.

So we can deal with the emergency situations. We will take great efforts to do that. We also have to have sustained long-term commitment to deal with the underlying problem.

QUESTION: Maybe Secretary Veneman. Robert Gurke [ph] with the Associated Press. Secretary Veneman, how is this apprenticeship program you're proposing today different than the one Christine went through. You said she's class of 2001. Is this something you've been doing in the past and you're reauthorizing it to go forward, or--

SECRETARY VENEMAN: “The apprenticeship program is very similar to what we've been running but it is, along with the Department of Labor, now put in uniform standards across all of the federal agencies that are involved, be it Forest Service, BLM, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Park Service. All of the employees who are involved in firefighting will have the opportunity to be certified to a common standard, which is what the Department of Labor has helped us with, and that's what makes it unique.

You also have substantial amounts of leadership training. We are really training people in this academy now to take over management positions in the future, and it will be done more quickly than it has been done in the past as we look at this 30 percent figure of retirement in the firefighting workforce.

So this is a concerted effort. You know, it's interesting because part of the President's management agenda is to look at how do we refurbish the federal workforce to be capable of doing what needs to be done in the future, given the number of retirements that are anticipated, and this is a perfect example of agencies coming together to figure out how to best do that, to put together a concerted effort to train people, to train them in the areas where they're going to hopefully be trained to go into management in the future and be leaders in these public lands agencies, and be able to carry forward with protecting our public lands.”

QUESTION: Regarding the fuel build-up, in Arizona, the governor and Senator Kyl, and other members of the delegation have blamed environmentalists and law suits for hindering government efforts to clear those lands. Do you two agree with that?

SECRETARY NORTON: We certainly do see the effects of delay and analysis/paralysis. There is a lot of evidence that there are programs to thin forests that would have taken place ,or to change management, that would have taken place, but for the kinds of gridlock that have recently been highlighted. There are lots of aspects to the problem and one of the necessary ingredients to move beyond the problems we're experiencing today is getting the consensus that we need to have more active management.

I think we are laying that groundwork with the work we've done on a bipartisan basis with the Western governors and I think there is a growing recognition that we have a serious problem that needs to be addressed.

QUESTION: Sorhan again with Denver Post. On a firefighter-related issue, regarding the crash that occurred in Colorado, and several lives, Friday, is there any need to look at the transportation procedures such as the kind of vehicles they use? Is that anything that's being reconsidered in light of that?

SECRETARY VENEMAN: “ Now which incident are you talking about?

VOICE: The automobile accident.

: The automobile accident. I don't know what the investigation has been with regard to that. As I understand it, those were contract employees, not employees of the Federal Government, that were on their way. I mean, automobile accidents--I don't know that there is any indication that there was any difficulty with their vehicle, and we have, I'm sure, investigators looking at what the cause of the accident was.”

VOICE: One more question. The Denver Post again.

QUESTION: No one else is asking--and this is for Secretary Norton. I just wanted to ask, real quickly, there is, because of the drought and what we're seeing from it, increased talk of looking for more water projects, and I'm wondering if you're seeing any need to build up the water infrastructure of the West right now.

SECRETARY NORTON: Well, obviously, we talk about long-term issues, water is certainly one of those, and we are quite happy to work with states and local governments on those issues, and we're currently working right now with California on the Cal-Fed project. We're involved in those discussions that are taking place in Congress right now. Those are decisions that need to be made through a long process of careful consideration. But we're not, at this point, focusing on water projects. We anticipate that those kinds of proposals come from the states.

VOICE: Thank you all very much for coming.

#