Boise center oversees efforts to fight wildfires nationwide

BOISE, Idaho — A 10-foot high-tech map pinpoints the real-time location and status of every plane and helicopter fighting fires in forests and grasslands across the country.

Next to it, wildfires are identified on a similar map. Facing the maps, workers in the coordination center for the National Interagency Fire Center are arrayed in defensive lines like fire crews in the field.

From this building on the 52-acre secured compound, they track the whereabouts of up to 15,000 ground crews from individual states and five federal agencies, dispatching a pair of 737 jets to deploy fresh firefighters when local crews are overwhelmed or too exhausted to continue. They can have firefighting aircraft anywhere in the country assigned within five minutes of getting a call for help.

"We make sense out of chaos," said Rose Davis, a public-affairs officer and one of 500 workers at the Boise-based center.

From the center at Boise's airport, they watch over 11 geographic areas in the U.S., poised to respond to fires and, more recently, other natural disasters and even terrorist attacks.

So far this fire season, wildfires have scorched about 3,700 square miles, and firefighters battled some 40 active large fires as of last week.

The center's unofficial and incongruous banner, tolerated if not condoned by higher-ups, is the Jolly Roger, the skull and crossbones on a black background tucked discreetly in cubicles but displayed boldly in outlying buildings.

The center is made up of the Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National Association of State Foresters, the United States Fire Administration, and the National Weather Service.

It was created in 1993 to help coordinate responses to wildfires from Alaska to California to Florida, and has helped standardize techniques and terminology to make firefighters from different agencies interchangeable parts.

Weather data from 2,000 remote sensors scattered across the country transmitted by satellite is used to make decisions about where fire crews might be needed next and to move supplies in advance from 11 pre-positioned caches, located mostly in the West.

With fire season in full swing, the center is shipping meals ready to eat (MREs), crates of the fireproof green pants and yellow shirts that are the trademark of wildland firefighters, hand tools and everything else needed to keep thousands of firefighters in the field.

From the center's communications division, workers distribute, collect, repair and send out again 8,000 handheld radios 60,000 times each year.

"Our primary job is wildfire response," said Tim Murphy, deputy assistant director with the Office of Fire Aviation of the Bureau of Land Management. "However, when the country needs resources and we can provide teams that bring some measure of common organization to chaos, and we're asked to respond, we do."