The last locally managed wildland fire crew in Arizona has disbanded.
The Bear Jaw Interagency Fire and Fuels Crew, based at the Highlands Fire District south of Flagstaff, fought large blazes across the West and even helped locals safeguard their homes.
But now residents and former fire officials wonder how the loss might impact readiness ahead of what could be an active fire season.
Kachina Village is one of the unincorporated communities within the fire district.
Throughout the neighborhood, the streets are lined with large piles of plastic bags, chock-full of yard debris, including in front of the home of Laurell and Lowell Kendall.
“There are pine needles and pine cones, and the bags tend to start ripping apart,” Laurel Kendall says, moving a bag.
Clearing debris from their yard is a routine chore, and critical in a fire-prone community south of Flagstaff that borders forest land.
“Maybe these weigh 30 pounds each, so there's some weight here, but we’re happy to do it, we can do it, it’s a sport,” Lowell Kendall says. “My neighbors, they don't think it's a sport, all of them. And so unfortunately, there are places that just get overlooked.”
Each spring before fire season, the Bear Jaw wildland crew helped some residents clear brush and detritus from their properties and picked up bags of needles to take to the dump.
But in March, Highlands announced the crew had been disbanded, and the community fuels program would end.
The Kendalls and others now worry that it might make the Kachina community more vulnerable to wildfire.
But for Dirch Foreman the end of the crew is more personal.
“It really emptied me,” Foreman says.
He worked for the Highlands Fire District for two decades, and as its fire chief for eight years before retiring in 2021.
“I'm often referred to as the godfather of Bear Jaw. So, yeah, heart and soul kind of work, and to have that disappear is, I think anyone who does that kind of work would have an emotional blow from it,” Foreman says. “There were no other crews like them in the state, no other municipal crews, no other fire district crews.”
Bear Jaw began in the late 2000s as a collaboration between the Highlands, Summit and Pinewood fire districts, serving unincorporated parts of Coconino County.
“We all kind of had these little grassroots fuels programs for fire mitigation,” Foreman says. “You know, three, four, five people doing work out in the field. And through our conversations, we thought, ‘Wow, what a great idea to maybe combine all of these people into one program and produce a crew that could actually go out on properties and get a fair amount of work done, and be a wildland fire resource.”
A year later it was certified to work on the front lines of wildfires in Arizona and across the West.
“I always felt it was important to be able to not only serve your community, but also to develop things that could serve the greater fire community, that larger fire community, and this just felt like the right thing to do,” Foreman says.
Bear Jaw was one of just three locally managed fire crews in the state that could be called up to suppress wildfire alongside federal and state crews.
The Ironwood Hotshots out of Marana and the Prescott-based Granite Mountain Hotshots were the others.
Both of those programs ended after 19 members of Granite Mountain were killed during the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire.
But the Bear Jaw crew continued working on high-profile incidents like last year’s Dragon Bravo Fire on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
Current Highlands Fire Chief Todd Miller says a mix of finances and staffing gave them no choice but to end the program.
“We recognize it's a huge loss to the community. It's very difficult for us to make that decision,” Miller says.
He says staffing has been a problem within the district for both seasonal and permanent positions.
“For seasonals … we've seen, used to be 100-plus probably applying there, and that's dwindled down to about 40. And out of those, you're trying to pick 20 people. So the last two to three seasons, we've barely been able to get the numbers of people that are qualified and meet the criteria,” Miller says.
Rural Arizona fire districts like Highlands often can’t compete with the pay offered by larger municipal fire departments or federal and state agencies.
Local property taxes support districts. But Miller says the state legislature has capped those tax rates, limiting the revenues districts can bring in.
“I think having a crew tied to a district has become something that's probably not sustainable for most fire districts,” he says.
And Miller says wildfire is not the only threat the district is tasked with responding to.
“The fire district doesn't exist to just fight wildland fire. We exist so that when any resident calls 911, and there's a medical emergency or there's a motor vehicle accident, whatever it may be, [we respond],” Miller says. “Fire districts cover everything in between cities across the state of Arizona. So when you're driving from here to Phoenix, you're going to pass through several fire districts, and if you have a problem on the freeway, it's a fire district that's going to come and help you.”
Experts worry that having fewer certified crews is the last thing that local communities need as fire seasons become longer and more intense.
Retired Timberline-Fernwood Fire District Chief Don Howard worked for 17 years on Complex Incident Management Teams, which manage operations on large wildfires across the country.
“In a busy season, we can be short of engines, hand crews, hotshot crews. The entire spectrum can come up short,” Howard says. “We want to use every tool in the toolbox, and Bear Jaw was one of the tools in the toolbox.”
Howard says, ultimately, state lawmakers need to take a hard look at whether county fire districts are receiving the financial support they need.
“Perhaps some additional help and funding from the state, who I think should be responsible for some of that. And they could do that through changing some of their legislation in terms of taxation, which some people wouldn't like,” Howard says. “But it's that cost-benefit. To have a group like Bear Jaw in your community working on a yearly basis, that really makes a difference.”
