Derrick Holdstock – Is bureaucracy slowing Oregon's wildfire response?

 As wildfires burn across the Pacific Northwest, some private firefighting resources are reportedly sitting idle because of dispatch policies and delays in a new federal contracting system. Derrick Holdstock, owner of Western Fire Resources, joins the show to discuss how VIPR contracting issues and resource reassignment policies could be affecting wildfire response when every minute counts. 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:10

Hey, welcome back to Lars Larson Show. You know, if you listen to this show that for years I was tracking uh the development of what I thought was one of the best firefighting tools out there, the global supertanker. And in fact, lately I've had emails from people saying, hey, Lars, whatever happened to that plane? Never, never got hired by the U.S. Forest Service. Eventually the plane was simply, well, the gear was dismantled, and that was that. So we're left with private uh resources, other kinds of resources, both firefighters on the ground and fire and some some support from the air. And one of those supporters is Derek Holdstock, who's owner of Western Fire Resources. Derek, welcome to the program. How are you? Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate you having me on. Well, let me ask you this is it the case that the firefighters are ready, but then the system says wait for us to clear the red tape? Tell my audience what's going on.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Yeah, in a way, um I think first it's important to understand the difference between the public and private resources, the fight fire. And I'm and here I'm talking about ground-based resources. Um during peak fire season, private contractors fly more than half of the engines on the largest fires. And we work on a daily rate that must cover all of our costs, so including payroll, taxes, fuel, maintenance, insurance, all that stuff, uh, including the original purchase of our apparatus. Um and then, of course, income tax chips away what's left. By contrast, you have taxpayer-funded cooperator fire departments, and when they get ordered to fire, they receive uh near full reimbursement for all incident expenses, plus they receive an additional hourly rate that's not tied directly to expenses. And this results in a surplus that functions as profit, and that's often two to four times the daily profit the contractors can expect to earn in a normal year. And in many slow years, you know, a lot of contractors lose money uh due to fixed overhead expenses. So if you look at just the way we're dispatched, from a dispatching standpoint, uh cooperating fire departments exclusively can be ordered through mechanisms like the Conflagration Act uh that Oregon has, as well as EMAC. Um, and you know, when when those programs are employed, private resources cannot be ordered at all, um, regardless of whether they're closer. Those programs are just not for private resources. Uh private resources come into the field.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

Hold on, stop that for a stop for a second. Eric, you're telling me you could have a group of firefighters with gear and personnel closer to the fire, but because of the bureaucracy, you said no, send the other folks because they're because because of the way the system works, instead of saying, no, these firefighters are closer, send them out, get the fire out.

SPEAKER_01 2:43

Absolutely. Yep. Um, you know, it's not always the case, but Oregon specifically has a tremendous number of firefighting resources, um, more than probably any other state, or in fact, definitely more than any other state. And I know of quite a few that are sitting right now uh when fire departments are coming from a long distance away to try to get to these fires.

SPEAKER_00 3:05

So, what would what would it take to break through that log jam of red tape?

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Well, we still have the interagency uh coordination system, the the interagency dispatch system, and cooperators are are preferentially ordered through there, but you can get to uh contractors further down the list. Um, what really needs to happen is a couple things really. First, you have to understand there's a profit motive for these fire departments to participate in this. Um, we've created this this uh this way for them to make money, and some of these government agencies, you know, because that's what they are, they're they're local government agencies, they can use the surplus to buy more engines and then get bigger and have more resources out there so they can make more money. This extra funding, you know, I mean, if it's truly needed by these local jurisdictions, um, it should come through direct support. It should not be tied to emergency response because whenever you tie it to emergency response, and that results in either delayed response or, I mean, just think about this. If we're moving resources away from their home jurisdictions that that purchase the resources to begin with, you know, they could be back defending those areas, they could be doing fuels mitigation, they could be doing preparedness, all that kind of stuff, and we're pulling them out of there for hundreds of days a year. Um, it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

SPEAKER_00 4:20

No, and in fact, the idea of a profit motive, ordinarily in the private sector, I think the private motive is a great is a great driver of excellence and low cost and everything else. Well, you've got a government agency, you say, we're trying to generate some ex what you would ordinarily call profit, excess revenues that would then we can spend on other things. And of course, it may prov you know g get some perverse incentives that say if a city or a county or the state says, well, if we don't have to spend five million dollars on new fire rigs because we were the ones who were responding and got the extra five million through this other pot of money, then we can back that five million out and use it for something else, maybe something completely unrelated to fire. Am I right?

SPEAKER_01 5:02

Correct. Correct, correct. So I think the solutions, you know, first we need to remove that profit motive. So reimburse cooperators only for their true cost of government plus uh, you know, reasonable depreciation. We need to dispatch by proximity where local and mutual aid resources are dispatched first, like like they are now, but then go off as closest available regardless regardless of ownership. And then once they start receiving, once the incidents start receiving replacement resources, I think it's important to get those uh home jurisdiction and mutual aid resources back home to cover their home jurisdictions because that's what they're what their uh purpose is. And then finally, you know, there's a lot of things in fire that are not emergencies. Extended attack, there's often plenty of time to get resources there, mop-up, patrol, uh, fuels mitigation projects. We should not be pulling uh public resources away from home jurisdictions to do these things because they're just simply not emergencies. Um private resources do not have jurisdictions to cover. So it just makes sense to use them because you're not creating a hole somewhere else.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

No, because imagine this you're in some town and and you've had fire resources pulled away. Yes, you're covered by mutual aid by nearby cities. So if you're in Tiger and you're covered by uh, you know, by a city next door, King City or whatever, uh that that that's one thing. But if you're you're gonna tell your taxpayers, by the way, we might be a little slower on that EMS call to respond to your house for a heart attack or something like that, because some of our rigs have been diverted out to fires uh somewhere else in the state or even somewhere else in the region. All of that is diverting resources from the people who are paying for the service, right? That is correct.

unknown 6:40

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 6:41

So anybody moving in that direction? And who do we have to convince to make this happen?

SPEAKER_01 6:46

Well, I've been working as hard as I can uh myself uh to kind of bring some uh you know bring bring this issue to light. Uh, talked to some people in Washington. Um, there's it's it's just so ingrained in the system, it's really hard to break through and and uh and and for people to understand that because I mean nobody wants to say, well, we don't want a fire department to show up to our fire. What what they don't realize is fire department might be coming from the east coast or something, and it's gonna take days to get there when you have to have closer things. So it's not you don't want them to show up, you just want the right ones to show up.

SPEAKER_00 7:18

And these days with diesel going at what six, seven bucks a gallon, it's not cheap to move big fire rigs from from point A to point B, is it?

SPEAKER_01 7:26

No, it's not. And uh I don't know if you hear the traffic in the background, but we were on our way to a fire and we had a rock through our radiators, so we got canceled from that fire. So, I mean, that's other expenses. You know, you get halfway to a fire, you break down, and they send you home and you have to start over again.

SPEAKER_00 7:41

Not a good idea. Hey, Derek, thanks for the uh background because I'd never realized that this was a the the kind of problem that it is. That's Derek Holdstock. He's the owner of Western Fire Resources. Does that make any sense to you that you'd end up paying more money to have the government agencies respond and they end up making a profit, which they can then spend on getting bigger or buying more equipment, and the private contractors know not so very much. You're listening to the Lawrence Larson show and the Radio Northwest Network.