By Fred R. LaPoint, Fire Chief
Every firefighter learns early that fire is not your enemy. That surprises people outside the service, so let me say it plainly for the folks reading this who’ve never pulled a line: fire is a tool and a force, older than any of us, and the job was never to “beat” it. The job is to understand it well enough to steer it — to decide where it goes, what it takes, and what it leaves standing. A firefighter who hates fire the way you’d hate a burglar doesn’t last. You respect it the way a sailor respects the sea.
I’ve spent more than fifty years in this work and better than three dozen disaster deployments, and I want to use what’s happening right now — the fires up in the Boundary Waters, the smoke that shut down the Mackinac Bridge — to open a door and let you see what this looks like from inside the boots. Not the politics of it. The job of it. Because if you understand what we’re actually up against, everything else in the news starts to make a different kind of sense.
“Beyond suppression” is not a figure of speech
Here’s a phrase you’ll hear from the experts studying the Boundary Waters fires: these blazes are beyond the ability of firefighting crews to suppress. To a civilian, that can sound like giving up. To a firefighter it’s a precise, sober assessment, and I want to explain exactly what it means, because it’s the heart of everything.
Fire needs three things — we teach it as the fire triangle: heat, fuel, oxygen. Take away any one, and it dies. Everything we do on a fire line is an attack on one leg of that triangle. Water and foam pull the heat. A cut line or a backburn removes the fuel. But when a fire is running at fifteen hundred degrees through a tinder-dry forest, with wind feeding it all the oxygen it wants, you cannot pull enough heat or clear enough fuel fast enough to matter. The fire is making its own weather. It throws embers a mile ahead of itself and starts new fires behind your lines. One paddler up north described bark falling out of the sky still on fire — that’s not poetry, that’s spotting, and it’s how a fire jumps every barrier you build.
So when the pros say “beyond suppression,” they don’t mean nobody’s fighting. They mean the honest tool left is not the hose — it’s the calendar. These fires may burn until the snow comes down and smothers them in the fall. The crews on those lines right now are not there to put it out. They can’t. They’re there to steer it — to stand between a thousand-degree force of nature and the towns, homes, and people in its path, and hold what can be held. That is the job at its most stripped-down and most dangerous. And most of the country will never understand that’s what those men and women are doing out there.
Why this year is different — and it’s not the firefighters
Fire has always been part of these northern forests. The jack pine up there is a species most people have never heard of that does something remarkable: its cones are sealed shut with resin and will not open to release their seed until fire’s heat melts them loose. Burn the forest, and you plant the next one. That’s not damage. That’s the forest’s own design, running on a clock older than the country. No firefighter, no policy, no governor changes that, and none should want to.
So why is this season so much worse? Two things, and neither is the crew on the line. The first is a longer, hotter, drier fire season that turns a burn that would once have been manageable into one that outruns everyone sent at it — these July fires were lightning-sparked and then spread by extreme heat and no rain. The second is us, all of us, building homes and whole subdivisions deeper into fire country and then acting shocked when the country does what it has always done. I’ve stood in the burned-out foundations of houses that had no business being where they were built. The fire didn’t hunt those homes down. We carried the homes to the fire.
The fire is ancient and blameless. What we’ve done to the people who fight it is neither.
The part that should stop every citizen cold
Now here’s where I need the civilians reading this to lean in, because this is the part firefighters already know in our bones and the public mostly doesn’t. At the exact moment these fires blew up, the people whose job is to fight them have been getting cut out from under.
In March, the U.S. Forest Service budget was cut by $438 million — a 24 percent reduction. By January, the agency had shrunk 16 percent, a loss of 5,860 staff, and that count includes the “red card” personnel qualified to work wildfire. Across the federal public-lands agencies together, more than 26,000 people have been shed since 2025. And here’s the number that matters most to anyone who understands the job: the staffing shortages drove a 38 percent drop in hazardous fuel-reduction work — the thinning and the prescribed burns. That’s the controlled fire we set on our own terms, in the cold months, so the wild fire has less to eat when it comes. It is the single most effective thing we do to prevent catastrophe, and it got cut by better than a third right as the fires started running at twice the ten-year average.
Let me put that in firehouse terms. Fuel reduction is prevention — it’s the fire inspection, the code enforcement, the smoke detector you install before there’s ever a call. Suppression is the 2 a.m. structure fire. What we just did, as a country, is gut the prevention program and then act surprised when the calls got worse. Any chief will tell you: the money you don’t spend on prevention, you pay back tenfold on the fireground, and sometimes you pay it in people.
Paying it in people
On June 27, on a fire in western Colorado, three wildland firefighters were killed and two more critically injured. Days earlier, the federal firefighters’ union had stood up and warned that the staffing cuts and reorganization were making exactly this kind of outcome more likely. Then it happened. Those three didn’t die in a budget argument. They died on a line, doing the oldest and most necessary work there is, in a workforce hollowed out around them — a workforce where three of every four federal wildland firefighters now say they’re thinking of leaving.
And now the Forest Service is doing something that ought to land hard on every person who reads this. Up in the Superior National Forest, they’re asking retired firefighters — people like me, people who already gave their careers to this — to come back. Back into a fight the experts have already called unwinnable until the snow flies. Back into an agency that shed thousands of colleagues and cut a quarter of its budget. Come back, because there aren’t enough people left.
I don’t write that bitterly. I write it so you understand what’s being asked. Those retirees will go. So will the exhausted crews already out there. That’s who firefighters are — it’s the part of this job the public sees least and relies on most. They’ll drive into fifteen-hundred-degree fire and thousand-mile smoke and hold what can be held until winter finishes the job, and most of the country will never learn a single one of their names.
What I want you to carry
This is the thing Behind The Alarm exists to say: there is a whole world of work behind every call — the training, the prevention, the standing-in-harm’s-way — that the public benefits from constantly and sees almost never. Wildfire is just the version of it big enough to make the national news. The crew on the Boundary Waters line and the volunteer pulling a line on a house fire in your township are doing the same fundamental thing: standing between people and a force that doesn’t care about them, and doing it with whatever staffing and budget they’ve been handed.
Fire is ancient and blameless. It always has been. But the decision to send fewer people, with less support and less prevention, into the worst fire season we’ve seen — that’s a human decision, and it has names and a date and a dollar figure. So the next time you see the smoke, or hear the sirens in your own town, I want you to think past the flames to the people walking toward them. Understand what they’re carrying. And then ask whether we’re giving them what they need to come home.
Because they’ll answer the call either way. They always do. The least the rest of us can do is make sure the call is one they can survive.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Every claim is sourced. Corrections with sources welcome and will be published. Boundary Waters fire behavior and the “beyond suppression” assessment, plus the statewide smoke impacts and Mackinac Bridge slowdown: Minnesota Star Tribune, MPR News, EGLE, CBS Detroit, and the Detroit News (July 13–16, 2026). Forest Service budget and staffing figures — the $438 million / 24 percent enacted cut and the 38 percent drop in hazardous fuel-reduction work: NFFE-IAM/IAM Union, the Wilderness Society, Government Executive, and related reporting (March–June 2026). The June 27 line-of-duty deaths and the union’s prior staffing warnings: NFFE-IAM/IAM Union. Fire-behavior fundamentals (the fire triangle, spotting, fuel reduction) reflect standard fire-service training.
This article first appeared in Behind The Alarm, the newsletter of Fred R. LaPoint, Fire Chief Paramedic of the Stronach Township Fire Department, on July 17, 2026. Read the original.