Arizona firefighters kick off wildfire training
Your body may be summer ready, but is it summer wildfire ready?
That’s the question more than a hundred firefighters are asking themselves at this year’s two-day Central Arizona Wildland Response Team training at Lake Pleasant.
“Everybody comes out here and trains annually,” said Tiffany Davila, public affairs officer with the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management. “It’s basically a refresher course to get prepared for the upcoming fire activity.”
The training, which started Wednesday morning, is designed to prepare firefighters for the harsh Arizona wildfires propelled by the large amounts of dry shrubbery created by the state’s desert vegetation.
Arizona has had several years of devastating wildfires in a row. In 2021 alone, 1,565 wildfires burned over half a million acres of Arizona’s lands and its neighboring communities.
This year, Davila predicted wildfires would hit southern Arizona the hardest, in part because of the increased rain and subsequent vegetation caused by last year’s monsoons.
“Based off of the conditions in that area, the fuel, the vegetation ... it is waist to chest high. And all of that overgrowth of fine fuel is due to last summer’s monsoon season,” Davila said. “We had all of this ample rain that developed all of this grass crop in southern Arizona and the Sonoran Desert, and now, because we didn’t get any winter precipitation, temperatures are heating and that fine fuel bed is drying out.”
Davila said they have already begun to see wildfire activity in those parts of the state.
According to fire officials, CAWRT training consists of shelter deployment training and other qualifications firefighters need to be certified for the frontline of wildfire defense. Those qualifications include structure protection exercises, engine and water pump operations, and communications drills — anything that equips firefighters to handle intense, destructive blazes.
Firefighters from departments in Surprise, Peoria, Scottsdale and more are attending the all-day training sessions in cooperation with the Bureau of Land Management and the Tonto National Forest.
Reach breaking news intern Brock Blasdell at Bblasdell@arizonarepublic.com or on Twitter @BrockBlasdell.