Excellent post. We would put out a 200 acre fire in one operational shift in SoCal. We are well equipped and trained better but I can’t believe PA or any other local states don’t have a state ran Type 2 helicopter or a single type 2 hand crew. Incidents have been elevated on the East coast for about 3-4 years.
The east coast is a whole different deal with wildland firefighting. They just haven't had to do it historically in most places, and despite increasing numbers of fires they haven't upgraded their response or equipment. Looking at the local news posts on the fire it looks like the local fire departments are all volunteer and I don't believe PA has any state level resources that fight wildland fires specifically, although I could be wrong as I'm not well versed in all of PA's resources.
Like you mentioned earlier, most places outside of the west coast, including fire departments, don't even know what a Type 3 engine is as they typically run Type 5's and 6's.
The fire behavior is very different, they did a controlled burn here the next county over at Calaveras Big Trees park and they did almost 900 acres in 4 days. That was a prescribed burn with slow rates of spread. No air resources, no dozers, and while I can't seem to find a personnel count for the operation at the moment I'd be willing to bet it was less than 100 people, heck probably less than 50. Couple of hand crews and some overhead most likely.
And for the others in this thread, it's not that I'm not sympathetic. I could easily lose my home where I'm at in a 200 acre fire, but that would unfold over the course of an hour or less, not days. And it wouldn't get any nationally based federal resources, it would be the local fire department, CalFire, and probably a couple of local USFS engines from the national forest up the road. So, technically federal rigs but ones that are stationed and staffed locally. There would be no FEMA resources, no national emergency declaration, and possibly not even a state emergency declaration unless there was a bunch of houses lost.
For example, the California National Guard was deployed on the "Line fire" this fall. At the time the California National Guard was deployed, that fire had burned 27,000+ acres in less than 5 days. It was threatening
65,000 homes, with 9,200 homes evacuated, and the state and local governments had already deployed 2,000+ firefighters and 200+ fire engines, plus air resources, on that fire alone.
National Guard deployed to help fight raging California fire threatening thousands of homes.
And honestly, that fire wouldn't always get a California National Guard deployment, but at the time there were 3 fires all over 20,000 acres going that started at the same time (same day!), so local resources were thin because there were literally hundreds of thousands of homes threatened. There was a wind event and the first day they started they all went thousands of acres in an afternoon.
It's also worth noting that even that National Guard deployment wasn't nationally based resources, it was the California National Guard units that had already received fire training for the year. It wasn't National Guard units based in other states, and it was a declaration by the governor, not anyone at the federal level.
