Jeff Flock: Western fires not as bad as last year

Jeff Flock

Jeff Flock, CNN's Chicago bureau chief and correspondent, has covered most of the major natural disasters in the United States since he started at CNN in 1980. He is covering the Western wildfires from the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) in Boise, Idaho, where the coordination efforts are under way to contain the fires across the West.

Q: Walk us through the steps of how a fire is reported and how it is or isn't responded to by local or national authorities.

Jeff Flock: The way it works is that the first line of defense is local fire management. Once local authorities determine that they cannot contain the fire, they alert the geographic coordination centers, which are designed to keep an eye on their specific region of the country. That's where the National Interagency Fire Center comes in. The NIFC coordinates all the federal government agencies -- the Bureau of Land Management, the National Forest Service, etc. The main function of the NIFC is to assess how much manpower and resources to devote to each of the large fires it handles.

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Q: Put this in perspective: How do these fires compare to those in years past?

Flock: In some sense, this is a more normal year that last year. Currently, they say, according to the NIFC, that 2.8 million acres have burned this year, and that's typically average. In fact, last year was extraordinary -- almost double that amount of acres had burned at the height of fire season. And we're right at the height of it now.

Q: Some officials, including Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber, said resources for fighting the fires are pretty thin. What is your sense of the amount of resources the NIFC has at hand?

Flock: Resources are absolutely thin and officials here tell you straight out that at the height of fire season they don't have enough resources. Some fires, of course, are not as high priority, since no structures or people are threatened. The Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service's policies have just evolved to let some of the low priority fires burn since they are part of the natural ecology of the forest. But more people have built homes in the middle of nowhere, so that some fires that would normally be left alone to burn must be fought to save damage to these homes.

Q: How much air power is the U.S. Air Force devoting to these fires?

Flock: Well, as the Air Force C-130 begins to take off over my shoulder here, the Air Force has a total of eight aircraft committed to this so-called modular air fighting force. These air tankers are capable of dropping red fire retardant, or slurry, that helps firefighters on the ground establish a line on the fire. Right now, the U.S. Air Force has devoted all of its planes that are capable of this type of firefighting, and they are all tapped out.