Government policies and spending should be updated to reflect that structural and wildland firefighters cross paths more often, U.S. fire administrator Lori Moore-Merrell told a Boise conference.

Congress, for example, should increase support for U.S. Fire Administration efforts to provide local training and improve coordination with wildland fire managers, said Moore-Merrell, who leads the U.S. Fire Administration, a unit of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Agencies and Congress also should expand support for further development and use of pre-fire response planning that is science- and cooperation-driven, and that integrates land-management objectives, she said.

“Wildfire is our concern,” Moore-Merrell said of USFA, which is traditionally focused on urban and suburban departments and emergency medical services.

Reasons include increased development in or near forests and grasslands, fire seasons that are longer and pose a greater threat to communities, and wildfires occurring where they have been uncommon in the past — such as the Midwest and Northeast.

“We built our communities toward risk environments, and so now we have structurally trained firefighters responding to interface communities” in or near wildlands, Moore-Merrell said in a remote presentation to the International Fire Behavior and Fuels Conference held April 15-18.

The Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission’s September 2023 report calls for encouraging cooperative decision-making at various levels of government, funding wildfire resilience in a dedicated and sustained way, supporting and expanding the workforce, enabling prescribed fire and making decisions proactively using the best available science and technology.

Wildfire is “no longer a land management problem, or is it isolated to regions or geographies,” Moore-Merrell said. Since communities are being built in the path of fire, “we have to move beyond talking about the wildland to talking about the impact of wildfire on humans, on public safety and on livelihoods.”

The fire administration and others have considerable data. A current challenge centers on how it can be best used to learn, and to leverage new technologies and approaches, she said.

From building codes and fire-adapted communities to prompt evacuation plans and managing community smoke impacts where possible, “we’ve got a lot of teaching to do,” Moore-Merrell said.