Firefighters Urge Better Wildfire Shelters
Firefighters in the Pacific Northwest are advocating for improved, more durable personal fire shelters. The call for upgraded equipment is driven by the increasing intensity and length of wildfire seasons, which now frequently require urban firefighters to deploy to wildland incidents.
- The current standard-issue "New Generation Fire Shelter" was adopted in 2002 after the U.S. Forest Service directed the Missoula Technology and Development Center to create a more protective model. - It is constructed with an outer layer of woven silica laminated to aluminum foil and an inner layer of fiberglass laminated to aluminum foil, designed to reflect radiant heat and slow heat transfer. - The catalyst for the most recent push for a better shelter was the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona, where 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots were killed after deploying their shelters. - A five-year research and development project to improve the shelter, involving NASA and testing hundreds of materials, ended in 2019 without producing a viable replacement. - Prototypes developed during the project showed some performance improvements in direct-flame tests but were ultimately rejected due to increased weight, bulkiness, or failures in production durability tests. - The National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG), an interagency body that sets national standards, ultimately recommended retaining the current M-2002 shelter design. - Field reports from incidents like the 2014 Beaver Fire and 2015 Valley Fire in California highlighted a failure point where the shelter's plastic PVC bag melted, making it extremely difficult for firefighters to deploy the shelter. - Despite calls for improvements, data shows a significant decrease in shelter deployments; between 1995 and 2009, the annual average was 28 deployments, which dropped to an average of about eight per year since 2010.
