Tennesseans Aid In Western Wildfires

Firefighters with the Tennessee Department of Agriculture’s Division of Forestry deployed this week to help fight fires affecting the western United States. Twenty highly trained forestry personnel are headed to central New Mexico to assist local wildland firefighting agencies and fire departments with initial attacks on wildland fires in that region. That crew includes incident commanders, tree fallers, and firefighters. An additional forestry staff member is deployed to Arizona to manage equipment for an incident management team assigned to a Bush Fire, currently the largest fire in the country. While June wildland fire potential is minimal in Tennessee and across the southeast U.S., the outlook in the southwest region of the country is very different. That region anticipates greater likelihood that significant wildland fire will occur during the summer. Fire agencies are on high alert and are beginning to utilize resources from other states, including Tennessee.