Changing wildifires bring change to fire command

As wildfires grow in size and complexity, changes have been needed in the command structure of wildland firefighting. The incident commanders overall in charge and responsible for all actions taking on within the incident. I would say the basic level is a type 5 incident commander where you're looking at maybe a single burning snag or minimal resources, maybe just one say module like an engine or something like that, where it grows and grows into a Type 3, which is more complex, maybe a more extended attack. And of course. You had your type one and two Type 2 teams, which is now CIM, which is more your most complex incidents. Type one and Type 2 incident commands have been changed to complex incident management teams to help alleviate staff shortages. With the amount of incidents that we deal with, the fires that we deal with, they keep on increasing year to year. The numbers of them, the sizes of them, basically what they came up with was we're not having enough people to staff those. Those teams, I'll give you an example. I've been a part of instant management teams for over 20 years and there's been years where we've gone to an incident, I've come home for two days, packed up and left two days later for another incident and did that like eight or nine times through one summer. That's why they're making more teams available for complex incident management. A complex incident management team was called in for the recent wildfires in New Mexico and will be used on large federal fire response moving forward.