As wildfires become more frequent and more devastating, wild land

firefighters are often the last line of defense protecting homes and

communities. While these crucial public servants are in high demand right now, their paychecks are sometimes smaller than some fast food workers,

and unless Congress acts, a temporary pay raise for federal firefighters will expire at the end of September.

Stephanie Sigh has the story.

This year's wildfires have already burned 5.4 million acres in the United States and forced

thousands of people to evacuate their communities. People that we know that went

by and looked at the property said it's burned down. Everything, our stuff is all

burned up. While fire evacuees flee to avoid danger, every year thousands of wildland firefighters are deployed to the front lines.

There's crews right now in the country that have already completed 7 14 day assignments, and average any more federal wildland firefighters are

sleeping in the dirt and on assignment in excess of 130 days a year.

Luke Mayfield was on a hot shot crew for 18 years.

Hot shot firefighters are called on to suppress the largest and most intense

wildfires in the country.

The mobile teams face grueling hours in tough conditions and

they're stretched thin. In recent years agencies have been short-staffed by

mid-July even though the Forest Service had met its hiring

goal of on-boarding more than 11,000 firefighters, those numbers don't tell the whole story.

Across the nation, we are missing 25% of the desired capacity of, you know, roughly

18,000 federal wildland firefighters across the Department of Interior and United States Forest Service.

And if you look at geographically specific locations, especially in the state of California, some of those vacancy rates can exceed 50 plus percent.

These are very serious shortfalls you seem to be describing. I don't think the average person understands does that mean it's

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