‘They are not telling us what the hell to do’: Pillen explains federal team’s role in Nebraska wildfires

At a meeting with landowners impacted by the Cottonwood Fire on Wednesday morning, Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen sought to clarify the role of an interagency team that was called in to help manage the two largest fires in Nebraska history.

The Rocky Mountain Complex Incident Management Team 1 was called in to help manage the Cottonwood Fire, and the larger Morrill Fire to the west, on Saturday. By Thursday morning, both fires showed a significant improvement in containment – 78% for the Cottonwood Fire, and 67% for the Morrill Fire. Combined, they burned more than 770,000 acres.

Rocky Mountain Complex Incident Management Team 3 was leading efforts to fight the Road 203 Fire, which has burned nearly 40,000 acres in Thomas and Blaine counties, but shared on a social media post Thursday morning that management was being shifted back to local firefighters as containment neared 80%.

On social media, rumors swirled about a “federal takeover” of firefighting operations – and at the Wednesday meeting in the Brady Community Center, some attendees shared concerns. One asked if landowners needed to get permission from the incident management team before taking preventative actions on their own land. Another asked if local fire departments had been told to stand down in certain areas.

Pillen and Dan Dallas, the Rocky Mountain team’s incident commander, said the team works on behalf of the state and is not giving orders.

“We’ve asked Rocky Mountain to come in with expertise and help us,” Pillen said. “They are not telling us what the hell to do. Something bad’s not going to happen and we’re gonna blame Dan. It’s on us.”

That sentiment was echoed by David Boyd, the public information officer for the Rocky Mountain team. He said communities that haven’t seen a Complex Incident Management Team, or CIMT, deployed in their area before are sometimes unaware of the structure.

“[The] National Incident Management Team system is organized through the federal government, but this team is made up of state, local and federal employees, and we work under the authority of the state of Nebraska,” Boyd said. “So we came in to help manage the fire, just because the fires are so large and so complex with all the resources and the logistics.

“But we're always working for somebody. So in this case, we're working for the state of Nebraska. And we’re working closely with the local fire departments as well,” he said.

The Rocky Mountain team is one of 41 CIMTs across the country. These teams are staffed by employees of local, state, federal and tribal agencies who volunteer to be dispatched to major fires and other natural disasters in addition to their regular duties. Boyd said most of the Rocky Mountain CIMT staff are from Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska and South Dakota.

This isn’t the first time that the Rocky Mountain CIMT has responded to Nebraska. It assisted with two major wildfires in 2022 – the Bovee fire in the Nebraska National Forest, which burned about 19,000 acres, and the Road 702 fire, which started near Cambridge and burned about 44,000 acres.

Typically, Boyd said, the team is dispatched to three or four incidents each year. They stay anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, depending on local needs.

While the Rocky Mountain CIMT has plenty of firefighters and incident command staff out in the field, a lot of their work happens on the back end. In the team headquarters at the Keith County Fairgrounds in Ogallala, staff members are broken up into sections, like logistics, security and equipment.

There’s a mapping division that works from the ground and the sky to make the fire maps more accurate. A fire behavior specialist and a critical incident meteorologist brief the team each morning about weather conditions and how the fire will react. A communications unit works to get cell service in hard-to-reach areas of the fire and set up specialty radio stations.

Brice Culbertson, one of the Geographic Information Systems specialists on the mapping team, said they use a variety of methods to obtain accurate fire maps. Early maps are often formed by aerial observations from helicopters, drones, and aircraft equipped with infrared sensors.

The other primary method is “ground truthing,” which is done by people walking the edge of the fire with a GPS tablet and transmitting information back to the mapping team.

“Given the size of these fires, it's definitely a challenge,” Culbertson said of mapping via ground truthing. “They've got their work cut out for them.”