COLVILLE, Wash. – Coordinating wildfire resources is no easy task, but dispatchers at the Northeast Washington Interagency Communications Center (NEWICC) in Colville have it down to a science.
“There’s a lot of moving parts, and we’re a part of that team,” said Jill Jones, who has managed NEWICC since 2015. “It’s really rewarding.”
NEWICC is a partnership between several state and federal agencies–including the Washington Department of Natural Resources, U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, U.S. Bureau of Land Management and more–that started in 2008 and covers 10 northeast Washington counties.
“The beauty of this is that we’re all in this one facility and work together seamlessly,” Jones said.
NEWICC is one of nine dispatch centers across the state of Washington, four of which are interagency cooperations.
Dispatchers monitor for new fire starts and figure out how–and when–to get resources there, whether those resources are on the ground or in the air.
“Usually when people are like, ‘oh there’s a fire,’ then all of a sudden magically there’s aircraft above that,” Jones said. “That happens here in this center.”
Cedar Reimer is NEWICC’s Dispatch Operations Coordinator. She’s worked there since 2016, and showed how dispatchers keep track of where crews are located on big maps on the office walls, with magnets representing different resources.
“It takes it a lot easier for us to see spatially where our resources are, so when we get a new reported fire we can look at it and determine who the closest resources are,” Reimer said.
She also walked through what a dispatcher’s typical workspace looks like.
“We have six-monitor setups, and one of them is always on the radio , so we always have that up,” Reimer said.
It’s a ton of information to process, especially with multiple massive fires going all at once, like in Spokane County a couple weeks ago–with the Oregon Road Fire starting in Elk while crews were in Medical Lake dealing with the Gray Fire.
“What we’re doing is trying to put all these pieces together of what [crews] are actually dealing with,” said Heidi Seitters, an aircraft coordinator at NEWICC. “Is the fire running through the grass, is it in the trees, is it burning homes?”
“You train your ear, you train yourself to listen to key words,” Reimer said.
What the team at NEWICC does is indispensable–not just to Eastern Washington either.
“We also bring in people from all over to help during major incidents, but likewise we support those efforts nationally as well, when there are fires going elsewhere, and it’s not so busy here,” Jones said.
It’s a job that Jones calls incredibly humbling.
“Even though there’s devastation with those tragic fires, like the Gray and Oregon Road Fires, where we’re losing primary residences, our hearts are aching, but we’re doing everything we can,” she said. “To watch my team in here, it’s inspiring.”
For more information on NEWICC, visit their website by clicking here.
