All the money gets routed to air drops.
pay a private contractor a years salary to drop one bucket of retardant on the fire instead of paying workers to do preventative work.
blame the lobbyists and senior executive services.
easier to keep the cattle mutilations and ET / Sasquatch sightings covered up when there are no boots on the ground anymore.
All the 'lightning strikes' are 'witnessed' on a giant TV screen hooked up to a computer satellite feed. They are built to detect lighting, to them everything is lightning, DEW is just energy / charge like a lightning bolt, so if there is a lightning bolt on the screen it must be lightning right?
The computer doesn't have an icon for DEW.
The people who are left still talk about sasquatch and cattle mutilations when the managers and public aren't around though.
and the travesty that is letting all the forests burn down and wasting all the tax payer money funding aircraft to 'contain' the problems we caused.
"We can't afford scientists, we can't afford dispatchers, we can't afford x,y,z, spend another 40 million on aircraft!!"
Well, they couldn't have boots on the ground anyways at this point, they have destroyed the contractors who used to support it, can't even find paramedics or EMT's anymore. So glad I'm not in that any more, but it was fun while it lasted and I learned a ton.