An inside look at operations at the National Interagency Fire Center

How can one best explain the many programs, agencies, partners, and all other operations that occur at the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC)? Guide people through a tour of the 55-acre campus that’s located in Boise, Idaho’s backyard. Interagency at its core with the focus on wildland fire management, NIFC has international, national, and geographic area-specific programs. It’s home to the national fire management programs of each federal fire agency, along with partners including the National Association of State Foresters, the U.S. Fire Administration, and the National Weather Service.

NIFC, owned by the BLM and the home base for more than 600 interagency (300 BLM) employees, is easiest to explain to the outside eye with a tour through the campus. BLM external affairs employees, alongside interagency external affairs partners, hosted nearly 1,500 people for a total of 75 tours in fire year 2024. The groups come from various backgrounds, and this year NIFC welcomed members of Congress, Idaho State Legislators’ spouses, more than 60 first graders from a local school, firefighters from Australia and New Zealand, the U.S. Director of the Census, and many more.

The tour includes a first stop at the National Interagency Coordination Center (NICC), where guests hear how the three-tier dispatch system operates and how it decides the movement of airtankers, crews, smokejumpers, caterers, and many other resources. NICC filters hundreds of requests daily. Next door, the Remote Automatic Weather Station (RAWS) group shows how wildland firefighters utilize RAWS to call in via radio for a real-time weather report. This year alone, RAWS deployed 111 incident-RAWS in support of wildland fire incident management teams and calibrated 7,951 sensors.

Over at the National Interagency Incident Communications Division, or radio cache, visitors catch a glimpse of how the 12,500 handheld radios are maintained by minimal staff, and how they can support up to 32,000 firefighters at one time. Around the corner, at the Great Basin Incident Support Cache, visitors walk through the warehouse that issued more than $83 million dollars-worth of inventory to support wildland fire incidents in 2024.

The last stop on the tour is the BLM Great Basin Smokejumper Base. This is frequently a favorite stop, as the groups get to hear from experienced wildland firefighters themselves. Smokejumpers fly via airplane to wildfires and parachute from 3,000 feet above ground to serve as initial attack on a fire. This BLM base at NIFC showcases where they spend the winter months sewing and repairing gear, the loft where they inspect every inch of their parachutes, and the ready rack where their gear hangs so they can ensure a two-minute suit up time. Groups are able to hear personal stories from the smokejumpers.

NIFC itself is just a place, but the agencies, organizations, and specific programs are what make it a fast-paced and invigorating place to work. Thousands of people have been able to see that first-hand through NIFC tours.

Learn more through the virtual NIFC tour at https://www.nifc.gov/about-us/nifc-campus/tour, or tune into the BLM Wildfire Matters Podcast and the recent episode about all-hazard response coordinated at NIFC.

See a graphic by Sheri Ascherfeld, BLM Fire, here.