Governor says top forestry official fired after gaps in wildfire response

At a weekly press conference the governor said he has terminated the top official in the state forestry agency after what he described as failures to deploy state assets during recent wildfires that affected Stillwater, Guthrie and a separate 92,000-acre fire.

The governor said he was at the state command center during the events and that forestry personnel “were not sharing information” with emergency management staff, hindering the centralized response. “We have the emergency management person is Annie Vest,” he said, and the command center exists so “any kind of resource that they need or problem we’re having around the state can come to one centralized center.”

The governor criticized the forestry management’s allocation of resources, saying the agency left significant assets in eastern Oklahoma instead of sending them to the larger fires. “What we did in the forestry, the management of forestry, the bureaucracy, took half of our resources to the most critical things and left half the resources in Eastern Oklahoma fighting 2 acre fire, a 13 acre fire,” he said. “We needed our resources in Stillwater and Guthrie, and we need these resources up here fighting the 92,000 acre fire.”

The governor said the state requested assistance from Louisiana and Arkansas and that Oklahomans expected in-state assets to be used first. “If we’re bringing resources in from Louisiana and Arkansas, we at least had all of our resources fighting those fires,” he said. He added: “If the governor can’t fire the person running forestry, who can?” and said he had terminated “the people that, that I that I felt like, the person at the top that did not put all those fire hoses and those resources on the fires.”

The governor said Secretary Blaine Arthur will choose an interim director for the forestry agency; he said he expected the interim to have firefighting experience and business knowledge to improve deployment and accountability. He did not name the fired official, and the governor’s comments did not identify the specific positions vacated or the effective dates of any personnel changes.

The governor framed the moves as accountability steps following what he called the state’s worst wildfire season in history and emphasized the role of the command center in coordinating assets across agencies.