The National Multi-Agency Coordinating Group, or NMAC, has elevated the National #PreparednessLevel to 5 (PL 5), due to significant fire activity occurring in multiple geographical areas, an increase in incident management teams being committed, and heavy commitment of shared resources to large fires nationally.

Given the continuing hot and dry weather and the increase in initial attack and large fires in the western U.S., the decision to move to PL 5 depicts the complexity that fire managers are encountering to assure that adequate firefighting resources are available for protection of life, property and our nation’s natural resources.

This is the earliest we have gone to PL 5 in the past 10 years. In 2002, PL 5 was set on June 21 and in 2008, PL5 was set on July 1.

PL 5 is the highest level of wildland fire activity. Several geographic areas are experiencing large, complex wildland fire incidents, which have the potential to exhaust national wildland #FirefightingResources.