The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection will welcome 40 students Monday to its brand new firefighter training facility in Merced County as part of a multiyear push to bolster its workforce.
The Atwater Training Center, at a former Air Force base, joins three other training centers that Cal Fire said will train about 1,600 firefighters in 2025. At full capacity, Atwater can support 300 students a year to become entry-level firefighters and company officers, responsible for leading operations in the field.
Students “could graduate from our academy and, their next day, arrive on scene and have to command the fire,” said Nicole Gissell, a Cal Fire assistant chief who helps oversee the centers’ curriculum.
The opening comes amid reporting from ProPublica that more than 4,500 federal firefighting jobs in the U.S. Forest Service — about 27% — remain vacant. At the start of the month, Gov. Gavin Newsom brought the fight to President Trump by sending his office a proposed executive order that, he said, challenged the administration to match the Golden State’s investment in fire preparedness.
The first of Cal Fire’s training centers opened in 1967 with 32 students in Ione, Calif. It served as the department’s sole training center until 2017, when, in quick succession, Cal Fire opened locations in Riverside, then in Redding in 2023, and now Atwater in 2025.
Since 2017, the governor and state Legislature have nearly doubled the number of authorized fire protection positions at Cal Fire, according to California Department of Finance data. It corresponded to a doubling of the department’s budget from $2 billion in the 2017-18 budget to $4.2 billion in the 2024-25 budget — 90% of which is dedicated to fire protection.
A Cal Fire spokesperson said the department, as of July, has 12,223 employees, including seasonal firefighters — already above 2024’s high of 11,754. The department expects its number of firefighters to peak with fire season around September.
“Our training program is probably one of the best in the fire service,” Gissell said, “and we’ve just been growing in the last five years to meet the demands of the department and to train all 12,000 employees.”
The new Atwater center will house two of the seven cadres of fire instructors teaching across the four centers. Through a 10-week program, students learn basic firefighting, fire science, leadership skills and how to operate fire equipment.
Beyond classrooms, Atwater has fire towers, off-road driving courses and a series of buildings used for search-and-rescue practice. Students will spend a full week working with live fire.
Cal Fire is actively hiring across its fire protection program, including entry-level firefighters, heavy equipment operators and battalion chiefs.
