National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) is used in the United States to provide a measure of the relative seriousness of burning conditions and threat of wildfires.
Better communication and better transportation were beginning to make mutual assistance agreements between fire control agencies more practical than in the past.
State compacts, and in the case of the federal government, interagency and interregional agreements were bringing fire control teams together from widely separated areas of the county.
NFDRS provides a uniform consistent system that possesses standards which agencies with wildfire suppression responsibility can apply and interpret.
[2] The assumption behind staffing levels is that the continuum of fire danger can be divided into discrete intervals to which preplanned management actions are keyed.
The first step in establishing staffing levels is the selection by the state or federal land management agency of an NFDRS component or index that best describes the total fire problems in their protection area.
Both state and federal land management agencies in Washington use the Energy Release Component (ERC) to determine staffing levels or adjective class ratings for the general public.
Land management agencies in Washington use the 90th and 97th percentile of the ERC as a basis for determining staffing levels.