The National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, is the nerve center of the world's largest firefighting force.

Every year from May to October, top-level fire managers monitor and direct firefighting efforts nationwide from the Boise headquarters.

The Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, and three other federal agencies have joined efforts at the fire center, which occupies a fifty-five-acre campus with twenty-three buildings. The main warehouse can hold enough equipment to outfit twenty thousand firefighters and supply ten smaller regional warehouses. The shelves are stacked with flameresistant shirts and pants, sleeping bags, gloves, boots, hard hats, goggles, tents, fire shelters, and so on. More than eight thousand handheld radios must be checked, which, during the busiest days of the fire season, can use as many as 385,000 batteries in a single day. Also on hand are thousands...