This is a too-long but over-due post about fire.
These photos are of a prescribed fire on the Deschutes National Forest. They are courtesy of my good friend Brett Cole, one of the best outdoor photographers in the business. He’s done a ton of photography on national forests around the country, some of which you can view here: http://www.wildnorthwest.org/.
I had a good meeting the day before yesterday with almost 20 employees on the Salmon-Challis National Forest in Salmon, ID. A number of folks joined by conference call—the Forest Supervisor has limited all but essential travel so anyone who wasn’t around the Supervisors Office had to phone in.
The Supervisor told me he could only stick around the meeting for a few minutes—he had an appeal to read “I told myself I was going to be locked in my office until I got through this,” he said. He was kind enough to stick around for almost thirty minutes. A district ranger who was in the building that day was also closeted with an appeal but stopped by for five minutes to talk about a cobalt mine. Then back to the appeal coal mine…
Appeals and litigation come up a lot in my conversations with FS employees. There’s often a lot of evidence of appeals and litigation in offices I visit—boxes of court records stacked up in planners and NEPA coordinators’ offices.
But I was talking about fire. If every national forest has its own personality, then the Salmon-Challis is definitely a fire forest. It’s a cultural thing: Every wall is covered with posters, photos, maps, etc. that document fires. It’s definitely a staffing and a budget thing: Close to half of the SCNF’s $20 million budget supports their fire fighting personnel and equipment. 60 of the SCNF’s employees 250 employees are attached to the Forest’s fire-fighting helicopters alone.
It is definitely a fire thing: 244,000 acres of the 4.3 million acre forest burned last year. 100,000 acres burned the year before that and 400,000 acres the year before that.
The SCNF’s focus on fire is mirrored by the agency in general. This year, Congress appropriated $1.2 billion of the Forest Service’s almost $4 billion total budget for fire fighting. With two months of the fire season still to come, the agency has burned through a billion dollars, and is starting to rob Peter to pay Paul—transferring money from individual national forests to pay for fire suppression operations. The Washington office estimates this summer’s fire fighting costs will exceed $1.6 billion, $400 million over-budget. But it could go even higher. The Forest Service is one large fire incident away from spending more money on fire fighting than they do on all other operations put together.
3.6 million acres have burned so far this year. The ten-year average for the nation is 3.7 million acres. The five-year average is 4.9 million acres.
A big reason this season’s fire fighting has been so expensive is because many fires are burning in areas of California that have a lot of homes. Fighting fires near housing developments is 50% more expensive than fighting fires in the backcountry.
What this means for the Salmon-Challis is that as much as $1 million of their $20 million budget will be siphoned off to pay for fire fighting costs in California. Among other things, this means that 600 acres of planned fuel reduction thinning on the forest won’t be completed. Nationally, the Forest Service is yanking $30 million from the fuel reduction budget to pay for fire suppression.
This is a little like our national health care system, where the taxpayers foot the bill for a pound of cure when the uninsured show up at hospitals with preventable diseases.
Or like our national defense policy where we sell arms to… oh, nevermind.
It has been suggested, by the Wilderness Society and others, that the Forest Service essentially be split in two, with a new Fire Service that has a separate budget, insulating the old Forest Service budget from the annual emergency.
It’d be nice if the national forest system had a budget that wasn’t subject to an annual raid from the fire shop, but I don’t like idea of two separate agencies doing what should be one well-integrated job. Forests are adapted to fire, and the Forest Service manages forests. So they should also manage forest fires.
The best way to fight fire is with fire. Increasing wildland fire use (allowing fires to burn consistent with resource objectives) and prescribed fire are part of the solutions to controlling fire costs.
Congress should act to put more of the onus for controlling fire risk on states, counties and local municipalities. If local government has to share the costs for Forest Service fire suppression operations they will be motivated to control development in fire prone areas and to require firewise measures—building design and landscaping that make homes survivable during wildfires (I’d recommend taking a moment to read Andy’s take on “shelter in place” here: http://www.fseee.org/forestmag/0904pub.shtml).
If homeowners designed their properties to survive fire, the great expense of deploying fire fighting resources to protect homes (and the risk to fire fighters) could be significantly reduced. It is well past time for westerners to adapt their lifestyles to fire.
Most of the expense in fighting fires currently comes from pouring resources into large fires driven by high winds—efforts that are largely futile. Forest fires can generally only be controlled when the weather cooperates.
My radical idea for controlling fire costs is to identify fire adapted forests that haven’t had fire for a long time, deploy fire fighting personnel and equipment around these areas when weather conditions are expected to be conducive to controlling fire, and then setting the area on fire. It is essentially fuel reduction on a large scale, and is also essentially what happens now with large fire incidents, except that fire managers will choose the time and place for the incidents.
Most employees I’ve talked to have scoffed at this idea. Some fire will inevitably escape. There’ll be a lot of smoke. “Sounds like a big lawyer show to me,” one fire management officer told me. I guess he doesn’t have room in his office for boxes of legal papers.
At the end of the day I think a basic problem is that Congress wants to fight fire instead of putting fire to work for us. Congress needs to act to 1) pay for prescribed fire and other fuel reduction measures with the same commitment that they pay for fire suppression; 2) make local government responsible for firewising properties; 3) create variances for smoke (in the long run the smoke from prescribed fire and fire use will be less of a problem than smoke from out-of-control wildfires); and, 4) shield the Forest Service from liability from carefully planned fire on the landscape.
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