Firefighters make sure the area is safe for returning homeowners. Photo © Carrie Richards
At the end of June, iconic images began to flicker across television screens and fill front pages around the country: flames weaving between trees and reaching ominously toward smoke–darkened summer skies, piles of smoldering rubble surrounding a brick chimney, highways choked with the vehicles of evacuating homeowners.
In California, more than 250 homes burned to the ground in the Angora Fire, which covered 3,100 acres south of Lake Tahoe. A blaze on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula grew five–fold overnight to engulf eighty–one–square–miles and threaten a community that lay in the center of the conflagration. In Utah, more than 300,000 acres burned in the largest fire ever recorded in the state. In response to these fires, the U.S. Forest Service and other state and federal agencies went into fire suppression mode, spending millions of dollars attacking the flames with ground crews, tankers, helicopters—even a jet plane.
The 2007 wildfire season was off to a roaring start. Along with the usual calls to action, it ushered in a series of complex questions that challenge the Forest Service, firefighting personnel and even homeowners to re–examine their attitudes toward fire, a once–natural process that now requires massive government spending and increasingly sophisticated equipment to control and contain.
The average annual budget for fighting wildland fires has tripled since 2000, despite the fact that many think the “war on fire” may be as unwinnable as the war on drugs. The annual average federal spending now approaches $3 billion a year, and it’s not likely that costs will decrease in coming years. Ongoing drought, exacerbated by global climate change and decades of fire suppression, promises larger and more severe fires.
And there’s no economy of scale when it comes to fire: the more acres burned, the more money it costs to control, suppress or monitor the flames. Bigger fires mean using more expensive firefighting tools, such as specialized crews, helicopters and air tankers. More crews on the ground mean more money in salaries and more services to feed, house and transport firefighters. The Forest Service is meeting the challenge by developing sophisticated—and spendy—technologies, including a geospatial data system used to prioritize hazardous fuel treatment and help manage large fires. And, as a growing number of homeowners construct dwellings in forested areas, agencies are feeling the pressure to use all resources available to prevent these houses from burning down.
For years, the Forest Service has struggled to get a handle on firefighting costs, but in the face of flames threatening public land or private homes, the agency falls back into its all–out assault mode, and bemoans the cost later. Theoretically, wildfires could be handled differently—there’s a growing recognition that letting wildfires burn unchecked could help reintroduce a natural fire regime to wilderness areas—but politics play a big role when wildfire appears on the horizon. Unlike hurricanes, earthquakes or other natural events, there’s a public perception that fire can and should be stopped, and to that end, Congress has been fiscally compliant, loosening federal purse strings to fund wildland firefighting almost without question over the years.
But as costs continue to spiral upward, there are indications that profligate spending may be at an end. For the past few years, faced with tightening budgets and federal deficits, the Government Accountability Office has asked the Forest Service to come up with a long–range plan for fighting wildfire and strategies to reduce costs. It has gotten an inadequate response. This spring, in the midst of Senate hearings on wildfire preparedness, GAO issued a report highly critical of the federal agency’s spending on wildfire. The report’s title, “Lack of Clear Goals or a Strategy Hinders Federal Agencies’ Efforts to Contain the Costs of Fighting Fires,” succinctly sums up the problem, and the office again requested that the agency improve efforts to curtail costs in preparation for the 2008 fire season.
Mark Rey, undersecretary of agriculture, disagreed with the office’s findings. His response to the charges cited the steps the agency has taken to contain fire–fighting costs, including treating hazardous fuels, and listed increased management efficiencies, such as coordinating efforts with other agencies, centralized management of aviation resources and improved training for line officers. But Rey’s response stopped far short of presenting a long–term plan for how the Forest Service intends to handle the nation’s forest fire predicament.
The proposed budget from the Bush administration for fiscal year 2008 calls for a reduction in the agency’s overall budget, from $6 billion to $5.7 billion, and also suggests the agency foot a larger proportion of firefighting bills with its regular budget. The proposal prompted a letter from five former Forest Service chiefs, who chastised the administration for cutting funds. According to the chiefs, from fiscal year 2000 through 2008, the proportion of the agency’s budget devoted to fire rose from 25 to 44 percent. “The increases in funding for fire, coming at a time of ever more constrained Forest Service budgets, has resulted in a 35 percent reduction in funding for non–fire programs,” the chiefs said. Non–fire programs include many of the things that the public values on its national forests: healthy ecosystems, clean water and recreational opportunities.
Some believe the current situation reflects confusion in the Forest Service’s message on fire. The agency has been in the midst of a funding crisis since logging revenues from national forests began plummeting almost two decades ago, and many wonder if the money generated from fire provides replacement revenue.
“There is a fire–industrial complex,” says Roger Kennedy, former director of the National Park Service. “A lot of people are making money on this every year.” Between increased use of aerial equipment (see “Air Power”) and higher on–the–ground costs, fighting large fires generates significant cash flow. At the height of the Angora Fire, fire managers employed 186 engines, twenty–four helicopters and fifteen water tenders, along with 2,180 personnel. The final cost of fighting the fire exceeded $11 million.
The high cost of that fire was due to the massive suppression tactics, which in turn were employed because the fire threatened what is called the wildland–urban interface—areas near public lands that are developed for second homes or country estates. These homes are prized for their proximity to public lands and, until very recently, most homeowners assumed that federal agencies would act as their rural fire department.
“The Forest Service is coerced to provide free protection for a whole lot of people,” says Steve Arno, a former Forest Service ecologist who has written extensively about fire. “It’s the reverse of the pioneering West, where people…had to be largely self–sufficient, had to figure out how to protect themselves. We have this mythology that westerners are still of that stock. It’s hokum.”
Understanding that there is no way to ensure that firefighting personnel can protect all homes in the wildland–urban interface, many are putting forth the idea that homeowners themselves can provide the best defense against fire—by building with fire–resistant materials and clearing brush from around their homes. A 2001 paper written by Forest Service researcher Jack Cohen says that homes themselves can provide fuel for fire if they are made of flammable material or exposed to burning vegetation. Cohen says that “residential compatibility with wildland fire…can be more effective at preventing wildland–urban fire disasters than the current approach of emergency wildland–urban fire protection.” (see the Inner Voice article, “Defensible Space”).
If the bulk of the responsibility to protect homes were shouldered by homeowners in the wildland–urban interface, letting fires burn might be an ecologically sound and less costly measure. For years, forest ecologists have been arguing that periodic unchecked fires—from cleansing ground fires that might occur every decade to stand–replacing fires that occur every 100 years—benefit many forest landscapes, and that the century–old policy of suppression has thrown that natural fire regime off–kilter, leading to dangerous fuel buildup and the potential for larger, more catastrophic fires.
In some wilderness areas, allowing fires to burn and mimic a more natural process has been effective and has reduced firefighting costs. In 2000, the Forest Service spent more than $7 million suppressing a 64,000–acre fire burning near private homes in Montana, but spent only $710,000 on a similar fire in a nearby wilderness.
Tim Love, a district ranger on the Lolo National Forest in Montana, says that the decision to let a fire burn is not made lightly, but follows a strict protocol and chain of command. “When you make these decisions, you want to make sure that they can last for the whole season,” he says. “A fire that started as a lightning event, very small, over the course of the summer can turn into ten and even hundreds of thousands of acres, and when you get a fire that large, it has the potential to go a long ways.”
Still, wildfires are never comforting to nearby homeowners.
“Fire is a very visible event; it can be ominous when you see those large columns appear, and they often appear closer than they are,” Love says. “And it can be frightening; people want to know if this is one of those ‘let–it–burn’ fires. It makes people nervous, because of the potential of escape.”
A prescribed fire that raged out of control in Los Alamos in 2000 offers a cautionary example of fire and budgets. When the fire escaped its boundaries, it burned nearly 50,000 acres and more than 200 homes before it was contained. Arizona State University professor and fire historian Stephen Pyne says that the fact that the Los Alamos fire was even started, and that a similar fire burned out of control in Arizona that same week, is indicative of a shift in the agency’s thinking, albeit one with costly consequences. “They ran up some high bills trying to suppress those fires under severe conditions,” he says.
Among firefighters and fire managers, the practice of lighting backfires or prescribed fires has changed perceptions about fire (see “The Shepherds of Fire”), but those who believe that letting wildfires burn is beneficial to the landscape face an uphill battle in a culture of suppression.
A 2005 paper published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire, written by Dustin Doane, a Forest Service smokejumper, and co–authored by three additional forestry professionals, acknowledges that “allowing fire to play its natural ecological role has been recognized as socially, economically and ecologically desirable,” but points out that 85 percent of natural fire ignitions are suppressed within wilderness areas.
“That’s a depressing figure because we’re looking at wilderness areas assuming that they are being managed as natural landscapes,” says Tom DeLuca, an ecologist with the Wilderness Society. “The longer that we suppress fires…the more likely that it will be very difficult to get fire back on the landscape without catastrophic fire.”
And therein lies the paradox. Big fires are expensive and the costs—in terms of ecological damage, the amount of federal dollars spent suppressing them and the personal risks faced by those are fighting them—grow quickly. “Although firefighting is often compared to fighting in a war, there is a considerable difference between the two,” says Tim Ingalsbee, head of the nonprofit group Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. “War always presents a calculated risk of soldiers dying, but no firefighter should have to die while suppressing wildland fires. Vegetation will regrow and homes can be rebuilt, but fallen firefighters are permanent, irreplaceable losses.” (see “Body Count”).
The future of wildland firefighting remains up in the air, and though there are plenty of suggestions for reining in costs, (see “Living with the Inevitable”), the agency seems likely to rely on the familiar and politically expedient tactics of fire suppression when wildland fire rages.
“The near future looks like the near past,” says Pyne, referring to large fires and suppression tactics. “It’s time for some serious internal debates: accept that fire will be there, and decide how you are going to manage it.”