Forest Service chief wants new way to pay for wildfires
Forest Service chief wants new way to pay for wildfires
21 June 2016
published by www.statesmanjournal.com
USA– Some forest fires should be considered natural disasters and their damage paid for like hurricanes and tornadoes, according to the chief of the U.S. Forest Service, who laments that 56 percent of his budget is going to suppressing fires.
As fire ravages parts of Arizona and Southern California this week, chief Thomas L. Tidwell sat down to discuss changes in wildfire fighting practices and the constrained budget that reduces the impact of other forestry programs to battle fires.
There is an understanding and a strong commitment that this needs to be fixed, said Tidwell, a 39-year veteran of the forest service. He said fire programs constituted 16 percent of the forest service budget in 1998 and are projected to consume 67 percent by 2025 if the funding mechanism isnt changed.
Funding for trail maintenance, recreational and campground facilities, fisheries management, and wildlife habitat all go begging because the money is transferred to fighting fires. The Forest Service budget for the current fiscal year is $5.6 billion, of which $3.2 billion will go to fire suppression.
Last year was one of the worst wildfire years since at least 1960, according to records kept by the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. More than 10.1 million acres were charred in 68,151 incidents. That compares to 3.5 million acres in 2014 and 4.3 million in 2013.
Tidwell predicts certain parts of the country including Arizona, with four large, uncontained fires burning this week, and Southern California, where the Sherpa fire is threatening an oil refinery and U.S. 101 in Santa Barbara County will have active fire seasons, like Washington state and California did last year.
The U.S. Forest Service concentrates its resources on the potential for fire in the millions of acres of wildland-urban interface where houses and other structures are close to the woods.
Weve significantly increased the number of acres we treat every year, especially for hazardous fuels, Tidwell said, referring to efforts to reduce the concentration of dead wood on the ground in areas susceptible to especially intense fires. Last year we treated 2.5 million acres through a combination of burning and mechanical treatment. The challenge is we have about 58 million (wildland-urban) acres just in the national forests that need some form of treatment.
The effect of such treatment, according to a study of 1,400 places where it has been done since 2006, is a reduction in the severity of fires, the amount of damage they do and most importantly, it makes it safer for our firefighters, Tidwell said.
In back country fires caused by lightning, the forest service is making increased use of a fire management technique that allows fires to burn within a watershed up to established fire lines created by back burning, he said. The practice, used on about 500,000 acres a year, improves the overall health of forests for which fire has always been part of the ecosystem, he said.
Tidwell said an active fire season now after years of drought, dying trees and insect infestation, as well as higher temperatures is much more active than those earlier in his career. And when fires get away from the initial attack and become established, they cant be suppressed. It takes a change in fuel conditions or a change in the weather to stop them, he said.
Andy Stahl, executive director of the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics in Eugene, Ore., said national forest management practices have improved in recent years.
But he said they are largely irrelevant to homeowners more than a mile from a forest boundary producing wind-blown embers. Fire doesnt have momentum, he explained. It needs heat, oxygen and fuel, and deprived of any one of them, it cant travel. He recommends keeping areas around homes near woods free of combustible material such as pine needles in gutters.
As for allowing forests to burn in remote areas far from human habitation, as many environmentalists advocate, Stahl sees a beneficial shift in the attitude of the forest service.
There has been a quiet but significant change in most places in the Forest Service in the culture of how we approach wildland fire as a natural part of the environment, he said. The change is not the result of an embrace of nature but instead an antipathy to killing firefighters. Instead of putting firefighters directly on the fire line and telling them to stamp out that roaring blaze thats about, at any moment, to overwhelm them and fry them, were allowing fires to burn within topographic features like ridgelines or bare spots.
Stahl said roughly 40 percent of the acreage burned in national forests is set to consume the forest between a natural or man-made break and the approaching fire.
The forest services firefighting budget is based on a 10-year average, but costs have exceeded that average in eight of the past 10 years, Tidwell noted. A bill pending in the House would allow for supplemental appropriations, like those made for natural disasters like hurricanes, as needed. Tidwell said the agency would gladly work with Congress to set the criteria for the 1 or 2 percent of fires hed like to see handled as natural disasters.
The bill, introduced by Idaho Republican Mike Simpson and Oregon Democrat Kurt Schrader, has 147 bipartisan co-sponsors, including Lois Capps, D-Santa Barbara, who visited some of the more than 2,100 personnel last week battling the Sherpa fire in her district.
The Sherpa fire is a prime example of what can be accomplished when our firefighters are well-equipped and operate as one swift unit, Capps said this week. We are currently seeing multi-level departments work in tandem to contain the Sherpa wildfire and save lives. After attending the firefighter briefing on Friday evening, I was inspired by their bravery and dedication as they battle this fast-spreading fire into submission.
At the time the bill was introduced, Schrader said: Each year, critical forestry programs face unnecessary budget cuts because they are forced to transfer funds from successful forest management practices to pay for wildfire suppression. Freeing up those financial resources to enhance catastrophic fire prevention programs will ultimately reduce costs on the federal government and help us better prevent wildfires in the future.
