US wildfire budget exhausted with more fires expected
US wildfire budget exhausted with more fires expected
06 October 2017
published by http://www.fireandrescue.co
USA: 2017 is shaping up to be the worst year for US wildfires in at least a decade and maybe far longer. Several yardsticks can be applied to fire severity such as the number of large fires, total hectares burned, personnel deployed, lives lost or dollars spent. With the single exception of fire fighter fatalities, the numbers so far this year are staggering. Let’s start with the money as perhaps the most comprehensive single statistic for historical comparison. This year the US Forest Service’ s budget for wildland fire suppression was $1,6 billion. As of 19 September 2017, the service announced that it had already spent more than $2 billion. With three weeks remaining in the fiscal year, the probable peak in fire fighting intensity yet to arrive and major battles likely to continue through next month before tapering off in a fire season that never really ends anymore. Already, according to the Forest Service, the 2017 fire season in the west and northwest has seen three times as many uncontained large fires on the landscape as compared to the five-year average, and almost three times as many personnel assigned to fires. More than 27 000 people supported fire fighting activities during peak fire season.
The Forest Service has been at Preparedness Level Five, the highest level, for 35 days as of 14 September 2017. Approximately 2,2 million hectares of National Forest system lands have burned in that time. Forest Service spending on fire suppression in recent years has gone from 15 percent of the budget to 55 percent, which means we have to keep borrowing from funds that are intended for forest management. We end up having to hoard all of the money that is intended for fire prevention, because we’re afraid we’re going to need it to actually fight fires. It means we can’t do the prescribed burning, harvesting, or insect control to prevent leaving a fuel load in the forest for future fires to feed on.
What happened to so greatly intensify a fire year that was looking last spring like it might be milder than normal? Well, like hurricanes, patterns of wildfire severity are difficult to predict. As of 1 June 2017, the National Interagency Fire Centre’s (NIFC) three-month outlook was for below-normal wildland fire activity in much of the west through early summer. Even for August and September, when the risk rises, NIFC predicted normal fire activity throughout the country except for portions of northern California, northern Nevada and Hawaii, where above-normal patterns were expected
But by 1 September 2017, the picture had changed dramatically, with a large swath of the northern Rockies and the Pacific northwest shaded red for above-normal activity. This was driven mostly by the unforeseen arrival of a pattern increasingly characterised as “flash drought”, a sudden and severe dryness, combined with high temperatures. Nowhere has the flash been as fierce as Montana, which atop sweeping crop losses is experiencing the worst wildfire year in its history, the entire state has been declared a fire disaster area. As Tanja Fransen, a National Weather Service employee in Glasgow, Montana, said, “This is unprecedented. This is as dry as it’s been in recorded history and some of our recording stations have 100 years of data. A lot of people try to compare this to previous years, but really, you just can’t.”
The Pacific northwest, too, is experiencing wildland fire of unaccustomed scope, with ash ‘snowing’ to earth in places like Portland and Seattle and public health warnings about lung damage from smoke so heavy and persistent that even Minnesotans have become accustomed to the occasional whiff riding in on a westerly breeze.
Alas, the current NIFC outlook is for more of the same, at least for a while. While an active southwestern monsoon has curtailed activity in the southwest and across portions of the central Rockies, above normal significant fire activity continues to be observed across portions of the Pacific northwest, Northern Rockies, northern Great Basin and northern California. Fuel moisture levels and fire danger indices in these areas are at near-record to record levels for severity.
Drier and warmer than average conditions across the central Great Basin and southern California are allowing for the fine fuels to become more receptive to fire activity. Precipitation received was generally well below average across the Pacific northwest, northern Rockies, Great Basin and California as most areas received less than 25 percent of normal rainfall.
Source: Minnesota Post
