Study shows fires boost local economies
Study shows fires boost local economies
31 January 2013
published by www.redding.com
USA — Fighting fire is big business that generally boosts local employment and wages, a University of Oregon study shows.
Obviously our county is pretty dependent on the forest and timber, and timber has historically been the bedrock industry, said Tonya Dowse, executive director of the Siskiyou County Economic Development Council. Unfortunately, you have to factor in the forest fire economy and you try to make sure you get the most return out of it, if you can.
Prepared by Oregons Institute For a Sustainable Environment, the study tracks data from 346 large wildfires from 2004 to 2008. It found labor market disruptions caused by fires are outweighed by employment gains the suppression efforts generate in the short term.
This is believed to be the first study of its kind to provide data that show a fires effect on the economy.
We sell a lot more fire boots in fire season the firefighters have money, said Brian Fay, who co-owns Shasta Boot Co. in Redding. Fay estimates he gets about a 20 percent boost in his business during a busy fire season. It actually brings business when you have fires.
The Oregon study crunched numbers for fires in which the U.S. Forest Service was the lead fighting agency and suppression costs exceeded $1 million per fire. Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers were used for employment and wage data.
Total local spending varied on the fires the study tracked from no money to nearly $19 million.
Nearly half of the 124 counties in the West studied experienced only one fire during the five years studied, while about a third of them had three or more fires, with a maximum of 21 fires that burned in Siskiyou County from 2004-2008.
Dowses organization has a business incubator that for years housed a startup that provided food to the fire lines.
We worked with a local company that started a business serving lunches to fire crews, so we could have somebody here locally competing for contracts with the Forest Service and CalFire, as opposed to vendors coming from outside the area, Dowse said.
The business was successful, but obviously they were dependent on whether there was a need for their service, Dowse said. You make the best out of a bad situation, right? And you try to derive as much local benefit as possible.
Local economies of counties included in the study were characterized three ways: recreation-based, service-based, and government-based. The study put Shasta under service, while Siskiyou, Trinity and Tehama all were considered recreation-dependent economies.
Government-dependent counties experienced a greater jump in wages than any other of the others, the study said.
Most of the fires studied burned during the summer season, when tourism dollars are coming into the counties.
We found that the effect of large wildfires on local labor markets remained significant even after controlling for summer seasonal trends, the study said.
But contracting with the government to fight fires can be a double-edged sword, said John Williams, who owns Sunrise Excavating & Paving in Redding.
Because they happen in the summer, at our busiest time, but we do make money on them, Williams said. But we have to be real careful because we have other obligations to contractors, so we cant make the mistake and go out to work on a fire and leave the poor guy we are working for.
So vendors like Sunrise Excavating need to be nimble during fire season.
Using bulldozers, Sunrise Excavating builds fire lines. Last summer, the company worked the Dale Fire between Happy Valley and west Redding and the Manton Fire, which burned 28,000 acres near Manton and Shingletown.
Williams explained when Sunrise works a fire, it has to use its own bulldozers.
So quite often we will rent a dozer for our job, Williams said. We dont make as much money as people think because there is a little tradeoff for having to rent that dozer.
It also takes some planning on the part of the business to prepare for the fire season.
We have to order our fire boots this time of year, said Fay of Shasta Boot Co., adding he could have boots left over. If its busy, we will be out of them, which is what you want because these are $400 to $500 boots. If the guys dont buy them, that makes the bookkeeper not real happy.
