Billion-dollar fire season
Billion-dollar fire season
06 October 2016
published by http://www.visaliatimesdelta.com
USA WASHINGTON A one-time infusion of $622 million helped the U.S. Forest Service meet wildfire costs in the budget year that ended Friday, but Congress should use its lame duck session to set up a mechanism for funding fires that exceed a 10-year average, a U.S. budget official said Tuesday.
Shaun Donovan, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, traveled to the Angeles National Forest in Southern California to address the perennial funding shortfall for an expense whose 10-year average has risen $700 million since 1995 and that he said will get worse with ongoing climate change and drought.
Again this year, the cost of fighting wildfires exceeded the funding level Congress provided to the Forest Service, Donovan said in a conference call with reporters. This is something weve seen in six of the past 10 years.
He said the rising costs have taken $237 million in the two previous budget years from other programs including hazardous fuel removal and reforestation designed to make forests more healthy and less prone to catastrophic fires.
Congress provided the $622 million supplement as a one-time-only infusion that the Forest Service cannot count on in future years, he said, calling it a Band-Aid approach.
He laid out a proposal that would permit the Forest Service to have some budget predictability while not delaying fire prevention efforts in order to pay fire fighting costs.
Our approach would say we will provide a specific amount of spending based on the average that weve seen in prior years, he said. But anything above that in an extraordinary year would be covered outside the normal budget cap as an emergency.
He said that would allow the Forest Service to know how much it could spend in prevention efforts each fire season.
House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Rob Bishop, R-Utah, said Donovans efforts constituted political posturing on wildfires and called it dangerous.
When the agency spends countless hours bulletproofing environmental documents against frivolous lawsuits, less time is spent treating fire-prone landscapes to prevent the most devastating and ruinous fires, he said in a statement. More money alone, as the administration called for once again today, is futile. Not until we provide federal agencies with additional tools to treat unhealthy forests at a greater pace and scale will we have done anything to solve the problem.
The committee also pointed to a July report by the Agriculture Departments Office of Inspector General that was critical of the Forest Services hazardous fuels reduction efforts.
Donovan was briefed before speaking with reporters by Forest Service personnel.
Deputy Regional Forester Jeanne Wade Evans said there were 6,500 fires that burned 650,000 acres in California and Hawaii in the fiscal year that ended Friday. Four firefighters and six civilians were killed due to wildfires, she said.
She said the costliest fire still burning after 95 days in the Ventana Wilderness is the Soberanes Fire in the Los Padres National Forest, where $245 million has been spent to protect $6.8 billion in property in the Monterey, Carmel and Big Sur region. Fifty-seven homes were lost.
Angeles National Forest Fire Chief Robert Garcia told reporters the offshore Santa Ana winds that drive fires are expected to be near normal in October and November but may increase in December. Models predict above-average temperatures through the end of the year and below normal precipitation.
