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Outside Magazine June 2003

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We're Toast (Cont.)


	Brown but not out: A surviving tree from Oregon's Quartz fire (Kurt Markus)

LET'S FIRE SOME FIREMEN

The Healthy Forests Initiative, fortunately, is for now limited in scope, focusing exclusively on a handful of national forests. And with the right set of ideas, we can do better. Step one is to rethink our annual holy war against fire. The people behind this crusade are dedicated and professional, but the machine they've created is like any bureaucracy: self-perpetuating, hungry for funding, and unable to see its own shortcomings.

These days, even a modest 25,000-acre fire can cost U.S. taxpayers $1 million a day—with private contractors, hired by the Forest Service, reaping the riches. Privatization picked up steam in the mid-1990s and now encompasses most areas of firefighting support—from feeding the troops ($40 a day per person) to operating helicopters (up to $4,800 per hour). It was supposed to save money, but average per-acre firefighting costs have risen steadily over the past 20 years, from around $500 per acre in the 1980s to some $750 today—a steep climb, even allowing for inflation.

So is the solution to shut it all down? No. Some fires still call for intense effort, especially when a town or watershed is threatened. But we could easily save money, diverting resources to more innovative management practices.

One good place to start with the cost-cutting: smoke jumpers. They're brave, motivated, and charismatic, but they're far too expensive for the service they provide. Smoke jumping took off in the 1940s, when much of the West was inaccessible by road. That isn't the case anymore, and these days jumpers often float down within sight of an interstate highway. The deep-wilderness fires they're best-suited to fight are precisely the ones that usually should be left alone. Maintaining nine federal smoke-jumping bases and 400 jumpers, meanwhile, sucks up some $20 million a year.

The resources saved by cutting pricey operations would free up funds for newer approaches. Timothy Ingalsbee, the 43-year-old director of the Eugene, Oregon-based Western Fire Ecology Center, suggests creating teams of year-round fire managers he calls "pyrotechnicians." They would handle all the ground-level work involved with managing fire—setting prescribed fires, helping towns and neighborhoods carve fire buffers, putting out fires when necessary. We're already halfway there, since many Hotshot crews—the main ground forces in any wildfire—spend part of each summer helping with prescribed fires, in which overgrown forests are burned in a controlled manner to reduce fuel loads. But it's a scattershot effort, abandoned as soon as big fires break out.

It's also time to rethink our reaction when homes are threatened. In the summer of 2001, for example, a small 4,500-acre fire in Teton County, Wyoming, near Jackson Hole, endangered woodsy subdivisions filled with million-dollar homes. The result was a frenzied air show, with squadrons of planes and helicopters dropping slurry and water. The cost was enormous—$13 million—and while fire managers denied it, the presence of high-priced spreads was clearly a motivator.

But these homeowners had only themselves to blame. They'd built right on the edge of a forest, well aware that the woods could burn but fully expecting to be saved when that happened. In Teton County, like elsewhere, homeowners had allowed brush and trees to grow too close to structures, some of which had roofs made of explosively flammable cedar shakes.

On the whole, wildfires do much less damage to homes than ordinary domestic fires. In 2002, wildfires caused roughly $100 million in property damage. In most years, standard house fires cost $4.5 billion. So we should limit our sympathy and response when homeowners choose to build near high-risk forest zones without making suitable preparations.

In the foreseeable future, brush cutting might find an ally in high technology. Researchers at the Forest Service's Fire Sciences Lab—a Missoula, Montana- based wildland fire research center—are developing more accurate fire- and weather-simulation models than have ever existed before. Coupled with improving maps that show fuel loads on the ground, the models offer a powerful tool for fire managers. In five years, within hours of a fire's detection, it may be possible to produce a "fire forecast" predicting where a fire will burn and how much damage it will do. Fire managers could use this information to decide whether a fire should be stopped or left alone.

Obviously, things will get tense when a computer program suggests that a fast-moving fire should be allowed to run. But the largest 2 percent of all fires account for 97 percent of the money spent on firefighting. Those are the fires we're least likely to stop, so that money goes up in smoke. We'd do well to put more effort into initial attacks on fires that threaten towns, letting many of the rest run their course.

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