Burn, Baby Burn

*This is an unpublished draft of a long-form story, so if you have any suggestions for readability, other relevant issues to investigate, or people to speak with let me know!

 

The Hellsgate, Arizona fire chief saw trouble in 1999, when the Forest Service announced the start of a fifteen-year drought cycle. Gary Hatch went to the board to request another brush truck to fight forest fires. They laughed then, but the Rodeo-Chedeski fire burned 468,638 acres in 2002, and they got the new truck.

The drought coincided with a Forest Service policy that has made the nation’s forests dangerously overgrown and increased fire size, leading to a funding crisis.

“The policy that they came up with basically set our forest up to burn,” Hatch said.

The problem began in 1910, just five years after the Forest Service was created, said Mike Ferris of the National Fire Center for the Forest Service. A 3 million acre fire burned across Idaho and Washington, and at least 85 people died. Firefighters gave up fighting or even trying to contain the blaze and simply evacuated whole towns.

After the fire, policy-makers developed the “10 o’clock rule,” and as the population grew, more land passed into federal management, and fire-fighting technology changed, firefighters were better able to get fires out – by 10 o’clock the next morning.

Over time, the number of fires increased slightly, which Ferris said is largely a function of more people living in the forests, but the size of the fires increased by as much as four times. Between 1985 and 1989, the average number of fires annually was 56,837, compared to 83,082 per year on average between 2005 and 2009. The median number of acres burned per year, however, increased from 2,719,162 acres per year during 1985-1989 to 8,689,389 acres from 2005-2009, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

The fire size is increasing in part because the “10 o’clock rule” allowed the forests to become overgrown.

“Frankly not knowing better that we’ve suppressed fire for such a long time that there’s so much fuel build-up out there that will burn eventually,” Ferris said.

By the time the Forest Service realized the danger of the trajectory and changed course, the forests had become so thick that small growth, which in the 1800s would have burned off in small lightning fires every few years, had taken over by virtue of sucking water from the larger trees. This left the forest foliage both plentiful and dry, a recipe for large fires.

The problem became obvious for Hatch’s jurisdiction in the ‘90s because of both the drought and a successful environmentalist campaign to shut down logging operations, which Hatch had seen as the last force for keeping forest growth from getting out of control.

“In the Ponderosa forest, you should have a maximum of forty trees per acre, and we’ve got 800 per acre in some areas now,” Hatch said. “I’ve never seen the forest as scary as it is now.”

The Forest Service has now dramatically changed fire-fighting strategy to cope with massive increase in fire size and intensity. Now, limited resources mean that only the top priority land gets saved.

“There’s been a dramatic change in how we do things,” said Clay Templin, who has been with the Tonto Forest Service for thirty-three years. “Really what we look at is three questions, what’s important, why is it important, and how important is it.”

The Forest Service will fight all fires that begin with human accident, but the many summer fires that start with lightning strikes are less certain, Ferris said. Sometimes they will focus on saving urban areas but let the wilderness-area fires burn as safely as possible, both from a desire to thin the overgrown forests and a lack of resources to fight the fires.

The budget is no longer enough even for this priority-based action. The first year when total fire-fighting costs exceeded one million dollars was 2000, but this has occurred every year since then with only two exceptions, according to the Department of Interior.

Funding this upward trajectory has required creativity. The smaller fires that can be contained with a day or two are fought and funded entirely at the local level, but the larger fires pay no heed to political boundaries or varieties of land ownership, and they are federally funded.

“Typically what we do, and this year is no exception, is we bring out a lot of resources from other parts of the United States where they’re not quite as active,” Templin said.

These out-of-town crews bring their own equipment, but they bill their extra hours fighting the large fires to the Forest Service’s fire suppression fund of $1.4 billion. During seven of the last ten years, fire-fighting costs have exceeded budget, by as much as $999 million in 2002.

“Because we had an active fire season last year, we exceeded and came over $400 million,” Ferris said.

When this happens, the Forest Service responds with a fire transfer, which means all its agencies send unused funds for the rest of the fiscal year toward fire-fighting.

This means that projects scheduled during the last few months of the fiscal year risk being pushed back to the next year, Ferris said.

This scenario is what prompted Senator Wyden of Oregon to introduce a bill that would change how the large fires are funded. If passed, the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act, which is currently in committee in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, would fund the large fires as if they were natural disasters via the Federal Emergency Management Association.

For now, local agencies bear any delay.

“They’ll submit their billing to the system, and it could take anywhere from 20 days to several months,” Ferris said.

All of the fire suppression billing goes through a single pay center in Albuquerque, but until that money comes through, the local taxpayer dollars have to support the fire stations, in addition to the costs of operating that they pay. Some of the receipts Hatch has submitted have taken up to a year to come though.

“Our cost of operating has doubled, and we haven’t had a raise in eight years,” Hatch said. “It’s killing us.”