Federal firefighting system needs reform

When an acquaintance of mine visited his parents near San Diego
this summer, he noticed the house he grew up in was surrounded by
manzanita and other flammable shrubs. He called a landscaper and
directed that all vegetation within 90 feet, except a mowed lawn,
be removed.

When October’s fires approached their home, firefighters
recognized it as the only fire-safe house in the neighborhood and
used it as a command post. Many neighboring houses that had shrubs
growing right up to their walls went up in flames. My
friend’s childhood home is safe.

Forest Service researcher Jack Cohen has found that homes will
ignite only if they have flammable roofs or flammable materials,
such as vegetation or woodpiles, next to the homes. The radiant
heat from the hottest forest fire will not ignite a home if it
can’t get closer than 100 to 150 feet from the house. Cohen
recommends that people make their homes fire safe by installing
non-flammable roofs and clearing most vegetation within 150
feet.

Yet every time a forest fire burns someone’s home,
Congress gives the Forest Service and agencies in the U.S.
Department of the Interior more money to thin federal lands. The
Forest Service claims 70 million acres of federal lands need
treatment because they have accumulated fuels after nearly a
century of fire suppression. But treating those acres won’t
stop houses from burning down.

For one thing, Congress only plans to treat about 2.5 million
acres a year. By the time the agencies thin all 70 million acres,
millions of other acres will already need treatment.

More importantly, the agencies are treating the wrong acres.
Forest Service researchers have shown that just 6.9 million acres
are at moderate or high risk of burning homes or other structures,
and more than three-fourths of these acres are non-federal lands.
These are the acres that need treatment, not the 70 million federal
acres. Thinning federal lands is neither necessary nor sufficient
to protect homes, but following Cohen’s recommendations is
both.

The President’s Healthy Forests Initiative is really the
Forest Service Bureaucratic Recovery Initiative. The 2000 Las
Alamos fire came after a decade of declining national forest
budgets that reflected declining timber sale levels. Congress
responded to the fire by giving the Forest Service a whopping 38
percent increase in funding, the biggest budget in its history. The
Healthy Forests Initiative will give it an even bigger boost.

If the Forest Service spent the money on the 6.9 million high-
to moderate-risk acres near homes and other structures, it could
finish the job in just three years. Then the appropriate policy
would be to let many fires on federal lands burn, taking care only
that fires do not cross onto non-federal lands.

Many people recoil at the idea of letting fires burn. As fire
historian Stephan Pyne notes, where rurals think of fire as a tool,
for urbanites it is a “social horror.” In this case,
the rurals are correct: most forest fires are ecologically
beneficial. Most species of wildlife and many of the trees we
regard as most valuable ““ for both timber and scenery ““
benefit from fire.

This year, the federal agencies have allowed about 325,000 acres
to burn and attempted to suppress fires that burned 3.8 million
acres. Fire suppression is costly, risks firefighters’ lives,
and can actually do more ecological harm than the fires themselves.
In the future, this ratio should probably be reversed: let 90
percent of fires burn, and suppress only 10 percent.

The fundamental problem is an incentive system that encourages
forest managers to spend enormous amounts of money on fire
suppression, without regard to the ecological consequences.
Congress has given the Forest Service a blank check to suppress
fires. As a result, after adjusting for inflation, fire costs have
more than tripled in the past two decades.

Congress must find a new way of funding fire protection. One
possibility would be to give the agencies a fixed annual
appropriation for fire and direct them to spend part of that
appropriation on fire insurance. Insurance would be needed only in
excessive fire years. The job of finding the most efficient way to
reduce fire damage would then be left to the insurance companies
working with the on-the-ground managers.

Such an incentive-based policy will protect people’s
homes, improve forest health, save firefighters’ lives, and
save taxpayers billions of dollars a year. Congress will adopt such
a policy only when it realizes that throwing money at fire just
makes the problem worse.

Randal O’Toole is an economist with the Thoreau
Institute (ti.org) and author of Reforming the Fire Service
(ti.org/fire.html).