Is public policy pouring fuel on wildfires?

When 14 firefighters died in a wind-fanned inferno near Glenwood Springs, Colo., in 1994, Roger G. Kennedy was struck by the senselessness of the tragedy.

“They were not fighting to protect an ecosystem or even a railroad or a highway,” he recalled. “Those people went to their death protecting a real estate development.”

Kennedy, National Park Service director under President Clinton for four years in the 1990s, is the author of a new book, “Wildfire and Americans: How to Save Lives, Property and Your Tax Dollars,” that contends that government policies have placed millions of residents in the path of wildfires.

Southern California has recently experienced two severe wildfires. The Day fire, which started on Memorial Day, burned more than 600,000 acres in the Los Padres and Angeles national forests and took a month to contain. Then the Esperanza fire destroyed property and killed five firefighters in Riverside County. Are America’s firefighting resources adequate?

The U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service are essentially the national fire department, drawing people from other activities they are supposed to carry on.... The Forest Service budget is systematically distorted by more than $1 billion a year to accommodate the fact, which is stupid.... The equipment tends to be obsolete; air tankers [owned by contractors] get old. The planes used would never be permitted in combat.... People are sent to the fire lines ... who are not always as well trained as they should be, because it is not the primary thing they do. It is very heroic but

Are you suggesting that firefighting efforts should be year-round rather than concentrated in the summer-fall fire season?

Yes. It is crazy not to have a national firefighting force that is in the business of going where people already are and protecting them better through prescribed burning and thinning.... We do not require that municipalities have fire-wise ordinances saying that if you do not clean up your place so it is safe from spread of fire, it’s a violation and should be a criminal violation because some are going to die.... We send the feds in to rescue people from circumstances where a neighbor fails to do his duty and leaves his place full of tinder and brush.... It is nutty.

You assert that in the largest sense, wildfire is a people problem, not a fire problem, because society has encouraged settlement in highly flammable terrain. Please explain.

In California, more than 50% of the houses built in the last 10 years were built in fire-imperiled places.... This is a dynamic situation which is getting worse every day because more people are coming in and because the climate is changing. Fires are getting bigger and more frequent. But we built the roads and supplied mortgages and infrastructure to people who had every reason to expect that we were going to provide a fire department, as we do in the cities. Those expectations have been disgracefully betrayed. We do not provide adequate fire protection, and we don’t provide adequate fire hazard diminution by professional people year round. So we have to stop encouraging people going into these very dangerous places.

Other than population pressures, what historically has driven the dispersion of urban dwellers to suburbs and rural areas?

When we came out of the second World War, the images in our minds were of urban fire -- Dresden, London, Rotterdam, Belgrade.... We knew all about bombing. We were conscious of the danger of Soviets or others bombing our cities, and the big lesson of the war was bust up the cities because they are targets for the Soviets. The Cold War provided every one of the major policies carried on to disperse the major cities.

Which policies drove this dispersal from the cities?

The panoply includes federally insured mortgages issued whether the houses were in a dangerous place or not. There was no attention -- in fact there is very little attention today -- as to how risky the location was going to be. There was no attention given as to whether the highways and feeder roads that we paid for would dump people out in safe or dangerous places. No attention was given to natural systems and dangers.... It is just in the past 10 years that we are paying any attention.

You contend that President Bush’s Healthy Forests Initiative for thinning and logging of national forests to reduce fire danger is seriously flawed. What are your concerns?

Promiscuous recommendations for logging overlook the historic fact that killer fires in this country’s experience have all been after logging ... in the slash of post-logging operations. Any program that says to go out and log and turns to the lumber companies like that again is crazy. Now, is it going to be important to thin forests on the run-up to settled places and on the fringes of villages? Absolutely, and there needs to be a lot of prescribed burning around the edges of communities.... But lumbering where the commercial timber is -- in remoter places -- does nothing to protect people.

How does society discourage development from going deeper into fire-prone areas?

If you are a farmer and don’t behave, you don’t get a farm subsidy. That is the way it should work in development. If you don’t conduct yourself in ways that provide for the safety of the people you persuade to settle, you won’t get the subsidies. We won’t build roads to you. We won’t build power lines to you. We won’t insure your mortgages. And we won’t permit the people you sell to deduct the interest on their mortgages. That would do quite a lot right there.

What happens to the existing structures in areas susceptible to wildfire?

You have to do the best you can for the people that are in them. I don’t think anybody would seriously say we’re going to let them burn up. But we do a terrible job of forcing communities and developers to plan properly to permit people safe exit.... We treat canyon communities as if they were islands in the Gulf. In one case, you can’t escape the hurricane, and in the other case, you can’t escape the fire.

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tim.reiterman@latimes.com