Debate Flares Over Park Service’s Increased Use of Prescribed Fires

Until last month, the National Park Service was setting more and more fires to clear brush and rehabilitate landscapes, tripling the area burned in just four years.

Then a fire set by officials at Bandelier National Monument got out of control, leading to last month’s inferno that destroyed more than 200 homes in Los Alamos, N.M. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt indefinitely halted all such “prescribed fires” by the Park Service in the West, saying an investigation found “serious systemic problems in the way the Park Service conducts prescribed burns.”

That practice has spread like wildfire in the Park Service since 1995, when Babbitt changed policy to further encourage the use of fires and Congress began giving more money and leeway to set them.

Last year, Park Service officials set a record 326 fires, burning 139,000 acres, or about 217 square miles, according to an analysis of the agency’s fire data. The 1999 total was a 62% jump over the previous record of 85,529 acres in 1998 and more than triple the 46,067 acres burned in 1996.

In all, the Park Service has set 3,760 prescribed fires since 1970, burning about 926,000 acres--or 1,450 square miles, an area almost the size of Rhode Island. Park officials also allowed 2,728 fires started by lightning or other natural causes to burn more than 400,000 acres.

During that time, Park Service workers battled 43,456 other wildfires that burned nearly 5.5 million acres, according to a Park Service fire database.

Still, the total acres burned by prescribed fires in 1999 represented less than 0.2% of the 78 million acres managed by the National Park Service. Some experts say many more prescribed fires are needed to prevent the kind of catastrophic infernos that blackened a million acres of Yellowstone National Park in 1988.

“Even when that number [of prescribed fires] is doubled, it’s a drop in the bucket,” said Ronald Myers, director of the National Fire Management Program of the Nature Conservancy. “I hope Congress is patient and lets this thing run its course.”

Congressional critics say federal agencies rely too often on fire to clear out the dead trees and choking undergrowth that make Western forests vulnerable to disastrous wildfires. They say federal land managers should rely more on “mechanical thinning”--cutting down trees and undergrowth using people and machines rather than fire.

“The National Park Service is acting like children playing with matches,” said Rep. Helen Chenoweth-Hage, R-Idaho, chairwoman of the House Resources Committee’s forests panel.

Park Service officials say fire is often the best and cheapest way to clear underbrush. They say prescribed fires mimic the natural fires that helped forests, prairies and swamps evolve. Fires can be set in remote areas where roads cannot be built to bring in logging equipment.

“As you get away from developed areas, fire becomes a more viable alternative--there’s a reduction in cost, and in threats to life and property,” said Park Service fire expert Tom Zimmerman. “It’s not that we’ve avoided mechanical treatments, we’re just trying to provide the most appropriate and cost-effective treatment.”

Besides the low cost, prescribed fires can help prime the soil for new seedlings and spur the reproduction of species such as giant sequoias, said Nate Stephenson, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist who studies fire in Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks in California. Mechanical treatments, on the other hand, produce less smoke and do not leave fire scars on surviving trees, he said.

“I think land managers would be shooting themselves in the foot to limit themselves to one tool or the other,” Stephenson said. “Dealing with the problem in the West of fuels buildup and fire suppression is going to require combinations. In some cases it will require saws. In some cases it will require fire. In some cases it will require both.”

While the current debate over fires and the National Park Service focuses on the West, the parks that set the most fires are in Florida. The agency’s top site for prescribed fires is the Big Cypress National Preserve, which had 388 prescribed fires since 1980 that burned nearly 534,000 acres. That’s an area equivalent to 74% of the preserve.

“We burn throughout the year, whenever the conditions are appropriate, to remove those hazardous fuels so we don’t get those big, screaming fires we can’t control,” said Larry Belles, the preserve’s fire chief.

Second was the adjoining Everglades National Park, where officials have set 363 fires that burned 105,244 acres since 1970. Officials at the Florida parks said their ecosystems depend on fires every three to 15 years.

“Two hundred years ago, lightning would strike somewhere out in what are now the Miami suburbs, and over the next few weeks the fire would burn into the center of the Everglades,” said Bob Panko, fire manager at Everglades National Park. “That can’t happen anymore, because there’s a Kmart out where the lightning is going to hit. So to respond to that, we’ve been lighting fires to maintain that natural regime of fire in our wilderness.”

The top Western parks were Sequoia and Kings Canyon, which together had 149 prescribed fires that burned about 27,500 acres. Officials at Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona lit 97 fires that burned 25,700 acres.

A prescribed fire on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim blew out of control at the same time as the fire that burned Los Alamos. The Grand Canyon fire burned about 14,000 acres before being contained, but high winds whipped it out of control again this week..

At Bandelier, home to scores of American Indian ruins in the forested Jemez Mountains, officials have set 55 fires that burned 4,583 acres over the past 30 years. That represents about 14% of the monument’s 34,000 acres and ranks it 22nd among 111 Park Service units that have set fires.

Before the disastrous fire that burned into Los Alamos, Bandelier officials had started setting fewer, larger prescribed fires. In 1998, monument officials set two fires totaling 1,700 acres, and last year they set one 1,404-acre fire.

The monument was also home to a seven-member team of firefighters created to help keep prescribed fires from getting out of control. The Interior Department investigation of last month’s fire said monument officials had too few firefighters on hand to monitor the prescribed fire and did not get help quickly enough from other federal agencies once the fire started burning out of control.

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On the Net:

National Park Service fire management office: https://fire.nifc.nps.gov/fire/