Anti-Wildfire Funds Help Idaho Subdivisions Prepare for Season of Fear

The next time a wildfire threatens Wilderness Ranch, Everett Waterbury wants to be better prepared than he was the last time.

The retired federal fire coordinator, who lives in the scenic mountain subdivision 25 miles northeast of Boise, watched well-timed thunderstorms stop the 1994 Rabbit Creek Fire from reaching his home.

“If it kept going the way it was, we’d lose 400 homes here and in Idaho City,” he said.

This fire season, he and his neighbors plan to use a federal grant to thin the overgrown forest and make the 175-home ridge-top development safer from wildfire. The Wilderness Ranch thinning project is one of four state-managed programs meant to reduce the threat of wildfire near 10 Idaho communities.

Funding will come from a $1.8-billion National Fire Plan written by the Clinton administration and the Western Governors Assn. The thinning project’s $25,000 price tag is a relatively small part of the more than $40 million in new fire funds slated for Idaho this year.

But state and federal foresters say the project places the money where it does the most good: where homes and wild lands meet. That was one of the findings of the white paper “The Fires Next Time,” released by The Andrus Center for Public Policy.

The paper, the result of a conference the center convened in December, brings the gathering’s conclusions together for policymakers to use in improving fire management.

Wildfires burned more than 7 million acres in the West in 2000, including more than 700,000 acres in Idaho. Drought conditions and forests overgrown after a century of firefighting could mean another season of huge wildfires this summer.

“We’ve found ourselves in a situation that well may be catastrophic,” said Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho). A record $1.6 billion was spent to fight fires nationwide in 2000, prompting the unprecedented budget increase for firefighters, equipment, thinning projects and community education.

The Bush administration has cut the budget for this year, but Craig is confident that he and other Western lawmakers can restore the necessary funds.

“I’m not worried about the availability of money,” he said.

What they are worried about is whether federal agencies can deliver the programs as promised.

Lyle Laverty, the U.S. Forest Service’s fire czar, said he is pushing his staff to make sure thinning, prescribed burning, training and education programs ramp up before this year’s fire season.

“I’m asking them: ‘How many acres did you treat? How many contracts did you award? How many people did you employ with those contracts?’ ” Laverty said.

Wilderness Ranch is a model fire-prevention community and a prescription for wildfire disaster. It has a volunteer Fire Department with six trucks and 25 volunteer firefighters, 12 fire hydrants and some fire-wary residents who have cleared brush and thinned trees near their homes.

It also has all of the natural ingredients for a catastrophic fire.

“The three factors for a wildfire are fuel, weather and topography,” said volunteer fireman John McCarthy. “We have an abundance of all of them here.”

The subdivision’s common areas are dense with brush, small trees and large, dead trees--perfect wildfire fuels. Expensive homes cling to steep slopes, ideal topography for fires that are at their deadliest racing up hills.

And winds generated in nearby canyons, McCarthy said, can reach “microbursts of more than 100 mph.”

“Except for [using] airplanes, you wouldn’t even want to try to get in there to fight a fire,” said Waterbury, the fire chief and Boise County fire coordinator. “It would just cook.”

In addition to Wilderness Ranch, the Idaho Department of Lands has proposed thinning projects around the isolated forest communities of Yellow Pine, Dixie, Island Park and Heyburn State Park. The state also is cooperating with federal agencies, the Student Conservation Assn. and Home Depot to educate landowners about how to make their homes near forests and range land safer.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Forest Service is planning its own thinning projects near Yellow Pine, Lowman, Atlanta, Idaho City and Garden Valley. It also will continue a series of prescribed fires throughout southwestern Idaho that last year brought racing crown fires to a crawl.

Nationwide, federal agencies already have burned 400,000 acres of forest this year to reduce wild-land fuels. The agencies are gearing up to handle additional firefighters, conduct environmental studies and develop new contracts for thinning, education and training.

“This is a huge amount of money under fairly tight time frames,” said Winston Wiggins, acting Idaho Department of Lands director. “I really think the federal agencies have worked very hard to make this happen.”

Because they live in such a vulnerable area, Wilderness Ranch residents tend to be better prepared than inhabitants of other remote spots. In addition to its fire hydrants and fire department, which works and trains with other fire departments including Boise, Wilderness Ranch is dotted with ponds and pumps.

Its firetrucks and some of its homeowners have the latest in fire-suppressing foam. So when the fire plan’s funds became available, the community was prepared.

“That put us in a forward position to get it,” McCarthy said. “My understanding is that we’ll be thinning and getting rid of ground fuels before the start of this fire season.”

“We have to be prepared,” said Ken Wells, one of the department’s three captains. “It’s that or burn.”

The West’s fire danger has grown because of a century of fire-suppression programs. Experts agree that it will take decades to reduce the buildup in fuels that has made dry, low-elevation forests like those in southwestern Idaho unusually prone to giant fires.

“If you’re going to have a forest management program, it has to be long-range,” said Cecil Andrus, former Idaho governor and U.S. interior secretary. “You have to make sure there is a budget there.”

Andrus has sent the white paper with 10 specific findings to each of the 400 conference participants and the Bush administration. But conference experts say success begins at home.

Wells has thinned small trees, cut the lower branches from large trees, removed brush and mowed the grasses to a height of 4 inches on the hill below his Wilderness Ranch home. Not all of his neighbors are so well-prepared.

“There’s no way we could save that place,” he said, pointing to a home surrounded by heavy growth.

“A lot of people move to a place like this because they want to be away from it all. They like being surrounded by trees and nature and the feeling of seclusion. About 30% of the people here have taken the precautions for a fire.

“The rest think it can’t happen to them.”