Rangers Struggle to Protect Growing Park System

Eric Scott was under the gun. It was the Thursday before the Fourth of July and visitors were streaming through the fee booths at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area for a weekend of sun, fun, boating and beer on Lake Powell.

Scott, chief ranger of the park’s busiest subdistrict, had worked just three hours and already handled a trash bin fire, a car accident, a report of a suspicious person and a fishhook through a visitor’s thumb.

“This is probably the lull before the storm,” he predicted ominously.

At the north end of the lake, divers searched for an 18-year-old man who was overcome by carbon monoxide fumes while body surfing behind a ski boat. Within a week, four more would be dead: a toddler who drowned, a man who died cliff-jumping and two other men who suffered heart attacks.

Those were among more than 500 incidents at the park that holiday week, including dozens of drug and alcohol violations, thefts, domestic disputes, a propane leak and medical cases ranging from broken legs to a snake bite.

And all were handled by just 34 park rangers.

Thirty-four rangers to patrol 1.2 million acres and a 135-mile-long lake shore, which draws more than 400,000 visitors a month in the summer.

Thirty-four rangers to patch wounds, fight fires, rescue hikers, control boaters, protect resources, arrest criminals, help motorists--even recommend eateries for inquiring tourists--across an area about the size of Delaware.

“If it keeps going like this, we’re going to be in trouble,” Scott’s boss, Assistant Chief Ranger Mike Mayer, said when the week was over.

Glen Canyon is representative of a problem pervading the parks, recreation areas, seashores and monuments overseen by the National Park Service. Over the last two decades, as visitation increased and acreage expanded, the number of rangers dwindled.

In 1981, the Park Service had 2,000 full-time enforcement rangers and about 1,000 seasonal rangers patrolling 329 units and 79 million acres. Visitation was around 210 million.

In 2001, about 1,500 full-time and 500 seasonal rangers patrol 384 units and 84 million acres. Visitation has risen to 286 million.

Many facilities have been forced to scale back operations. Some have no enforcement rangers, while others have only one--resulting in no backup and no coverage for the parks several days a week, according to a study last year by the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police, or IACP.

Some parks are experiencing crime problems similar to those of big cities: rapes, aggravated assaults, body dumping. In parks on the U.S.-Mexico border, drug smuggling and illegal immigrant activity is on the rise. Arizona’s Organ Pipe National Monument was dubbed the most dangerous national park in the country by a ranger organization. Some 80,000 pounds of marijuana were seized last year in the 330,000-acre park, which is patrolled by fewer than 10 rangers.

Even the large, more popular, facilities have suffered. Yosemite National Park in California had more than 200 rangers in 1974, when annual visitation was 1.5 million. Today, with 3.5 million visitors, fewer than 60 rangers patrol the park, which has among the highest levels of crime in the park system.

“When a ranger’s responding to a more serious call, the less serious may be waiting or they’re not dealt with at all,” said Don Coelho, the park’s assistant chief ranger. “We’re the EMS, the fire responders, the city police, county sheriff and highway patrol all mixed together.

“We’re stretched too thin,” Coelho concluded.

As the job grows more challenging, it also becomes more dangerous. Last year’s report by the international police association found that park rangers have the highest assault rate of all federal law enforcement officers. Three rangers were fatally shot in the 1990s, and 65 were assaulted last year alone.

“They don’t really advertise that to you when you apply for the job, that you’re more likely to be assaulted than a DEA agent,” said Greg Jackson, a 14-year veteran and district ranger at Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

What does this mean for park visitors? Most rangers agree the general public is still safer at a Park Service facility than walking down the street of most cities, and the rate of serious crimes has actually decreased slightly.

Last year, park rangers also responded to nearly 5,000 search and rescue calls and handled more than 17,000 emergency medical cases, while 244 visitors died in non-crime-related incidents.

But some rangers say reporting of accidents and crimes has slipped because rangers are too busy responding to incidents to record them. Others, like Coelho, say the impact on public safety is harder to quantify. He notes that his rangers are so reactive, jumping from crisis to crisis, that they have little time to conduct proactive patrols to warn visitors of dangers inherent to the park.

“We might be able to prevent injuries,” Coelho said, “maybe even save lives.”

Dennis Burnett, acting chief of ranger activities for the Park Service, blames the ranger shortage on competing priorities and stagnant budgets.

“Congress designates new park areas pretty much annually, and when that happens it doesn’t come with any additional manpower. So it has to be staffed with people from the existing work force,” he said.

The law enforcement-protection budget is drawn from Park Service operations, meaning a pot of money goes to each superintendent who then decides which divisions get how much. Lately, other priorities have taken precedence, including a $5-billion maintenance backlog and more money for resource protection--among President Bush’s budget initiatives for the agency.

Public safety has never been cited as a budget initiative, according to Burnett.

Others question the Park Service’s overall commitment to safety, from protecting visitors to its own employees. Dick Powell, manager of the agency’s risk management program, notes the Park Service has one of the worst employee safety records in the federal government. Among the nine divisions of the Department of Interior, the Park Service far exceeds all others in occupational accidents, with 2,367 cases in fiscal year 2000. The next highest number was 705 for the Bureau of Land Management.

Powell points to a lack of oversight from headquarters and regional offices.

“It depends quite honestly on the personal commitment of the individual superintendents,” he said. “A few have taken this on, but there’s a lot of ambivalence among others.”

Powell also criticizes the agency’s efforts to prevent visitor accidents and fatalities, such as a string of carbon monoxide deaths on Lake Powell. Ten people have died of boat-related carbon monoxide poisoning on the lake since 1994, seven of them on houseboats. But Powell’s office didn’t learn of the problem and issue an alert to the entire park system until after the deaths of two boys last summer.

“I would hope that in the future we would be able to investigate and then recognize trends so this doesn’t happen again,” Powell said.

In 1999, a congressionally mandated study of Park Service law enforcement found the ability of the agency to protect people, property and resources had been “eroded” by the growth of the park system and the cost of doing business.

The report recommended increasing the ranger protection staff by 1,295 full-time employees and converting 500 seasonals to permanent positions.

The following year, the police association’s report concluded that the Park Service’s law enforcement program was “undervalued, under-resourced and under-managed.” It recommended increased training and better equipment, as well as 615 new full-time rangers.

To date, none of the recommendations has been implemented, although Burnett said a task force is preparing to forward the association’s recommendations to Park Service officials for consideration.

Until then, rangers continue to juggle their myriad duties. They readily admit some responsibilities are neglected, particularly resource protection--one of the main reasons the ranger force was founded.

“The parks are always, somehow, going to respond to the big emergencies,” said Cindy Ott-Jones, chief ranger at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. “What is falling down is the specific resource protection--the back country areas, the archeological sites.”

Jackson, the Santa Monica Mountains ranger, added: “It’s taking care of the urgent at the expense of the important.”

On that Thursday before the Fourth of July at Glen Canyon, Eric Scott had only himself and one other ranger to patrol 275,000 square miles of the park for much of the day. Three of his 17-member patrol had been dispatched to help search for the drowning victim up north.

He had no one to put out on the lake, dotted with dozens of houseboats and jet skis and swimmers.

He had no one to help reroute traffic when an entrance station was closed because of insects.

Eventually, he had to call someone in on overtime.

Scott, a 14-year veteran whose father also was a park ranger, is among those who believe the parks remain safe for visitors--for now. When asked about next year and the years after that, he thought for a moment.

“I couldn’t even speculate,” he said finally.

Besides, he didn’t have time. The radio in his truck was crackling with more calls.