U.S. Moving On New Strategy to Fight Wildfires

Last summer’s catastrophic wildfire season laid bare nearly 7 million acres of Western land and also exposed a harsh truth: The manner in which wildfires have been fought for decades and the way forest supervisors have gone about preventing them simply do not work.

Now change might be in the offing. On Monday at the Western Governors’ Conference that begins here today, Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton and Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman will sign a 10-year comprehensive strategy to combat wildfires, an attempt to bring cohesion to the nation’s $3-billion annual firefighting effort.

The plan calls for increased input from state and local officials and stepped up coordination among federal agencies. The strategy will also address the increasing problem of forests choked with deadwood, dry underbrush and other debris that fuel fires. This is the fallout of decades of a policy that called for extinguishing all fires on public lands. The new plan will champion controversial fire prevention methods, such as forest thinning and prescribed burns.

“We can’t continue to do business the way we have historically done it,” said John Glenn, fire management officer for the Bureau of Land Management in Wyoming and one of the authors of the strategy. “Something is not working. We have to have a paradigm shift.”

While short on specifics, the strategy offers a template for fighting wild-land fires that stresses consistency and cooperation among the five federal land management agencies: the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Indian Affairs within the Department of the Interior; and the Forest Service within the Department of Agriculture.

Beyond Washington, the plan stresses the need for local input to fighting fires, a policy welcomed among Western leaders.

“There has been the strong tendency in the past to maintain command and control from Washington, D.C.,” said Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne. The Republican is one of the architects of the new strategy. Idaho was one of the Western states hardest hit by wildfires last summer. Kempthorne noted that the fires consumed 1 billion board-feet of timber, the equivalent of the lumber used in 100,000 single-family homes.

“I have a lot of respect for federal forest supervisors, and they are as frustrated as the rest of us,” Kempthorne said. “This document will change that attitude. We need to get to a true partnership.”

The lack of a single-minded approach to wildfires among federal agencies has long irked state officials, who complain that when fires flare they must wade through confusing and differing departmental policies before getting help.

The seemingly simple idea that the Forest Service and Park Service would sit down and confer on policy and planning is not as easy to implement as it seems. Aside from residing in two separate Cabinet jurisdictions, the agencies have historically different mandates and goals.

To some, the significance of the new wildfire plan lies in its directive that old walls be torn down and internal animosities set aside.

“Basically, the document is a framework for collaboration,” said Lyle Laverty, the national fire plan coordinator for the Forest Service. “It is a dramatic change in terms of making a clear statement of how we are going to work together. That hasn’t happened before. It also reflects a sea change in terms of our philosophy. It doesn’t seem like such a big deal, but you are talking about changing the thinking of the Interior and Forest Service. Take my word for it, it’s a big thing.”

Last year’s fires finally debunked the long-standing federal policy of fire suppression. The Smokey Bear-era of all fires being bad has greatly influenced--and some say hindered--federal forest management. The reticence of the Park Service and Forest Service to preemptively burn dense underbrush or allow natural fires to burn out has created millions of acres of ready fuel, which can be kindled with a single lightning strike.

“We’ve allowed fuels to build up to an unnatural state,” Glenn said. “Mother Nature is like a rubber band. You can pull it and pull it and it’s not going to break. But eventually, it’s going to snap back. And when that happens, it’s violent.”

Still, the public has never been comfortable with allowing forests to burn naturally, as happened in Yellowstone National Park in 1988. Prescribed burns are also controversial. Last summer’s Cerro Grande fire, which charred 47,000 acres and destroyed 235 homes in New Mexico, began as a prescribed burn in Bandelier National Monument and was whipped by winds to nearby Los Alamos. Since then, prescribed burns have been suspended.

Fire experts say that without the changes advocated in the new plan it is only a matter of time until a massive, out-of-control fire consumes homes and lives increasingly placed in wild areas.

The 10-year strategy will answer some of the recent harsh criticism directed at the federal firefighting effort. According to a General Accounting Office report two weeks ago, almost one-third of all federal lands have dangerous accumulations of fuel.

The report concluded that “these conditions have increased the probability of large, intense wild-land fires beyond any scale yet witnessed.”

The GAO report blasted the lack of consistency and coordination in firefighting efforts by the Interior Department and the Forest Service. It charged that “the five federal land management agencies cannot ensure, among other things, that they (1) are allocating funds to the highest-risk communities and ecosystems, (2) are adequately prepared to fight wild-land fires in 2001, and (3) can account accurately for how they spend the funds and what they accomplish with them.”

A response to the GAO report will be contained in the fire strategy implementation report, a highly detailed follow-up document to the 10-year strategy, expected next May.