Budget Is Hot Issue at Forest Service

When lighting struck the gnarled skeleton of a tree in the Kalmiopsis Wilderness late last summer, it ignited what turned out to be a small fire, 279 acres, but a big bill--$2.2 million.

At a cost of $7,899 per acre, the Craggie Fire, located 35 miles west of Grants Pass on the Siskiyou National Forest in southwestern Oregon, was one of the most expensive of the summer for the U.S. Forest Service--seven times the national average of $1,164 per acre.

The Forest Service blames rising costs on the buildup of fuels due to a century of putting out too many fires, a practice managers say they are working to change. But the agency’s history, culture and structure still combine to encourage managers to do whatever it takes to put them out.

Overall, Forest Service spending on putting out fires shows an unmistakable upward trend. Despite periodic efforts to control costs and reduce fire danger, a line drawn between the ups and downs of firefighting costs per acre for the past 24 years, adjusted for inflation, scribes a slope getting steeper every year. From beginning to end, the increase is 63%.

One reason is that the Wildland Fire Situation Analysis, which the Forest Service uses to decide how aggressively to fight a fire, does not factor in any balancing benefits--safety, ecological or economic--of letting a fire burn.

The only real check appears to be the availability of resources. And after 2000 became the worst wildfire season in 50 years, Congress provided more money than ever before--$1.9 billion across all agencies. That paid for twice as many helicopters as last year, and 5,000 extra federal firefighters, as well as more prevention, rehabilitation, and research.

“If I was in business, I’d be out of business,” said Harry Croft, deputy director of the Forest Service’s National Fire Plan, of the firefighting balance sheet. “Everywhere I’ve been, everyone says the same thing: ‘The system is broken, we’ve got to change it.’ Whether they are going to want to fix it is another issue.”

Croft said the new National Fire Plan makes a start, with the $469 million budgeted for Forest Service fire suppression representing the first realistic level ever. But the Forest Service still overspent its fire suppression budget by $230 million, and fire prevention efforts fell short of goals.

From its beginnings at the turn of the century to World War II, the primary mission of the Forest Service was fighting fire. That changed when GIs coming home from World War II wanted to build homes, and the mission switched to timber production.

Change came again in the 1990s, when lawsuits by environmentalists forced the Forest Service to drastically cut back logging to protect fish and wildlife. Fire filled the gap; the $1.8 billion spent on it now accounts for more than half the Forest Service’s $3 billion budget.

“This is, after all, the Smokey Bear agency,” said Robert Nelson, a professor of environmental policy at the University of Maryland and author of, “A Burning Issue: A Case for Abolishing the U.S. Forest Service.” “Fighting fires built up into part of its institutional culture.

“Most of the timber cutting, if it is going to be done, is being done for fire reasons,” he said. “The budget is also being driven by fire.”

In 1926, the Forest Service decided all fires should be held to just 10 acres. That was updated in 1935 with the 10 o’clock rule: Every fire was to be controlled by 10 a.m. the next day.

The policy worked for decades. The annual toll of wildfire throughout all jurisdictions steadily dropped from an average of 39 million acres a year in the 1930s to 3.2 million acres in the 1970s, even as the number of fires increased, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

Then things changed. The number of wildfires turned down, but the acres burned turned up. Scientists said stifling fire had cultivated unnatural forests thick with small trees, susceptible to insect infestation, disease and bigger fires.

The Forest Service began putting fire back in the forest to clear the clutter of fuel, but it was tough going. Congress appropriated little money, people living nearby didn’t like the smoke or the risk, and the effort lagged, though the warnings of future catastrophe got louder every year.

“There seems to be a political calculus that spending money to prevent fires has no political benefit, so Congress won’t give them much money to do that,” said Randal O’Toole, an economist examining wildfire spending for the Assn. of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. “But spending money to stop fire has a tremendous amount of political benefit.”

Except for a few years in the 1980s, the Forest Service has always had a blank check for fighting fire, said O’Toole. They can dip into other funds, such as reforestation accounts, and Congress always pays them back at the end of the year.

The Forest Service tried limiting the budget to the average spent in the last 10 years, Croft said. Anything over that would come out of other accounts, with no payback. But it was abandoned.

“If we had two or three bad years in a row, we’d be out of business,” he said. “Where is the benefit of being efficient and putting a fire out quickly? There almost is none.”

The Forest Service has a terrible reputation for bookkeeping. The General Accounting Office threw up its hands last fall trying to understand the true costs of the timber program. The forest association’s Andy Stahl said part of the problem is that the agency uses fire the way it once used timber, to cover a host of other expenses, such as buildings, computers and personnel.

Croft would love to get rid of the practice known as indirect cost pools, but resistance is deep.

“Say you took the typical ranger station,” Croft said. “At one time, fire paid for 20% of the building, timber 80% of the building. Timber shrinks to 20%, do you cut off part of the building? Costs are fixed. You’ve got to pay for the secretary, the phones, computers, on and on. Then there’s a fire. So fire is going to pay for it.”

Croft has analyzed dozens of fires, looking for ways to save money, right down to bottled water.

It turned out the cost of bottled water was minuscule compared to helicopters. And when people drink out of creeks, they get sick. So bottled water stayed.

Despite costing $4,111 to $9,115 per hour on the Craggie fire, Croft said heavy helicopters can be tremendously effective with their 1,000-gallon water buckets, as long as turnaround times are under five minutes.

The cost adds up quickly. On Craggie, heavy helicopters accounted for $303,337, 14% of the total.

“The tough part of this is, how much risk will you take playing with a fire?” Croft said, especially in the wake of Cerro Grande, a prescribed burn that got away and left 400 families homeless last year in Los Alamos, N.M. “What incentive is there to use prescribed fire when, if one gets away from you, you get crucified?”

Data from the Center for International Disaster Information show the Forest Service allowed 104 fires to burn this year, 1% of the total. The 62,392 acres burned was 1% of the season total. By comparison, the National Park Service, with a greater commitment to natural processes, allowed 4% of its fires to burn, Stahl said. The 21,033 acres amounted to 39% of its total.

Though critical of the Forest Service, Nelson acknowledged that spending more money could have been responsible for avoiding a repeat of the fire toll of 2000. However, the underlying problem remains, Nelson said. Forests are hungry for fire, and putting them out now costs money later.

“It seems like you are spending your money on what caused the problem in the first place,” he said.