In Wildfires’ Wake, There’s Money to Burn

Plagued by wildfires? Fear not. The Proteus Fire Master stands ready to help--for $6,000 a day.

With the clatter of steel treads and the whine of a 300-horsepower diesel engine, the 26-ton firefighting juggernaut climbs out of a steep gully on the “Proteus Proving Grounds,” a chewed-up back lot near the Missoula airport.

Scott Peterson stands nearby, smiling with satisfaction. While the prospect of another long summer of flame fills many Westerners with dread, entrepreneurs such as Peterson smell opportunity in the smoky air.

The Proteus can crawl through the burning forest to scrape out bare-earth corridors with its 6-foot-wide bulldozer blade. Its hydraulic boom can topple a 2-foot-thick pine, then slice it up in seconds with a grapple and retractable chain saw. Hoses squirt water in all directions, fed by a 3,000-gallon tank that can be refilled on the run by a helicopter.

Peterson’s company, the Rough Terrain Technologies Group, rushed out a Proteus prototype last summer to help battle blazes in the Bitterroot National Forest. Encouraged by Forest Service officials, Peterson built three more of the contraptions for $350,000 apiece.

He calls the $6,000 daily rental a bargain.

“We figure we can replace 35 people with one Proteus,” he says. “It’s more efficient, it’s safer, and it gets the water to where it’s needed.”

8.4 Million Acres Charred in U.S.

If Peterson’s gamble pays off, he won’t be the only one to profit from wildfire.

Last year’s fires, the worst in half a century, charred 8.4 million acres nationwide and cost the federal government $1.4 billion to fight. The blazes caught the attention of Congress, which approved an extra $1.6 billion to beef up budgets this year for fire research, suppression and prevention and the thinning of forests to reduce dangerous fuel accumulations.

All that money is giving a boost to the rural West’s “fire economy,” a little-known but thriving field of commerce in which residents are enriched by the very forces of nature that threaten to destroy them.

Consider the Bitterroot Valley, just south of Missoula in southwestern Montana, where 365,000 acres burned last year, including nearly 20% of the Bitterroot National Forest. More than 1,500 people were evacuated, and 70 homes were destroyed. Smoke hung in the valley for six weeks, hiding the mountains and turning the midday sun blood red.

Most people here will tell you the fires were awful. At the same time, however, the government was spending $74 million to fight the Bitterroot fires, and a good portion of that money trickled into the local economy.

Benefiting from the fires is still a sensitive subject here.

“It isn’t discussed,” says Dixie Dies, public information officer at the Bitterroot Forest headquarters in Hamilton. “There was so much hurt, people don’t want to talk about who did well.”

Entrepreneurs Fared Well

But many did do well.

Sweet Pea Sewer & Septic collected $60 a day for each portable toilet it rented to the Forest Service. At the height of the fires, the small company doubled its work force to maintain about 400 toilets in fire camps in Montana and Idaho.

“People go, ‘Oh, you’re taking advantage of the fires.’ But someone has to provide services, and we worked our butts off doing it,” says co-owner Susan Bashor. “You get exhausted. You don’t see your kids. You drive through the fires and you think of neighbors who have lost their homes. It was very emotional for all of us.”

Housewife Jennifer Sain put the kids in day care and rented her GMC Suburban to the Forest Service for $80 a day, then hired herself out at $11.63 an hour to drive it, ferrying fire officials and reporters around the forest. She says she made $10,000 in two months.

Some of her government-wary ranching relatives didn’t appreciate her working for the Forest Service, she says. But economics prevailed.

“I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t good money,” Sain says.

When Ed Lesky, a retired personnel manager, was forced from his home by smoke, he stayed with friends who were firefighters.

“They said, ‘Ed, do you want to sit there drinking beers, or do you want go fight fire?”’ Lesky recalls. “So I became a firefighter.”

He worked 40 days on an engine crew and earned about $6,000--though he notes the fire also cost him money. His house survived, but he spent $2,000 to build a retaining wall to keep mud from sliding down the fire-denuded hillside above. (The government paid the rest of the wall’s $8,000 cost.)

For many, the fires brought a mix of good and bad.

Motels lost reservations from vacationers scared off by the fires, but every room in town was booked once fire workers arrived in force.

Heavy smoke forced the cancellation of the Ravalli County Fair. But then the Forest Service leased the fairgrounds as a fire camp, and fair operators cleared $200,000 in 2 1/2 months, about 10 times the profit they usually make from the weeklong fair.

“We’re debt-free now,” says fairgrounds manager Gary Wiley. “It was a blessing in disguise--but I’d rather not have that blessing again.”

At the Bitterroot Forest headquarters, strangers kept appearing in the parking lot, offering to rent backhoes, bulldozers and other heavy equipment to fire crews.

“They follow the smoke,” says Forest Service dispatcher Tony Lubke. The equipment-strapped agency took many of them up on their offers.

Profiting from wildfire is part of Western history, says Stephen Pyne, an Arizona State University professor who has written 11 books about fire.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Northwest residents set fires in the woods, knowing they would get jobs fighting them, Pyne says.

Even now, he says, forest managers tend to spend huge amounts on fighting fires and a pittance on preventing them or moderating their damage by thinning the forests.

If that doesn’t make financial sense, it’s because forest management is only partially an economic issue, Pyne says. Much of the land involved is public land, where a simple formula of spending X to protect Y amount of timber does not suffice.

What is the value of a human life threatened by fire? How much is a favorite fishing spot worth? How do you measure the benefits of ecological health, which may depend on periodic fires?

“The economics is complicated,” Pyne says. “People have been trying to figure out how much fire protection is worth for 100 years, and I don’t think we’ve got it yet.”

He’s encouraged that the extra money authorized by Congress includes funds for research and for thinning the forests--but he warns that such funding can be short-lived.

“This is a huge windfall,” Pyne says. “The agencies have to convince Congress that they’re making good use of the money. Otherwise, you have two or three wet years, and it’s all going to go away.”

Fuel-Reduction Projects Targeted

The Bitterroot National Forest received a 30% funding increase for firefighting this year, which translates to about 30 extra jobs, says Chuck Stanich, the forest’s deputy fire management officer.

Forest officials are identifying the most fire-prone areas of heavy timber as candidates for fuel-reduction projects--work that could employ loggers idled by recent cuts in timber production.

Stanich hopes the extra money from Congress will hold out long enough to get at least some thinning and controlled burns done.

“There’s so much land out there that even if they gave us all the money we thought we needed, it would be hard to treat all the acres that need it,” he says.

Meanwhile, the Bitterroot’s fire boom continues this summer, even without active flame.

Commercial mushroom pickers have flocked here to harvest morels, which flourish the year after a forest fire. Experienced pickers can make $300 a day, and forest officials have hired five extra people to process picking permits and patrol the mushroomers’ camps.

Since May, a government work crew representing both sides of wildfire’s economic fallout has toiled on blackened hillsides around the valley. Hired under a $2.6-million grant from the federal Labor Department, crew members earn $8 to $17 per hour planting trees, laying straw mats and rearranging logs to reduce erosion.

It’s decent work in an area where jobs are scarce, but there’s a catch: To qualify, applicants had to show they’d been hurt by last summer’s fires.

Crew boss Doug Bower guided fly-fishing clients on the Bitterroot River last summer until the fires shut him down. Crew member Cathy Palin watched helplessly as last year’s drought killed her fields of strawberries.

More than anyone, crew member Nathan Olson is aware of the ups and downs of the fire economy.

A high school science teacher in the town of Darby, Olson had just finished building his dream home last summer when the fires broke out. Forced to leave as flames approached, he went to work fighting blazes elsewhere in the forest. When he returned home, he found only a pile of rubble where his 2,000-square-foot house had been.

Now his 30-acre property, once crowded with pines, is a study in black and gray. Blackened poles jut up from the ash. Jagged holes show where fire chewed down into the root systems of trees.

Since the work crew’s mission is to help private landowners, program managers decided Olson’s property was a fine place to do some erosion-control work. And so, on a recent sweltering day, Olson found himself being paid by the government to rehabilitate his own land.

The whine of chain saws and rhythmic pounding of wooden stakes filled the air as Olson and the others worked, their clothes and faces as black as chimney sweeps’. Clouds of ash billowed up with each step.

Olson, not one to dwell on the negative, looked around his devastated land and performed his own economic calculations.

Insurance paid for his destroyed home, and he has already started to rebuild. His property taxes are half what they used to be, since most of the trees are dead. Brilliant wildflowers are springing up from the ash, and Olson delights in watching as elk and deer forage on the tender vegetation.

“There’s always some good and bad out of fire,” he said, wiping a sooty hand across his brow. “It was kind of a bad thing to see the house burn, but some amazing things happened. The community pulled together. God must have done it for some reason.”

After the fires, friends asked if he was going to move away.

“It never even crossed my mind,” Olson said. “This is my home, and fires are part of the ecosystem. If you want to live here, you have to live with what you get.”