The Good, the Bad and the Costly of Fighting Forest Fires

Warren Alford watched in disbelief as the wildfire billowed up a wooded river gorge toward his family’s 300-acre homestead. This is it, he figured. The century-old barn, the placid meadow and generations of memories seemed as fragile as a sandcastle at high tide.

Down on the front line, Keith Larkin had even bigger worries. The state’s fire division chief for Calaveras County knew a gap of only half a mile remained between the flames and the pine-studded streets of Arnold, a hamlet on the Sierra’s western slope. More than 1,500 homes and businesses could be in jeopardy.

But on this day, disaster would be averted. The flames reached a broad gravel road flanked by a forest thinned out just for such sieges. Like a fullback hit in mid-stride, the fire stumbled. Aerial bombers rained down fire retardant. Larkin’s hand crews and pumper trucks finished it off.

The blaze demonstrated what is both good and bad about the way the United States is managing its fire-prone wild lands across the tinderbox West.

An aggressive firefighting campaign in California and other Western states has helped to avoid a repeat of last year’s disastrous fire season, the nation’s worst in at least two generations.

But critics say fire-suppression costs nationwide are out of control. These days, fighting a big wildfire can chew up $1 million a day.

Consider the so-called “Darby” fire and its two-week rampage across 14,000 acres of Calaveras County. The 2,300 fire personnel, 103 engines, 10 helicopters, 22 bulldozers and 37 water trucks limited damage to a single burned-out camper. But by the time the blaze was controlled on Sept. 21, the bill had reached $18.3 million.

While fires near populated areas such as Arnold deserve close attention, critics say many remote blazes are extinguished that would be better left to burn.

“We’ve simply thrown money at the Western wildfire problem,” said Jonathan Oppenheimer at Taxpayers for Common Sense. With the cost per acre of battling blazes in national forests nearly tripling since last year, Oppenheimer said, America is engaged in “blank-check firefighting.”

Fire officials call such assessments a statistical distortion. And the stakes, they say, are great. In Calaveras County, more than $300 million in devastation could have been inflicted.

“Yes, we’re still suppressing fires,” said Rose Davis, a spokeswoman for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. “Society wants us to.”

But the nation’s unflagging devotion to quick-reaction firefighting collides with today’s accepted wisdom--that fire is a necessary part of a balanced ecosystem. Critics say federal land managers are not effectively tackling the root cause of the nation’s wildfire problems: Forests so overgrown that any blaze can have devastating consequences.

A Call for Controls on Residential Sprawl

Meanwhile, little has been done to curtail residential development pushing deeper into private swaths of forest and wild lands. In California alone, more than 8 million people own homes and businesses in harm’s way.

Some critics say California and other fast-growing areas need to look at tougher building codes, stricter requirements for fire-resistant landscaping and more effective zoning to control such growth, from Sierra woodlands to the grasslands of Southern California.

Robert Nelson, a University of Maryland economist and U.S. Forest Service critic, poses a provocative question: Why not let some deep-woods buildings burn? It would be cheaper to replace them than to wage a costly and potentially deadly fight to halt the flames, he reasons. “We may be spending--in fact, I’m sure we’re spending--more than buildings we’re saving are worth.”

For a century, America has routinely suppressed wildfires on its vast expanse of publicly owned forest and prairie. The public always saw fire as foe, not friend. The media often fueled that view with breathless accounts and wartime analogies. Politicians forked over funding.

But that unyielding approach has combined with other factors to leave the West’s forests clogged with trees starved for sunlight and nutrients.

Most scientists have now concluded that forests need to be thinned of underbrush, which can serve as a ladder for flames to reach the crowns of trees. Once in the canopy, fires can rage out of control, in some cases frying the ground and consuming even the most hearty trees.

“Typically,” Larkin said, “there’s not enough water or engines to put that sort of fire out.”

The cheapest and most efficient way to thin a forest is with “prescribed burns,” setting a controlled blaze to eliminate undergrowth and make room for mature trees. That approach has its limits. Before fire can be introduced artificially, many stretches of forest need to be culled with chain saws.

Stephen Pyne, professor of environmental history at Arizona State University, calls it “woody weeding.” Such thinning is expensive. The smaller trees don’t produce much marketable lumber. And though logging declined nearly 75% in the 1990s, critics remain fearful that the thinning merely camouflages efforts to revive big timber harvests on public lands. They consider the Bush administration’s recently released 10-year strategic plan for wildfires “a Trojan horse.”

If thinning is done right, however, even ardent environmentalists applaud. Take a walk with Alford and see.

Alford is the third generation to inhabit his family’s heavily forested ranch on the south rim of Arnold. He’s also a Sierra Club forest expert. Though the timber industry prefers thinning deep into national forests, Alford believes the focus should be on creating “defensible space” around inhabited areas.

People in Arnold have embraced that notion ever since the Old Gulch fire a decade ago threatened to burn down the town. Alford estimates almost three-quarters of the town now is ringed by fire breaks.

The strategy is a fundamental element of the Sierra Nevada Framework, a forest management plan under review in Washington. A decision on the framework, which has drawn a sharp rebuke from the timber industry, is expected in about a week.

On the ridge just above his ranch, Alford points into the thinned forest. There the fire did not advance and the trees should recover.

Up ahead is a patch the chain saws missed. None of the conifers survived the onslaught.

“There’s a difference between burned up and burned over,” Alford said. To him, the sizable price tag for preventive measures makes sense: “It’ll cost less to do it sooner rather than later,” when lives and property are threatened by fire, he says.

This was supposed to be the year that preventive maintenance got going in the nation’s overgrown forests. After fires charred 8 million wild acres across the West in 2000, Congress boosted national fire funding to nearly $2 billion, with $400 million earmarked for thinning.

Though drought had the western U.S. poised for the worst summer ever, mild temperatures, combined with the addition of 10,000 new firefighters, air tankers and other machinery eased the situation. So far, 3 million acres have burned, including 244,000 in California.

Probability Is High for Major Wildfire

Federal agencies have proven less adept, critics say, at fixing problems on the front end. In a July report, auditors at the General Accounting Office said conditions on 211 million acres--almost a third of all federal lands--continue to deteriorate, increasing the probability for large, intense wildfires “beyond any scale yet witnessed.”

This year, thinning and fuel reduction is complete on 860,000 forest acres in the U.S. But that pace won’t produce a forest fix for half a century. The GAO chides federal land-use agencies for failing to narrow the list of communities most in need of protection. The agencies also stumbled half the time in producing fire management plans--blueprints that detail where a fire should be left to burn.

“You get a bigger bang for your buck by reducing fuel loads before fire occurs,” said Charles Cotton, a GAO assistant director. “But they’re just plodding along. We may never catch up.”

The nuances of government budgeting also seem to play a role. Linda Blum, a Quincy resident who helped craft a groundbreaking forestry and fire management plan for the northern Sierra, said fire officials seem content to wait for a blaze and then “smother it with dollar bills.”

“We’ve had Forest Service fire officials tell us that it doesn’t make sense for them to spend money on managing fuels,” Blum said. When a fire breaks out, “the money’s free, because it’s off budget. . . . They’re free to act, because it’s an emergency.”

Authorities say the higher per-acre firefighting costs cited by critics are misleading, an anomaly of this year’s aggressive strategy. Additional equipment and manpower helped reduce the amount of terrain burned. In some instances, fires that once might have consumed 5,000 acres were pounced on to limit the loss to 50 acres.

“A helicopter working at $350 to $500 an hour raises that per-acre cost,” said Davis of the National Interagency Fire Center. “But we’re not getting those large, devastating fires like last year. Some burned until the snow put them out.”

In the case of the Darby fire, Larkin had no such luxury.

Standing on a rocky promontory above the Stanislaus River’s north fork, the fire chief looked out at the blackened path of flames headed straight toward Arnold.

“We always worried about this area,” said Larkin, a veteran of two decades with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “It seemed capable of producing a fire we’d all regret.”

The steep terrain hindered suppression efforts in the gorge. And flames repeatedly bulled into finger canyons, threatening mountain neighborhoods strung along the main highway.

People ‘All Want to Live in the Forest’

“People are flocking to the foothills and they all want to live in the forest,” said Debbie Ponte, mayor of nearby Angels Camp. “But the fact is, the forest isn’t really the best place for human habitation.”

A few towns and county governments have taken some steps to restrict development or beef up building codes in the forest. But Matt Mathes, a U.S. Forest Service spokesman in California, said authorities “cringe when we see these ads for a new development” abutting the woods.

Pine and fir lured Elmo Neal to his seven acres in Calaveras County. Five days after the Darby fire broke out, those trees carried destruction right to his doorstep.

Firefighters saved the house, though the flames cooked the stain right out of the siding. Neal’s beloved trees, meanwhile, were charred.

“I figure 90% of them are gone,” Neal said. “We’ll replant. It might come back, but not in our lifetime.”

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Cost of Wildfires

Total annual acres burned by wildfires in U.S. forests and the costs of federal fire suppression. The Darby fire was one of the fires that raged in September.

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Year Acres burned Cost* Cost per acre 2001 527,000 $699 million $1,326 2000 2.2 million $1.1 billion $518 1999 605,000 $630 million $1,041 1998 306,000 $234 million $764 1997 241,000 $164 million $682 1996 1.4 million $548 million $401 1995 376,000 $374 million $994

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* All cost figures adjusted to 2001 dollars. Cost for 2001 based on Forest Service

budget estimates.

Sources: U.S. Forest Service, Taxpayers for Common Sense