Isolated Forests Get Most Fire Aid

By BETTINA BOXALL

Aug. 19, 2002 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

At a time when national fire policy is emphasizing the importance of reducing the threat of wild fires to nearby communities, the U.S. Forest Service in California is spending the biggest chunks of its fire prevention funds in some of the least populated parts of the state.

Nowhere is that pattern more starkly reflected than in the Angeles National Forest. Backdrop, playground and watershed for millions living in the Los Angeles Basin, the forest ranks at the bottom of the funding ladder. The Angeles this year received less money for reduction of hazardous fuel than any other federal forest in the state. Its major thinning project last year consisted of sending in a hungry herd of sheep to munch on the chaparral.

By contrast, the Plumas National Forest, in a Northern California county of 21,000 people, got $9.8 million, or about 21 times as much as the Angeles. Plumas’ neighbor, the Lassen National Forest, collected $8.9 million.

Fire prevention funding for forests in the central and southern Sierra Nevada, where development is creeping up the foothills into the woods, also trailed well behind Plumas and Lassen.

So generously have those two out-of-the way forests been funded that their fuel reduction budgets rival those of Colorado and Arizona.

In large part, the Plumas-Lassen windfall represents a hard-won political triumph for an unusual coalition. In a rural region, where environmentalists, loggers and civic leaders tend to be at each other’s throats, all sides agreed on a forest thinning plan that captured Washington’s attention in the late 1990s.

It is that project, known as the Quincy Library Group after the small-town coalition that helped craft it, that is funneling money to the Plumas and Lassen forests and part of the Tahoe. Lately, the project has been included in the National Fire Plan, a multibillion-dollar program adopted by the forest service in 2000 to accelerate thinning and controlled burning on federal land.

The fire plan is an effort to reduce the wildfire threat in the West, where some spectacularly large blazes have galloped across the landscape in recent years. The fires have focused attention on what is generally considered to be unnatural denseness in the region’s forests. For a variety of reasons--most notably a century of fire suppression policies--many forests are thick with fire-prone smaller trees and brush. The General Accounting Office in 1999 reported that nearly 40 million acres of national forests in the West are at high risk of devastating wildfire.

While the National Fire Plan bumped up forest service spending on fuel reduction projects throughout the state, the Quincy funding kicked Plumas and Lassen onto a plane of their own.

Last year 25,556 acres were thinned or subjected to controlled burns in Lassen, the most of any forest in California. Plumas treated nearly 21,000 acres, the second highest figure. None of the national forests in Southern California treated more than 4,000 acres.

The disparity is particularly noticeable against the backdrop of national fire policy, which says that a top priority of fire-prevention work should be forests and brush next to homes and communities. Similarly, a 10-year wildfire strategy recently endorsed by Western governors names community protection as a primary aim.

Communities of a few hundred or a few thousand people are scattered around the Plumas and Lassen forests. Lassen National Park, surrounded by the national forest, is among the least visited parks in the national system.

The Angeles, Cleveland and San Bernardino forests, on the other hand, sit cheek by jowl with the second-largest metropolitan region in the country. Housing tracts butt against them, busy roads slice through them, and millions visit them.

“If you look at where fuel [reduction work] would do the greatest good for the greatest number, that would probably be in Southern California brush forests,” said John Buckley, a former forest firefighter who heads the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center.

But the proximity of so many homes and people makes it harder to do the necessary thinning and burning. Heavy equipment must share suburban streets with throngs of impatient commuters. Strict air-quality regulations limit the days when burning is permissible. Moreover, the very nature of some forests, more brush than trees, provides less economic incentive to do thinning. The companies that contract for that work want to make a profit, and there’s not much profit in manzanita.

Forest Service officials also point out that the Quincy funding was directed by Congress, which responded to years of lobbying by the coalition members who came together seeking a truce in the timber wars of the 1990s.

“The reason we’ve gotten the money we’ve gotten is because of the community activity,” said Merri Carol Martens, forest service spokeswoman for the Quincy pilot project. “Quincy Library Group members pursued that and had been pursuing that since 1993, long before the headlines of catastrophic fires came into play.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who was instrumental in Quincy’s passage and remains its staunch protector, said the pilot project is not just about about reducing fire risk. “That is for timber too--to be able to do some selective logging. It’s much more complicated than just directed at fire.”

Asked if it made sense to locate a major fuel-reduction project in some of the most sparsely populated reaches of the state, she replied, “It makes sense to carry out the pilot project. It makes sense to have a much bigger program of fire reduction throughout the state.”

Figures from individual national forests in California indicate that they thinned and carried out controlled burns on about 123,000 acres last year. That reflects a steady climb since 1993, when 11,500 acres were treated. But the acreage is expected to drop below 100,000 this year, as the forest service concentrates more on areas near communities, where work is typically more costly and time-consuming because added precautions are necessary.

Most of California’s 20 million acres of national forest are considered to be at high or moderate risk of destructive fire. Kent Connaughton, deputy regional forester in charge of fire programs in California, estimated that a third to half of the forest land needs thinning or controlled burns to clear out the most flammable growth. To do that would require treating at least 300,000 acres a year, at $200 million a year--more than four times what the forest service in California expects to get this year.

“We’re pleased with the increases we’ve seen over the last couple of years, but it doesn’t give us everything we need,” Connaughton said. “We’d like to spend more money in Southern California, and there is not a debate about that.”

Fire officers in Southern California said money is not the only thing dictating how much they can do. “Some of it’s money. Partially it’s not having the funding to do a large number of acres,” said Don Feser, forest fire chief for the Angeles. “But more restrictive is just the few days that we can burn.”

The 600,000-acre Angeles is mostly chaparral, where fire prevention consists primarily of prescribed burns to clean out dead brush, along with some mechanical clearing to maintain fuel-break openings along ridges. The forest also has used sheep, usually near Santa Clarita in less steep terrain, to thin brush. “They eat everything,” Feser said.

Ideally, he said, the Angeles would like to treat about 10,000 acres a year, which would cost $2 million. He has not seen, nor does he expect to see, that sum. “Two million dollars for fuels treatment? Nah. It’s a pipe dream.”

Last year the Angeles conducted prescribed burns on 1,663 acres near development. Sheep thinned 2,000 acres. This year, because of the record dry conditions, virtually no burning is being done.

The work that could be considered the most urgent--near houses and urban areas--can be the most difficult. If a controlled burn escapes, it can destroy homes. If the wind blows the wrong way, it can blow smoke into someone’s living room. If clearing is done just beyond someone’s backyard, the residents may not like the way it looks.

“Because you are operating near people’s homes and residences, people are more sensitive. It takes a lot more work,” said Mike Dietrich, fire management officer at the San Bernardino National Forest. “You hang yourself out for public criticism. Under one circumstance you can be a hero and another you can be a scapegoat.”

The forest service believes that it can treat more of the forests more easily in remote regions.

Compare the budgets of the San Bernardino, which at $1.2 million received the most hazardous-fuel money this year of any Southern California forest, and of the Modoc. Sprawled across California’s nearly empty northeast corner, much of it in a county of fewer than 10,000 people, the Modoc got $2.7 million.

One central Sierra national forest that has tapped into the flow of funds to the far north is the Stanislaus. Just north of Yosemite National Park, it is collecting $2.4 million this year and last year treated more than 15,000 acres.

That is not an accident. Stanislaus started paying attention to fire prevention work after a 1987 blaze blackened 147,000 acres. “When that fire hit, we all felt it, saw it and lived it,” said Pat Kaunert, acting public affairs officer for the Stanislaus.

Fire officers said that communities scattered around the forest support thinning and burning projects, and Buckley said his group, which monitors the Stanislaus, agreed not to appeal fire hazard work as long as it did not involve old-growth trees. With such support and interest, the Stanislaus has moved ahead of many other forests in California.

Regardless of where the project is, forest officials said, a year or two of planning and environmental analysis is required before work can start on the ground. The Bush administration would like to streamline the process.

“[We’re] looking at our own decision-making and seeing if we’re spending too much time and agony in justifying these things,” said Mark Rey, U.S. Department of Agriculture undersecretary in charge of the forest service. “Many of these fuel treatments are very similar, whether in Lassen or Tahoe. Can we be looking at a template that reduces the time to do them?”

Historically, the forest service’s job has not been cleaning out the woods near communities for fire protection. It cut down trees for timber and put out wild fires as quickly as possible to avoid destroying the timber.

“The ship of the forest service is hard to get turned in another direction,” said Sue Husari, until recently the service’s deputy director for fire and aviation management in California. “We are trying to go in that direction as quickly as we can.”

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Fire Funds

Spending on thinning and controlled-burn projects to reduce the fire risk in California’s national forests:

Fiscal 2002 Acreage treated Forest fuels treatment budget in fiscal 2001

Plumas $9.8 million 20,896

Lassen $8.9 million 25,556

Modoc $2.7 million 13,000

Tahoe $2.5 million 7,038

Stanislaus $2.4 million 15,377

Tahoe Basin $2.1 million 1,884

Klamath $1.8 million 10,478

Eldorado $1.4 million 4,830