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The cost of fire season

As of Aug. 13, the U.S. Forest Service has spent $828 million to suppress wildfires. Despite efforts to curb costs, that’s $78 million more than the same period in 2006 — and that’s despite tightened spending.

By Keith Chu / The Bulletin

Published: August 21. 2007 4:00AM PST

WASHINGTON — When it comes to fighting wildfires, it seems the best-laid plans are no match for Mother Nature.

Earlier this year, U.S. Forest Service officials said they had a plan to slow the trend of ever-increasing fire spending: a combination of closer internal spending controls and the use of computer models to predict where fires are likely to start. But midway through the 2007 fire season, hot weather nationwide has put the Forest Service on pace to exceed last year’s record-breaking $1.5 billion wildfire fighting cost.

The weather will decide how the rest of the wildfire season unfolds. Continued hot weather paired with lightning strikes will worsen this year’s already fiery summer, while unexpected rainstorms could end the fire threat early, according to firefighting officials.

“Do us a favor and have your readers pray for rain,” said Joe Walsh, national spokesman for the Forest Service.

While Central Oregon has seen a relatively small number of fires this year, other parts of the country are battling hosts of wildfires. Montana and Idaho, in particular, have been scorched. As of Monday, 31 fires were burning more than 1 million acres in the two states. So far this year, 6.4 million acres have burned nationwide, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

Meanwhile, Forest Service officials and forestry experts defended the current cost saving and forest health strategies, despite the trend of increasingly worse fire seasons that cost more and more money over the past several years.

The Forest Service has tightened spending controls over the past five years, said Ken Snell, Forest Service director of fire, fuels and aviation for the Pacific Northwest. The Government Accountability Office has been critical of oversight on fire spending over that time.

Snell said the new measures include cost-watching oversight teams, more aggressive use of airplanes, computer models that predict fire behavior and advance placement of firefighters to more quickly quench blazes. The oversight teams, for example, consult with fire managers to be sure that potentially expensive tactics are really necessary, Snell said.

There’s no way to tell how much money the measures have saved — or if they’ve saved any money at all. But Snell said he thinks the effort is having an effect.

“It’s hard to really validate,” Snell said. “What we can say is over the last five years we’ve been hammering ourselves in terms of being as efficient and effective as we can be.”

Those efforts paid off last week, Snell said. The Forest Service placed a team of firefighters and equipment in Ukiah, near the Blue Mountains, just before a lightning storm Thursday.

“When we had 40 (lightning) strikes and 30 fires start just yesterday, we had a task force already in place and ready to get on it,” Snell said.

The Ukiah fires were 80 percent contained Monday, after burning a total of 4,300 acres, according to an Oregon Department of Forestry update.

Each fire that isn’t put out by the first people to reach it — a phase called “initial attack” — costs an average of $2 million, Snell said. Although the agency puts out about 98 percent of fires in initial attack, even dousing a few more fires in that phase would make the efforts worthwhile, he said.

The Forest Service also hired more smokejumpers and is using Canadian tanker planes this year.

Still, the budget situation remains precarious.

The Forest Service had spent $828 million as of last week, compared to the $750 million it spent at the same time last year. That means the agency has nearly exhausted the $1.2 billion allotted to fight fires this year.

The agency may soon begin pulling money from nonfire accounts, a process known as “fire transfers,” to fund the rest of the year’s firefighting operations, according to Forest Service officials.

“The agency’s looking at that stuff as we speak,” Snell said.

Congress historically has reimbursed just 80 percent of fire transfers, according to a 2004 Government Accountability Office study. Deschutes National Forest officials have said the practice has delayed some construction projects in the past, when money was pulled to fund fire operations.

Oregon has had the nation’s sixth-worst fire season so far this year, with 418,266 acres burned as of Aug. 12. It trails Idaho, Utah, Florida, Georgia and Utah in acres burned, according to the Interagency Fire Center, which coordinates federal firefighting efforts.

And although state and federal forest agencies have focused on reducing fire risk since 2001, the amount of fuel for wildfires that sits on forest floors has actually increased in that time, said Oregon State University Professor Stephen Fitzgerald.

“The number of acres that we’re treating is still not keeping pace with how fast the forest is growing into a high-fuel condition,” Fitzgerald said. “Each year these forests put on billions of board feet of biomass or timber.”

But Fitzgerald said it is too soon to abandon the effort to reduce fire danger. Instead, he argued that foresters should focus on protecting unique resources, such as old-growth stands.

“I don’t think anyone expected we’d be able to turn the acreage around in a very short period of time,” Fitzgerald said.

Meanwhile, the Oregon Department of Forestry estimated it has spent $12.4 million so far this year, and expects to be reimbursed about $1.5 million by federal agencies. The state has a $32 million overall fire budget, Nichols said.

Nichols said the state started using heavy aircraft earlier when fighting potentially dangerous fires, after the devastating 2002 fire season. That change in tactics increased base wildfire costs, but is designed to prevent the outbreak of the biggest and most costly fires, he said.

“This strategy can drive up suppression costs in years such as this one with so many fire starts under extreme conditions, but we consider it preferable to incurring large-scale damage to the forest resource,” Nichols said.

In Oregon, rain helped douse the fires in the Warm Springs Agency Lightning Complex over the weekend. The Irish Spring fire, outside of Baker City, had burned 60,400 acres as of Monday and was only 5 percent contained.

Keith Chu can be reached at 202-662-7456 or at kchu@bendbulletin.com.

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