Billions spent on fighting wildfires, but little on prevention
LOS ANGELES — When COVID-19 blew a hole in California’s spending plans last spring, one of the things state budgetcutters took an ax to was wildfire prevention.
A $100 million pilot project to outfit older homes with fire-resistant materials was dropped. Another $165 million earmarked for community protection and wildland fuel-reduction fell to less than $10 million.
A few months later, the August siege of dry lightning turned 2020 into a record-shattering wildfire year. The state’s emergency firefighting costs are expected to hit $1.3 billion, pushing the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s total spending this fiscal year to more than $3 billion.
The numbers highlight the enormous chasm between what state and federal agencies spend on firefighting and what they spend on reducing California’s wildfire hazard — a persistent gap that critics say ensures a self-perpetuating cycle of destruction.
This year’s wildfires scorched more than 4 million acres — a modern record — claimed 31 lives and damaged or destroyed more than 10,000 structures, according to Cal Fire. In early September, smoke choked much of the state, obscuring the sun and turning Bay Area skies an ominous orange.
“There was a particular day where my wife said, ‘Maybe we just need to leave California,’” recalled Michael Wara, director of the climate and energy policy program at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment. “We are fifth-generation Californians. My great-greatgreat-grandparents are in the ground in Colma. It’s not a place I ever want to leave.
“The system we had for managing this problem doesn’t work anymore,” he lamented. “I think the reality is, just like we need to pay for fire protection, we probably need to be paying something like that much money for firerisk reduction in the state.”
Climate change is exacerbating California’s wildfire problem. But it didn’t create it. There are a variety of reasons why wildfires have grown larger, more intense and more destructive in recent decades. A big one, experts say, is that 40 million people live in a fireprone landscape that has been largely deprived of flame for more than a century.
In a widely cited 2007 research paper, University of California, Berkeley scientists estimated that prior to 1800, about 4.5 million acres of California burned every year in fires ignited by lightning and Native Americans.
The elimination of Indigenous burning and the government’s 20th-century fire-suppression policies put an end to that, producing a long-term fire deficit and fuel buildup across much of the state that Californians are now paying the price for.
At the same time, development has continually pushed into wildlands, putting ever more homes and people at risk.
Fire scientists have long called for a dramatic increase in the use of prescribed fire — that is, controlled burns that trained crews deliberately set in forests and grasslands during mild weather conditions.
They have urged federal agencies to thin more overgrown stands of young trees in the mid-elevation Sierra Nevada and let nature do some housekeeping with wellbehaved lightning fires in the backcountry.
They point to the dire need to retrofit older homes to guard against the blizzard of embers that set neighborhoods ablaze in the most destructive, wind-driven fires.
Yet year after year, state and federal funding for such work remains a pittance compared to the billions of dollars spent on firefighting.
“When everybody knows what to do and they don’t do it, there’s something deeper going on,” said Wara, who helped draft a recent independent report on the costs of California wildfire that noted the state’s “long history of underinvestment in prevention and mitigation.”