USA TODAY International Edition
Year-round wildfires now the norm
In West, blazes move faster than government
It’s fire season in the West, and that means an overflowing inbox for Daniel Berlant, assistant deputy director at Cal Fire.
The emails arrive frequently, always with the best of intentions. A common recommendation from Californians: Why not just set up a sophisticated sprinkler system throughout the state’s 101 million acres?
A resident recently suggested turning blimps into giant water balloons as a way to control blazes. Fill them up, drop them on wooded areas and soak the land. Easy, right?
They all mean well, Berlant said, and he’s happy residents are engaged. But those ideas aren’t realistic.
What is realistic: The blazes ripping up and down the western part of the United States are here to stay. Large chunks of the West are under siege from wildfires right now, in what many experts have deemed “the new normal.”
Three-pronged attack
Fire prevention and suppression is a complex system involving federal, state, local and privately owned land. It’s easy to critique decisions from the past. In hindsight, we shouldn’t have used shake roofs (shingles made out of wood), and building in spaces susceptible to wildfire probably wasn’t wise either. But the urban sprawl ship has mostly sailed.
Different agencies are responsible for different areas; Cal Fire, for example, is responsible for only one-third of California.
Vocabulary matters in this discussion, too. Say the word “prevention,” and you might think of Smokey Bear, the long-running campaign on campfire safety. But on a bigger scale, prevention refers to hazardous fuels reduction, which includes prescribed fires and mechanical thinning, efforts to lessen the number of dead trees and brush that litter the ground and act as kindling. There’s also fire mitigation, where agencies work with communities to reduce risk of severe damage from inevitable wildfires.
Cal Fire, the agency responsible for protecting 31 million acres, views prevention as a three-pronged attack: engineering, education and enforcement. Engineering refers to modifying the environment through actions like brush clearance and prescribed fires. Cal Fire’s goal, Berlant says, is prescribed burns on 31 square miles a year, plus mechanical fuel treatment on 31 more.
The challenges of prevention
But how to pay for all this? Agencies across America are strapped for cash, and when faced with budget cuts, prevention is usually the first to go. Lifesaving funding will always take precedence. There’s lots of glory – and money – for emergency helicopters, but considerably less for building codes.
Nationally, the USFS got a boost this spring when Congress passed an omnibus budget bill that provided an additional $40 million for hazardous fuels reduction. That should help stop “fire borrowing,” the practice of taking money set aside for prevention and using it instead for immediate suppression needs.
“These fires are not your grandfather’s fires,” said U.S. Sen Ron Wyden, D-Ore., one of the bill’s sponsors. “They’re bigger, they’re hotter, they’re more powerful.”
California lawmakers have tried a variety of tactics to fund wildfire prevention – some of them widely unpopular, like the fire prevention fee.
Initially approved during the 2011 California budget crisis, the fee charged up to $153 per habitable structure in rural areas at high risk for wildfires, which affected approximately 800,000 property owners. The fee collected roughly $75 million a year but was opposed by many from the outset.
In July 2017, California legislators passed Assembly Bill 398, the cap-andtrade program, which suspended the fire fee through 2031.
One of Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature pieces of legislation, the cap-and-trade program “essentially tripled our (prevention) spending” even without the fee, according to Berlant, partially because $200 million was allocated for Cal Fire prevention grants, up from $15 million just a few years ago.
“We’re infusing significant money into fire-prevention projects in a way California has never seen,” Berlant said.
Fighting fire with fire
Part of the battle in the education component of fire prevention is fighting the perception that all fire is bad. Fire is actually good, and it’s healthy for the environment when controlled.
“Prescribed burns are sort of like training a Grizzly Bear to dance,” said Stephen Pyne, a fire historian who teaches at Arizona State University. “You can do it, but you never know when he could turn on you.”
The United States needs more prescribed burns, Pyne said. A lot of them.
The forest service started the practice of prescribed burns back in the late 1940s, though Native American communities had been burning their land centuries before. Setting fire to wooded areas helps clean out dead brush, can ward off invasive species and is often crucial to new vegetation growth.
The federal government, the Nature Conservatory and many states perform prescribed burns. If you’re looking for an example of who does it well, Pyne said, look to Florida.
The Sunshine State does prescribed burns on more than 3,281 square miles per year, more than 5 percent of its total 58,594 square miles. The USFS, by comparison, burned just 1,719 square miles of its 301,563 square miles in 2017, down from 2,188 square miles in 2016.
California tries to burn 31 square miles per year.
“We’re really behind the curve,” said state Sen. Ted Gaines. “We have clogged forests, which, combined with drought conditions, are creating a powder keg.”
The knock against government is that it moves at a glacial pace, a fair criticism, Gaines said, when it comes to the prescribed burn approval, which is partially determined by the California Environmental Quality Act.
“It can take up to three years for Cal Fire to get approval – that’s outrageous when you consider the conditions we’re currently in,” Gaines said.