Sticker shock on firefighting fleet

The initial proposal to pay for an aerial firefighting fleet to protect Coloradans against wildfires came with a whopping price tag of nearly $34 million.

That was too much, but the pared-down plan of $21 million that received Senate approval Thursday is still excessive.

The bottom line is that the state will have to take the money from somewhere if this idea advances, and there aren’t that many places to look.

Currently, the money is set to come from the state’s troubled benefits management system, which is a bad idea.

Other ideas bandied about are to reduce funding for education, which suffered more than enough cuts during the recession, or to put less into the state’s reserves, which may be an even worse alternative.

The plan to add state aerial firefighting capacity comes out of a report generated at the urging of state Sen. Steve King, R-Grand Junction.

The report is by Paul L. Cooke, director of the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control, and it recommends buying two aircraft and contracting to use 10 others.

The idea would be to develop an aggressive initial attack strategy to put out fires before they get too big. That would be accomplished by sending out reconaissance aircraft quickly after a fire is spotted and suppression aircraft shortly thereafter if needed. An idea that has been discarded, thankfully, was to contract for two big— and expensive— air tankers.

One of the major problems with devoting such extensive resources to aerial firefighting assets is that during the worst fire conditions, they’re often grounded by high winds.

Furthermore, as the federal government ramps up its tanker fleet, which had been vastly diminished in recent years due to problems in replacing aircraft, the state’s need for large tankerswill become less urgent.

Meanwhile, serious questions have been raised about aerial firefighting. The Government Accountability Office recently found that when it comes to assessing the effectiveness of aerial firefighting, the U.S. Forest Service harbors “a firefighting culture that values experience and history over data and scientific analysis.” That’s hardly reassuring.

There is no shortage of fire professionals who will tell you it’s boots on the ground that put out fires, not aircraft.

A prudent, compromise approach would be to lease as few assets as possible on an as-needed basis so the cost is something the state can afford while closely evaluating the effectiveness of a state firefighting air corps.