The Westerman bill is a compendium of policy ideas from various sources, some of which have been floating around for a long time. I think this E&E News story did a pretty good job of focusing on some of the main themes of the hearing.
I don’t think the 10am idea is going anywhere. I fully respect individuals who disagree, and I hope they move on to more detailed ideas for “being more careful.” If this Xprize or other technological innovations are successful, people will have to choose for every ignition and what will inform that choice? Human safety would seem to be less of a factors with unpersonned aircraft and so perhaps that will change the possibilities and choices of suppression as well.
What can we learn from fire with benefits that worked vs. those that didn’t work? How can we reimburse people who suffer when they don’t work? When wildfires are likely to hit private land, should landowners have a voice? It seems to me that there are many questions to be worked out. Perhaps with forest plan amendments or other pre-planning. Here at TSW we have seen a variety of people with concerns (Sarah Hyden and Michael Rains) and even Jon and I agree on the utility of plan amendments, which is fairly rare. Anyway, I think there’s a conversation around “if not 10 AM and out, how can FWB (fire with benefits) proponents build trust with impacted communities?”; a conversation that would be more complex than “10 AM or not.” Maybe the appropriate Congressional committee (perhaps not this one) can examine why FEMA seems to be uniquely unsuccessful at getting relief to impacted individuals after the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon escaped prescribed fires, as reported on in detail by The Hotshot Wakeup. I know that fire folks and academics are working on the trust issue.
Meanwhile, there’s a big story from NPR KRCC this morning on wildfire smoke health risks..
New research shows that the health consequences of wildfire smoke exposure stretch well beyond the smoky days themselves, contributing to nearly 16,000 deaths each year across the U.S., according to a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) analysis released in April. The analysis warns that number could grow to nearly 30,000 deaths a year by the middle of the century as human-driven climate change increases the likelihood of large, intense, smoke-spewing wildfires in the Western U.S. and beyond.
“This really points to the urgency of the problem,” says Minhao Qiu, a researcher at Stanford University and the lead author. “Based on our results, this should be one of the policy priorities, or the climate policy priority, of the U.S., to figure out how to reduce this number.”
Another analysis, led by researchers from Yale University, finds that the human death toll every year from wildfire smoke could already be near 30,000 people in the U.S. Deaths from cardiovascular disease, respiratory problems, kidney disease, and mental health issues all rise in the days and weeks after smoke exposure.
Together, the studies point to an underappreciated threat to public health, says Yiqun Ma, a researcher at Yale and an author of the second study.
“It’s a call to action,” she says—outlining the real, and significant, human stakes of failing to rein in further human-caused climate change.
Wildfire smoke is bad for people but fire is good for forests. How best to manage the trade-offs? How will climate change and the new technologies above balance out in terms of new future “large intense smoke-spewing wildfires”? How does planned prescribed fire, compared to Wildfire With Benefits fit into that? I don’t know, but I’m fairly certain health researchers don’t know either. Interestingly, it looks like the Wildland Fire Commission did not include folks from CDC?.
Anyway, here’s what Marc Heller reported on this.
Fire suppression debate
Westerman’s draft combines many ideas that haven’t advanced far in Congress, in some cases because Democrats won’t support them, but in others because they haven’t been attached to legislative vehicles that can get through the congressional logjam. The farm bill, for instance, covers the Forest Service but has languished for months on unrelated issues.The quick extinguishing of wildfires has become a rallying point for some Republican lawmakers but would face hurdles with forest policy groups. It would place the requirement on drought-inflicted areas and on places the Forest Service has designated among the most at-risk landscapes, for instance.
One witness at the hearing, Kimiko Barrett, a member of the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission, said the 24-hour proposal goes against recommendations the panel made in a report to Congress several months ago.
“Calls to return to a 24-hour suppression policy are antithetical to allowing more beneficial fire, supersede local decisionmaking and are in direct opposition to the commission’s recommendations,” said Barrett, a senior wildfire researcher at Headwaters Economics in Bozeman, Montana.
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The chilly response to the fire suppression provision contrasted to more positive views of other aspects of Westerman’s draft, which calls for creation of “firesheds” that would receive expedited thinning and prescribed fire to reduce the threat of wildfire, as well as updates to shared stewardship arrangements that allow the Forest Service to partner with outside groups for forest improvement projects.
Westerman, the only professional forester in Congress, said the draft resulted from years of work and bipartisan cooperation on a number of issues.
A proposal to streamline consultation with the Fish and Wildlife Service on endangered species issues has some Democratic support as well, and the community-based wildfire risk reduction programs and research have broad appeal.
In addition, the proposal would incorporate 10 of the nearly 150 recommendations the federal Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission made to Congress several months ago and adopt other policies that align with the commission’s findings — although it veers from that commission on the scope of fire suppression.
For some reason, Westerman said, forests have become politically divisive even though healthy forests benefit everyone through cleaner air and water, recreational areas and economic rewards of the wood products industry.
“It’s something we should all work toward,” Westerman said, adding that he took a bipartisan delegation to his alma mater, the forestry school at Yale University, last year to see how researchers manage its lands in Connecticut.
“People realize this shouldn’t be a divisive issue,” Westerman said.
French said a number of provisions in the draft that have been proposed in earlier legislation align with Forest Service goals. In the case of expedited environmental reviews for forest projects, he said the agency would want to clarify Westerman’s intent.
But in exchanges with lawmakers, French also acknowledged that tasks such as endangered species consultations, litigation and environmental reviews sometimes add substantial costs to forest management projects.
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Like I said, since this bill is a lengthy mix of different ideas, and the folks testifying had many interesting things to say (also in their written testimony), I’ll be posting in depth about some of the testimony and my observations.
Seems to me that in order to build bipartisan support the narrative of fire bad -> fuel bad -> less fuel means healthy forest has to be clarified. I think that approaching the whole stalement from an ecological basis would find more traction. A narrative closer to fuel in wrong place/structure -> fire with non optimum outcomes/greater hazard -> living forest should be managed to be more resilient to fire disturbance. I think that focusing entirely on fire hazard is a shallow goal that won’t lead to multiple value-based success.
Wyatt, the people I run into talk about three things at the same time.
1. Stand resilience, returning to historic densities/structure and/or reducing density to protect from future drought.
2. Reducing densities/changing structures to reduce wildfire intensities, promote conditions for successful prescribed fires
2. Specific shaded fuel breaks/ firebreaks in specific patterns to provide suppression forces strategic and tactical advantages in protecting values, communities, evacuation routes, watersheds, endangered species habitat. (PODs)
Who do you think is focusing entirely on fire hazard?
Keep the updates coming! In your final point about French acknowledging the cost of analysis and litigation, I feel there are two possible interpretations. 1) The burden of complexity is too logistically and administratively complex so we ought to abandon that burden and just do admittedly average or poor work everywhere, or 2) we build tech-enabled tools to do the hard job of optimum analysis and admin cheaper, better, faster. To me the choice is obvious.
A.- What Chris said is that “it’s just a cost of doing business” which is not to say “the costs could be reduced”. In fact, he pointed to some increased NEPA efficiencies by using existing ESD authorities.
I’m trying to find out more about the numbers he used.
The better cheaper faster reminds me of Fred Norbury’s “the NEPA process should be more like a NIKE factory and less like a cobbler shop.” This idea ran to ground on the idea of centralizing, since the FS had recently had bad experiences of administrative centralizing (and continues to do so) plus there was contracting out government work, which was thought then to be not as good as in-house. Maybe it’s time for another stab at E-NEPA? the last was in the early 2000s.
After reading through the Bill’s Committee Digest and the complete Bill I would not spend a lot of time fretting about this one. One must give him credit as the Chair and ranking Republican of the Committee on Natural Resources for perseverance but like all his others since 2015 this one will likely join them in the “vaporware” pile and for the same reasons. His succession of failed bills precedes him; H.R. 2647 (Emergency Wildfire and Forest Management Act of 2016), H.R. 2936 in 2017 (The Resilient Federal Forest Act of 2017) which was re-introduced in 2019 where it failed again, and H.R. 7315 (2018 Protecting American Communities from Wildfire Act). This current Bill is nothing more than an exercise in cut and paste from his previous ones along with a little last minute borrowing from the Biden Fire Commission Report. Parallel and many times overlapping his efforts to solve all that ails us among others was the failed S.3085 (2016 Emergency Wildfire and Forest Management Act) introduced by a congressional type from Kansas and H.R. 5188 (2022 Wildfire Response and Drought Resiliency Act), a package of 49 earlier failed bills combined into one by our illustrious Congressman from Boulder. I should perhaps qualify that much of the above I had already compiled for case studies I use in the graduate courses I currently teach.
It is worth noting that the hearing on the Bill this past Wednesday blindsided Interior who was forced at the last minute to submit a Statement for the Record with the hope of further discussions about the Bill’s impacts on their public land administration.
Being the Biden Fire Commission work and final report released last September was written for the Congress one can’t say whether Westerman read it or how he (Aide?) determined which excerpts to extract and include in the Bill. Having had to read and dissect the Report multiple times for several presentations it had to have been a challenge. If you haven’t had the time or interest, the report is 328 pages long of which 70 are Appendix, 426 citations take up 30 pages, and concludes with its 148 “All of the Above” recommendations Congress should implement immediately. It’s hard to take much of it serious when it states the so-called wildfire crisis should be retitled an issue of National Security and Public Health Crisis, that wildfire mitigation is also an issue of National Security, the term “wildland fire” should be changed as it does not account for fires burning into communities, and the stature of mitigation and recovery should be elevated to be equal to that of suppression including funding. From the report came the introduction of the term “beneficial fire” as the new panacea and somehow this cultural fire thing is different from prescribed fire though I struggle to see how. It adds that cultural fire should be codified separately into federal law. Whether or not the whole topic of prescribed fire is a debacle as Michael suggests, it is indeed a mess. Despite her accolades, post-nominals, and Commission membership, I did have to chuckle at Ms. Barrett’s comment as a minor witness that the 24-hour suppression proposal goes against the recommendations of the Committee. Whether she aware or not the Commission was disbanded, retains no standing, and a recommendation is simply that. Unofficially the 24-hour rule has been in place for many years and will continue due to the new smoke crisis and as evidenced by our addiction to more planes, more people and more gadgets. Of course when everything is a crisis, then nothing is.
Being retired like many after 36 years in the FS as a Line Officer, forester/silviculturist, and fire practitioner I am admittedly cynical in a time where the so called experts today are the flocks of climate-types and where the publish or perish world of academia research continues to try and tell us things that the likes of Cohen, Finney, and Calkins figured out a long time ago. For what it’s worth…Jim Krugman