Fire and Fuels

NCFP is mentioned in this story in E&E News.
Here’s the link.
Below are some excerpts.

The “fire borrowing” has occurred with increasing frequency over the past decade as the cost of fighting wildfires has spiraled out of control.

Fire borrowing has happened six times in the past decade, Tidwell told a Senate panel in June, and has ranged from a low of $100 million in 2007 to a high of $999 million in 2002. Of the total $2.7 billion that was borrowed, about $2.3 billion was eventually restored by Congress but not without disruptions to important agency programs, he said (E&E Daily, June 5).

“Not only do these impacts affect the ability of the Forest Service to conduct stewardship work on national forests, they also affect agency partners, local governments and tribes,” Tidwell said.

As an example, past fire borrowing has forced the agency to halt trail work on the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail in California and repair many other trails and trailheads, wasting the opportunity to leverage thousands of volunteers. Failure to complete the work was expected to cause sedimentation and damage to watersheds.

Lawmakers from both parties have urged the administration to improve implementation of an emergency wildfire reserve known as the FLAME fund that Congress established in 2009. The FLAME fund was designed to prevent the raiding of other agency budgets. But that account is depleted, the agency has indicated.

“It didn’t take a crystal ball to predict that the Forest Service once again would be forced to steal money from hazardous fuels and other fire prevention programs to pay for spiraling costs of fighting fires,” said Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who yesterday visited the interagency fire center in Boise. “The fires sweeping the West are proof that federal forest and fire policy are broken.”

Absolutely broken. Thank you Senator Wyden! Now what would fix it?

Chris Topik, who directs the Nature Conservancy’s Restoring America’s Forests program and is a former aide on the House subcommittee that funds wildfire suppression, said it was “chilling” that Tidwell had ordered the field to stop spending money.

“This is a mess, as forecast,” Topik said. “It shows that we need to get serious about investing in the restoration work that reduces fire risk. We need to get serious about a new way of funding suppression.”

Topik said he anticipates that the Interior Department within the next 10 days will also have to start borrowing money from other programs to shore up its wildfire budget.

He said the Forest Service already has canceled official trips to Salt Lake City next week for a federal advisory committee meeting on forest planning.

The agency will “just not be doing much,” Topik said. “This is 8 percent of America. It’s not trivial.”

“Will Congress pay it back?” Topik added. “I hope so.”

Thank you, Chris, it’s time folks got fired up (sts) about this. Even if the FS folks manage to get back some of the fire borrowing borrowed money..well it’s next year and a hassle to distribute, and a unit might end up getting nothing depending on who gets their hands on it before it gets to you, and what crises next year brings.

Note that Chris says Interior will start doing the same thing.

I found the rolodex factor on this story to be interesting.
Below are some excerpts:

More than 40 uncontained, active and large wildfires dot the western U.S. from Arizona to Washington state and Alaska, taxing national firefighting resources and helping to push spending past $1 billion for the year.

The National Interagency Fire Center in Boise has raised the national wildfire preparedness level to the highest tier for the first time in five years.

The center lists two central Idaho wildfires as the country’s top priorities, helping provide crews and resources for the Beaver Creek Fire, which forced the evacuation of 1,250 homes in the resort area of Ketchum and Sun Valley and has cost nearly $12 million so far.

First we have Steve Gage.. good choice:

Forty-eight fires remain uncontained around the country, the White House said, and about 17,800 people have been dispatched to fight them.

Steve Gage, assistant director of operations for the fire center, said officials can’t fill all the requests they receive for crews and equipment.

As fire season progresses, Gage said, the center moves crews around to where the greatest assets like houses are threatened, and tries to have crews positioned to catch new fires when they are small.

Then they quote other fire spokespeople (good) and go back to Steve.

Nationally, federal agencies have spent more than $1 billion so far this year, about half last year’s total of $1.9 billion, according to the fire center. There have been 33,000 fires that have burned more than 5,300 square miles—an area nearly the size of Connecticut.

Whether costs top the 10-year average of $1.4 billion or the $1.9 billion spent in 2012 and 2006 will depend on the rest of the wildfire season, which traditionally gets very active in Southern California as late as October, Gage said

Now we go to.. Norm Christiansen (?). Who knew that Duke was such a center of knowledge on western fires?

“Certainly drought in some areas has contributed to the number and intensity of fire events,” he said in an email. “But many of the fires have been in highly populated, wilderness-urban interface areas such as Colorado Springs, Sun Valley, Idaho, and the west slope of the Sierra Nevada. That adds greatly to costs since so many more resources are required to protect built structures.”

As a Coloradan, I would have to say that while the Black Forest 14200 fire this year got much press, a lot more acres were burned in the West Fork complex 109,000 as of July 16 (couldn’t find a total). Of course, Waldo Canyon was last year. I’m suspicioning that Christiansen’s view was gleaned from the press, perhaps, which tends to focus on fires burning in communities (not that there weren’t communities around the West Fork Complex) and not reviewing figures at NIFC. But West Fork is not highly populated. Then you get into what is “many of the fires”.. but as in my Golden example, if you’re really in the WUI, fires tend to get attacked strongly by local forces and may not end up as large fires.

Next rolodex pick..

Jason Sibold, assistant professor of biogeography at Colorado State University, said since the 1990s, the climate has been changing, producing hotter, drier and longer summers in the West. That combined with more people building vacation homes in the woods pushes up costs.

“The societal demand to try to control and fight these fires is escalating at the same pace as the climate’s warming,” he said.

Here’s a link..he seems to be a fire history professor and is in the school of anthropology, but not necessarily an expert on suppression or suppression costs.

And oddly, the homes in the Black Forest are not “vacation homes” and neither are most front- range WUI homes. AS we can tell by listening to folks on the blog, it’s a complex situation as to fire costs and once again we get the narrative of “people building homes” and “climate change.”

We don’t get the narrative of “old trees that are beetle bait” or “fire suppression has led to high fuel loadings” and “it is just a matter of time regardless of weather or climate”…

Or even, “communities that do good fire planning cost less to protect”. Where does the narrative “climate plus building (vacation homes?) in the WUI” come from, and why does it keep recurring in the press to the exclusion of other factors?

Gil found this post and was looking for the thread on fire costs, but I thought it was worthy of a separate post. I think it’s interesting because they have more industry and management, and the policy barriers they see are completely different from ours. Yet, they face the same problem of it taking money to treat landscapes and fight fires.

Here is the link and below is an excerpt:

Other jurisdictions in North America are going through similar exercises in cost-cutting of prevention activities in an attempt to rein in public spending. Not surprisingly, this short-sighted approach has the opposite effect of the one intended when it comes to the cost of wildfires.

First of all, wildfires cost much more than we have long thought. British Columbia taxpayers spend, on average, approximately $140 million on fire suppression (even though the province only budgets $65 million every year). Researchers throughout North America have looked at all the other costs associated with an individual wildfire, such as home and business losses, erosion mitigation, human health and damage to natural resources, and found that actual costs can range from two to 60 times the suppression cost.

On one particular wildfire in California the fire suppression bill was only $48 million while the total bill, which can often take a decade or more to realize, was $1.2 billion.

Secondly, when it comes to spending money on hazard reduction activities, an ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure. A recent study published by Northern Arizona University concluded that investments in hazard reduction activities had a significant impact on fire behaviour and total cost.

The authors contend that hazard reduction treatments applied at the broader, landscape-scale were more desirable than treatments that are only applied in the WUI.

Researchers found that WUI-only treatments leave the landscape around communities vulnerable to large, severe, and expensive mega-fires that often result in significant social, environmental, and economic impacts.

This last point is worth discussing in the context of B.C.’s approach to reducing wildfire threat to communities.

The approach advocated by the province is to focus attention on only a narrow two-kilometre buffer around communities and within that narrow buffer on only those stands rated as high to extreme hazard of crowning (fire spreading through the tops of trees as well as along the forest surface), thus resulting in a patchwork of small, dispersed, treated and untreated stands surrounding vulnerable communities.

In contrast, other jurisdictions, such as Alberta, recommend treating the area within 10 kilometres of a community.

Another important point from the NAU study is the importance of linking areas treated versus treating a patchwork of smaller stands; exactly the opposite of the B.C. strategy, which prioritizes funding for the treatment of high- or extreme-hazard stands above all others. The B.C. strategy may be a valid for small fires that start in the WUI, can be hemmed in by a network of roads combined with some small hazard reduction treatments and be quickly attacked and suppressed by local and provincial firefighting resources.

Unfortunately, the reality is that fire behaviour and effects of large, landscape fires that make a run at communities, such as Barrier-McClure, Okanagan Mountain Park, Slave Lake, and Waldo Canyon, are little affected by small, dispersed treatments.

In fire management, we are dealing with dynamic ecological systems and a stand classified as low or moderate hazard today will eventually be classified as high or extreme hazard in the not too distant future. In other words, better to treat the whole landscape instead of just parts of it.

It’s not clear why the province’s limited approach to wildfire hazard reduction is being employed when research points to broader treatments as ultimately more effective at protecting communities and community interests on the larger landscape.

Perhaps the province is simply trying to avoid having to address two very significant policy and political issues: the province’s traditional approach to Annual Allowable Cut determination and tenure system administration.

UPDATE: I removed #7 after a comment by John Persell reminded me it was more of a pet peeve than a principle.

I’d be interested in what you think of these principles.

(Warning: I am going to use “we” here to stand for “people” or “the joint efforts of levels of government”)

1) Fires have bad effects and good effects of various kinds. Management of fire should try to maximize the good and minimize the bad, subject to the safety constraint of carefulness with human lives and knowing that fires are unpredictable and dangerous.

2) Fires are not “needed” by the “ecosystem”. Some plants and animals like post-fire conditions. Some climate folks think that trees won’t even be growing back in some places. It’s more complicated than “things would be fine if we let everything burn because that’s the way things used to be”. This point is really a Virtual Book Club point.

3) In many cases in the west, some form of fire is more or less inevitable. So we would like it to burn without hurting people or property. Prescribed fires can get out of control and are smoky, and cost many bucks to redo at regular intervals. Plus the “natural” folks say the effects aren’t the same if you burn under relatively safe weather and season conditions, than in the past, when the fires may have been at the height of summer. So if “naturalness” is your goal you are faced with a number of problems- safety, understanding Native American fuel burning patterns, and how “naturalness” fits with climate change. More Book Club stuff.

Here are the costs for one fire.. again, costs as (may be) litigated. Tens of millions.

So prescribed burning is difficult (in the West) and possibly more expensive than we would like to do, especially the magnitude at recurring intervals.

4) Fire management can be facilitated and negative effects to people, watersheds and wildlife can be mitigated to some extent by vegetation treatments. Given that you’re going to do that, it makes sense to sell the trees. However I do not agree that timber harvesting would have prevented the MPB epidemic in lodgepole, nor that it necessarily would help other places. The main decrease in west side Oregon due to spotted owl is notoriously not fire prone. Many places in the west, trees just don’t grow fast enough, they are too far away from roads, the conditions are too steep and soils too fragile. Many parts of the west there are no trees at all, and climate change predictors say that there will be fewer. I would like to think of living with wildfire as a potentially dangerous and expensive business, and selling excess vegetation is a good way to make things less expansive.

5) Sometimes bad things happen which no amount of money can reverse. We should analyze these situations beforehand and see if we can avoid them. (this story is interesting because of the interview with the USGS folks)
Link
Excerpt:

As for some residents’ wish that someone could barricade Manitou Springs, Mau said it simply isn’t feasible to put up barriers against debris flows on this scale for a host of reasons, including daunting logistics, blocking roadways, interfering with water rights and simply diverting flows and problems elsewhere — all at a high cost — when the burn scar will heal in 10 years, or perhaps longer.
Until then, the shadow of the Waldo Canyon fire will continue to loom large.

6) People who live in fire-prone wildlands, especially at low densities, need to be aware of, and respond to, the risks and responsibilities of the situation. More work needs to be done to figure out the best and fairest way to do this; but people and communities are not expected to move out of where they are now.