Firefighters Need Congress to Prioritize Community Fire Preparation

By Timothy Ingalsbee, Ph.D.

Timothy Ingalsbee is the director of the Western Fire Ecology Center, research associate at the University of Oregon specializing in wildland fire and a former wildland firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service. He may be reached at fire@efn.org.

Protecting homes and structures is one of the most dangerous assignments for wildland firefighters. Firefighters are basically forced to make a stand between a wildfire and the immovable objects of homes and communities. Part of this danger is due to the fact that the areas adjacent to homes and communities often have the highest fuel hazards since it is here that fire has been most aggressively suppressed and systematically excluded. Yet, homes and communities built in the “fire plain” cannot hold back the tide forever and eventually fire will come when weather conditions are ripe and ignitions from lightning or people are sparked.

Unfortunately, the misnamed Healthy Forests Restoration Act (H.R. 1904) that passed the U.S. House and is to be voted on in the Senate – possibly without debate as a legislative rider on the Interior Appropriations bill – is a fatally flawed wildfire bill in three key areas.

First, it fails to target the areas that need fuels reduction most urgently: the wildland/urban interface zone, a relatively narrow band approximately one-third mile around communities. This is the critical “red zone” that determines whether or not firefighters have defensible space to keep flames from reaching homes.

Rather, H.R. 1904 would authorize projects indiscriminately across 20 million acres of federal lands, including remote backcountry areas where fuels treatments would be ineffective in reducing wildfire risks to homes. However, the majority of rural communities-at-risk from wildfire are bordered by private, state, or tribal owned lands. These communities’ needs are left entirely out of the bill.

Secondly, H.R.1904 fails to prioritize and pay for the kinds of fuels that pose the highest potential for ignition and rapid fire spread: the ground surface layers of accumulated dead needles and limbs, underbrush and small-diameter trees. Most firefighter fatalities from fire over-runs occur in these kind of “flashy” fuels.

H.R. 1904 does not offer a single dime to pay for fuels reduction; instead, it proposes to “rob Peter to pay Paul” by authorizing logging of commercially-valuable mature and old-growth trees to pay for fuels reduction. Yet, big, old trees tend to survive most fires and help moderate fire behavior by shading the ground surface from the sun and wind. This counterproductive commercial logging mechanism would actually increase flammable fuel loads and further degrade ecosystems.

Finally, H.R. 1904 fails to foster agency-community collaboration and consensus around fire and fuels management projects. Instead, it attempts to insulate federal managers from environmental laws mandating informed public input and agency legal accountability. Up front citizen involvement in planning fire and fuels management projects is especially critical. This fundamentally anti-democratic approach is guaranteed to generate intense public controversy and conflict, potentially inciting widespread resentment against the whole mission of fire and fuels management if specific projects are perceived to be mere ruses for inappropriate or otherwise illegal logging.

Despite the recent mea culpa of forest managers over the role of past fire suppression in causing present forest health problems, firefighters continue to be dispatched to fight almost every single wildland fire, even in remote backcountry areas with fire-dependent vegetation. Often, the main excuse for this attack-all-fires policy is the potential for wildfires to eventually spread to unprepared communities and indefensible homes located several miles away. The American people should fully understand that there is no free lunch: wildland firefighting is an inherently hazardous duty that puts firefighter lives at risk, causes extensive environmental damage, leaves unsightly scars on the landscape and costs lots of money.

The enormous task of restoring fire-adapted ecosystems across hundreds of millions of acres of public and private lands will be a long-term, multi-generational endeavor. The necessary first step is to reduce fuels and create defensible space around homes and communities. Once communities are protected from wildfire, we can begin to restore ecosystems with greater use of both prescribed and natural fires. Firefighters could then become genuine fire and fuels management technicians suppressing fires only when and where necessary, not as a matter of bureaucratic routine unconstrained by any economic or ecological considerations, as is the current system.

Passage of the Healthy Forests Restoration Act would squander precious public resources on commercial logging schemes that will leave communities unprepared and unprotected, make forest ecosystems more degraded and fire-prone and increase the safety risks and health hazards for wildland firefighters. There are better legislative proposals, such as the Forestry and Community Assistance Act (S 1453), that offer more effective approaches to protecting communities, restoring ecosystems and enhancing firefighter safety. The Republican Congress must decide whether they want a bill that puts the interests of logging corporations first, or rural residents and wildland firefighters first.