Burning Money

Not only is it impossible to extinguish large forest fires, it's safer for people and property not to try. Contrary to press reports, the 47,000-acre forest fire that destroyed $1 billion worth of property around Los Alamos last May--the largest fire in New Mexico's recorded history--was not started by the National Park Service's "prescribed burn" in Bandelier National Monument. A Forest Service investigation has determined that the prescribed burn--necessary and prudent management in a forest that needs fire and where fire had been unnaturally excluded by humans--would have gone out on its own. Instead, it was the backfire, started by firefighters, that got away.

On July 6, 1994, 14 firefighters died trying to stop a blaze from ascending Storm King Mountain, in western Colorado. No one has adequately explained why they were there. No houses or even valuable timber were on top of the mountain--just a fire-created, fire-dependent plant community of pinyon, gambel oak, and juniper.

We fight large forest fires we know we can't put out for two reasons. The first is to appease that element of the public that is still convinced that fire--the ether of hell--is evil incarnate and that it "destroys" forests. This notion got a boost in the late 19th century when Prussian-trained forester Bernhard Fernow pronounced that fires were the "bane of American forests" and symptomatic of "bad morals." According to John Muir, fires did 10 times more damage than loggers. Gifford Pinchot, the first director of the U.S. Forest Service, likened the acceptance of fire to the acceptance of slavery.

In 1910 fires in Idaho and Montana killed 85 people, eventually inspiring the Forest Service to implement its "10:00 a.m. fire policy," according to which (until as recently as 1971) all forest fires were to be extinguished by 10 on the morning of the day after they were reported. In 1942 the Empire of Japan advanced fire's evil reputation by launching balloon-borne incendiary devices in a vain attempt to incinerate our Northwest timber resources. That same year, a truly horrendous forest fire, started by careless humans, shocked the nation and the world. Panicked wildlife--strange varieties of birds, rodents, lagomorphs, reptiles, and ungulates, many with primatelike eyes positioned in the front of their skulls--were seen running, flapping, crawling, and wriggling from walls of flames and blizzards of firebrands. The survivors, including a mother quail and her brood, a mother raccoon and her litter, and a whitetail buck and his pregnant mate, found shelter in a lake while the ravenous flames consumed their happy homes. This fire, which occurred in Walt Disney's animated motion picture Bambi, has been cited by Roderick Nash, professor emeritus of history and environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, as "the most important document in American cultural history bearing on the subject [of fire-management policy]."

The other reason we fight large forest fires is that attempted fire suppression has become an industry with such mass and momentum that it flattens everything in its path--except the flames. The current federal fire policy, inspired by the expenditure of $1 billion and 35 lives during the fires of 1994, is downright enlightened. It acknowledges that ecosystems deprived of fire do not function correctly and that fire

suppression has caused dangerous fuel buildups. It recognizes fire as a critical natural process that needs reintroduction to the wild, and it calls on agencies to support that reintroduction. In firefighting it assigns priority to the protection of human life first, then the protection of natural and cultural resources. It stipulates that all federal land have some kind of fire-management plan. It calls for fuel reduction in fire-prone forests where people have built houses. And it assigns the ultimate responsibility for fuel reduction, education, and fire management in developed fire zones to state and local governments. The National Audubon Society itself could not have hatched a more environmentally friendly fire policy.

But every summer the good ideas get tossed out the window like antiques from a burning attic. The Forest Service knows how dangerous and pointless it is to fight large fires, but it can't help itself, because the more hopeless the wildfire intervention it undertakes, the more money it hauls in. The agency has a firefighting slush fund that carries it through part of the fire season, and when this gets depleted it hits up Congress for more money. Basically, Congress has given it a self-filling cookie jar. At the same time there are entire companies that exist for no other purpose than to supply the federal government with firefighting paraphernalia. There are companies that sell the slurry, which can cost $2 per gallon to deliver to a fire. There are companies that lease the Boeing 234 Chinook helicopters, which can cost $109,396 a day with crew, and the Lockheed P3-A Orion tankers, which can cost $40,000 a day. Following the firefighting force as if they were trailing Patton's Third Army are supply lines dispatched by companies that provide all manner of support services, including food, clothing, tools, fire shelters, toilets, showers, and tents. And there are freelancers--often laid-off loggers. One of them with a water truck can earn $2,000 a day. The industry even has its own lobbying group, the National Wildfire Suppression Association, to make sure that Congress keeps the pork flowing.

There is no accountability and no prioritizing. In the 1999 fire season, for example, the Forest Service blew $178 million--or 30 percent of its entire annual firefighting budget--on two fires (or "fire complexes," as it calls them) in California. In fire season 2000, the agency deployed 240 helicopters, 50 air tankers, 35 million gallons of slurry, 1,200 fire engines, and about 30,000 firefighters--including 2,500 troops from the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, and fire managers from Canada, Australia, Mexico, and New Zealand.

During Montana's 15,000-acre Bucksnort fire last summer, Helena National Forest supervisor Tom Clifford attained a personal record, dropping 135,000 gallons of slurry in a single day. "I had my hands on every air tanker in the western United States," he told me. "We flew a million gallons of slurry out of the Helena airport." Not that Clifford thinks it was a good investment. "I hate the situation we're in," he said. "We're spending about $1,000 an acre on firefighting--somewhere in the neighborhood of a million bucks a day once we call a team in. With an investment of a hundred bucks an acre for thinning [that is, fuel reduction], we could really reduce fires over time and in the process control noxious weeds and enhance wildlife habitat."

Always there is arson, often by people seeking employment as firefighters. In 1996, the most recent year for which the statistic is available, 21 percent of all forest fires were ignited by arsonists. In 1994 a man pleaded guilty to igniting three forest fires in Washington State and admitted that he'd been paid to do so by companies that lease firefighting equipment. This past season, although anyone with a shovel could find work as a firefighter, there was still plenty of arson. In September two unemployed miners were charged with setting five fires in western Montana--evidently in an effort to get work as firefighters, according to the county investigator. A fire on the Flathead Indian reservation in Montana also appeared to be the work of an arsonist, as did the Jasper fire--the record-shattering, 82,000-acre blaze in the Black Hills. Plenty of work generated there.