Burning Money

Some important lessons are available from fire season 2000. One is the value of prescribed burns, such as the one that would have gone out on its own in Bandelier National Monument had it not been messed with by firefighters. When South Dakota's Jasper fire raced into Jewel Cave National Park, it hit an area where the Park Service had reduced fuels with prescribed burns.

Abruptly, the running crown fire came down out of the trees and ambled along the ground. With suppression now possible, fire crews were able to save all of the park's major structures.

Another lesson is the importance of keeping development out of fire-dependent forests. People who want to build their houses beside the Mississippi or on dirt cliffs overlooking the North Atlantic can expect to be denied building permits, pay more for insurance, or at the very least have difficulty obtaining federal relief when their houses float away or fall into the sea. America is beginning to understand that tidal zones and floodplains cannot be made safe for human development with jetties, dikes, dams, and levees. But in most cases no one makes a peep when people build houses in fire zones. We still believe that we can protect them with SAC-like air strikes against annual forest fires.

Montana's Bucksnort fire, which cost taxpayers about $8 million to fight, was started by a rural subdivision resident dumping charcoal briquettes into a ditch near his house. Principal property damage from the Los Alamos fire has been attributed by Jack Cohen, the Forest Service fire scientist who investigated it, "to the abundance and ubiquity of pine needles, dead leaves, cured vegetation, flammable shrubs, wood piles, etc., adjacent to, touching, and/or covering the homes."

Every summer taxpayers pay firefighters to clear brush around houses, move stacks of firewood away from houses, and spray houses with fire retardant. The National Fire Protection Association estimates that in 1994 federally contracted firefighters spent from $250 million to $300 million trying to protect houses built in and beside fire-prone forests. The number of houses damaged by wildfires in the 1990s was six times that of the previous decade. The Plum Creek Timber Company--whose logging operations were reported by the Forest Service to have started last summer's Crooked Creek fire in Idaho--converted to a "real estate investment trust" a year ago, the better to avoid federal taxes and sell off its scalped, flammable land to developers.

It's not as if the enactment of zoning laws for fire-prone forests were a radical new idea. Frederick Law Olmstead Jr. suggested it 70 years ago as a means of protecting lives, property, and resources from the fires that are forever sweeping down from the fire-dependent, fire-created chaparral in the area around Malibu, California. Yet in 1993, when these fires destroyed houses in Malibu, their owners rebuilt the houses with insurance money. Then, in 1996, when the fires again destroyed Malibu houses, their owners again rebuilt them with insurance money. If there's one thing that's clear, it's that available lessons are not the same as education.

Still, the Clinton administration learned something from the eight fire seasons it presided over. On September 9, 2000, President Clinton announced a $1.6 billion proposal for increased forest restoration, fuel reduction, and firefighting that was based on a 35-page report by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman--two bureaucrats who understand the danger of postponing forest fires and the folly of trying to extinguish large ones. Because the program won't depend on commercial logging, as did Clinton's past "forest health" initiative, mainstream environmentalists support it.

At this writing the administration is promising to redraft the federal fire policy that it redrafted five years ago. All indications are that the new policy, due out about the time you receive this issue of Audubon, will be every bit as enlightened as the old policy. But there is no indication that with the onset of fire season 2001 the new good ideas--like the old good ideas--won't be flung out the attic window.

Ted Williams was in Yellowstone's backcountry on "Black Saturday," August 20, 1988, the day 70-mile-per-hour winds spread the fires by 165,000 acres.

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