Each year, Congress appropriates hundreds of millions of tax dollars for the Forest Service Fire Preparedness budget which should fund fire management planning. Since 2000, Congress has vastly increased this funding as part of the National Fire Plan; yet, ironically, there has been very little fire planning under the National Fire Plan. Despite this increased taxpayer largesse, the agency has systematically neglected to invest in proactive fire planning to implement the Fire Policy, and has chosen to spend the money on other things more tied to traditional firefighting and logging activities. The following provides four persuasive arguments for citizens to advocate for Fire Policy-compliant FMPs in order to increase firefighter safety and efficiency, and reduce firefighting costs and impacts:
Fire Management Plans Can Reduce Safety Hazards for Firefighters
Wildland firefighting is inherently hazardous duty, and individuals are exposed to health and safety risks on every firefighting incident. The lack of FMPs in the U.S. Forest Service compels the agency to engage in aggressive initial attack, extended attack, and total suppression on all fires. The agency must fight all fires without considering whether or not they occur in areas where the risks of fire to human communities are low, the ecological benefits of burning are high, and the hazards to firefighters may be high to extreme. Avoiding unnecessary fire suppression actions would decrease hazards to firefighters, but without these FMPs fire managers have only one option: total suppression. Thus, as was the case of the Biscuit Fire in Oregon—the nation’s largest wildfire in 2002—the lack of an approved FMP by the Siskiyou National Forest caused firefighters to be exposed to prolonged, unnecessary risks and hazards on a "siege-like" campaign fire that defied human control efforts and was eventually extinguished only by changes in the weather.
Fire Management Plans Can Increase Suppression Efficiency and Effectiveness
Fire Policy-compliant FMPs make a whole range of "appropriate management responses" to wildland fires possible. These responses can range from simple aerial monitoring of fires burning in remote roadless or wilderness areas, to aggressive fireline construction where fires threaten to encroach upon human communities. These options can exist even on the same wildfire incident. Consequently, managers may not need to waste resources trying to completely encircle and extinguish all fires in all places at all times at any cost, but instead can target suppression resources, and devise strategies and tactics to those sites and conditions where firefighters will be most safe, efficient, and effective.
Fire Management Plans Can Reduce Suppression Costs for Taxpayers
The Fire Policy was developed after officials were shocked by the expense of the 1994 fire season--an unprecedented $950 million—and the Policy Update was developed after the 2000 fire season cost a record $1.3 billion. The Fire Policy mandates that fires are to be suppressed at minimum cost; yet, the Forest Service has neglected to create guidelines or direction that would concretely lead to minimum-cost suppression strategies or tactics, with the result that suppression costs are rising at an annual average rate of 15.5%. Moreover, the agency has the authority to engage in deficit spending for fire suppression activities whenever it exceeds its annually appropriated budgets. Congress simply reimburses the agency through supplemental appropriations when it depletes its emergency firefighting fund, and rarely questions the expenditures of fire managers. Consequently, "The Forest Service manages emergency firefighting funds as if they were unbudgeted, unlimited, unallocated, and without benchmarks on acceptable spending levels. This environment provides the appearance of no accountability."
Despite hundreds of millions of tax dollars poured into the Forest Service fire budgets from the National Fire Plan, the 2002 fire season topped $1.5 billion. The lack of fiscal constraint and accountability is particularly acute on large wildfire incidents. For example, on the Biscuit Fire, the Forest Service spent over $150 million fighting the lightning-caused Biscuit Fire--fully 106% of the agency’s total budget for fire suppression operations--even though Biscuit was predominantly a low-to-moderate intensity fire that burned mainly in designated wilderness and inventoried roadless areas. Because FMPs and proactive fuels management projects must come out of fixed budgets, but reactive fire suppression actions have essentially no fixed budget, there is institutionally a perverse incentive for managers to favor reactive wildfire suppression over proactive fire planning and fuels management.
FMPs can reduce suppression costs by helping to focus firefighting actions to the times and places it is most safe, effective, and necessary. FMPs can also reduce suppression costs by setting the course for hazardous fuels reduction and ecosystem restoration that ultimately are the only viable, long-term solutions to reduce the adverse effects of severe wildfires.
Fire Management Plans Can Decrease Suppression Damages to Ecosystems
Fire suppression programs and practices have never undergone environmental analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA); yet, there are significant direct, indirect, and cumulative environmental impacts caused by firefighting. In some cases, the impacts of firefighting can be more significant and enduring than the effects of wildfire alone. For example, bulldozers cutting firelines into steep erosive slopes or roadless areas can cause scars that last for decades. Backfires ignited under extreme weather conditions can increase the intensity and severity or wildfires, and in some cases, can start whole new wildfires. Some fire retardant chemicals degrade into cyanide at levels highly toxic to fish and frogs. And the presence of large numbers of firefighters and their equipment and vehicles can spread invasive weeds, harass wildlife, and damage sensitive lands. FMPs can prohibit certain aggressive suppression methods where they would be most damaging (e.g. bulldozers in roadless areas, chemical retardants in riparian areas). Alternately, FMPs can prescribe "Minimum Impact Suppression Tactics" where they would be more effective and less damaging to the environment. Without FMPs providing such guidance to fire managers, there are no constraints on the kinds of destructive practices that can occur while "fighting" fires. FMPs enable managers to set priorities for suppression in ways that decrease the short- and long-term damages that firefighting can inflict upon the landscape.
In sum, FMPs provide strategic guidance that can help increase the safety, efficiency and effectiveness of suppression actions while reducing their economic costs and environmental impacts. FMPs also provide critical strategic direction to pre-fire and post-fire activities such as prescribed burning, non-commercial thinning, other manual and mechanicals fuels reduction treatments. Given the basic underlying philosophical premise of the Fire Policy--that the key to protecting communities and the environment from severe wildfires requires fire reintroduction and ecological restoration of fire-adapted ecosystems--FMPs should offer key analysis and strategic guidance to all restoration-oriented fire and fuels management activities. The ultimate goal of FMPs should be to make aggressive wildfire suppression the exception and ecological fuels management the rule.
Fire Management Plans Can Increase Effectiveness of Fuels Reduction and Forest Restoration Projects
The Fire Policy represented a dramatic shift away from reactive fire suppression towards proactive fuels reduction and ecosystem restoration. However, the Forest Service has been using the concepts of fuels reduction and forest restoration as justifications for business-as-usual commercial timber extraction without making essential connections between these timber sale projects and strategic fire management planning. Projects are typically planned in an ad hoc, opportunistic manner around commercial timber stands in defiance of science-based definitions of genuinely hazardous fuel loads. Even worse, most of the so-called fuels reduction or forest restoration timber sales have their management objectives to further fire exclusion and suppression goals in defiance of the letter and spirit of the Fire Policy. When such timber sale projects are proposed but are not tiered to a strategic FMP, it is not only a matter of "putting the cart before the horse," but the two are disconnected and heading in opposite directions! A Fire Policy-compliant Forest-wide FMP should provide the strategic guidance for all site-specific fuels reduction, fire reintroduction, and ecosystem restoration projects. Before the agency increases the number of fire/fuels projects, it must ensure that these conform to the Fire Policy and are based in the FMP.