Yellowstone National Park’s vast wildfires in 1988, which burned nearly 800,000 acres and almost 40 percent of the park, marked a watershed in the understanding of wildfires. Before 1988, government policy was to suppress all fires at all costs. The Yellowstone fires showed how futile this was, as total suppression led to large buildups of fuel, which resulted inevitably in larger, more catastrophic fires.
In the 26 years since the Yellowstone conflagration, the lessons from those fires have been gradually implemented as fire policy. These practices include allowing natural fires to burn, increasing the practice of controlled burns, controlling fuels in populated areas, and improving safety and fire prevention advice for homeowners in hazard areas.
But the funding mechanisms have been slow to recognize that wildfires have become a major hazard affecting a broad swath of land and people. Further, some federal policies do not appear to be in agreement when it comes to addressing wildfires. For instance, President Barack Obama’s new budget is calling for a change in the way the federal government pays for fighting wildfires, while his climate change policies focus on fire prevention.
Obama’s proposal asks Congress to finance fire fighting the same way it deals with other large-scale natural hazards, such as hurricanes and tornadoes. Namely, when large rare events occur, such as Hurricanes Katrina or Sandy, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is authorized to exceed its budget and use a special disaster account. The Obama proposal would extend that kind of response to the agencies most involved in firefighting—the departments of Interior and Agriculture, according to the Washington Post The Interior Department is responsible for America’s national parks, while Agriculture houses the U.S. Forest Service.
President Obama’s funding proposal emerges against a stark backdrop: since the 1988 Yellowstone fires the West has experienced a sharp increase in the number and size of large wildfires, as shown in this graph produced by Climate Central. And the future looks hotter. The National Research Council estimates that for every 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit of temperature increase the size of the area burned in the American West will quadruple. Global warming estimates show an increase by 2050 of between 2 and 4 degrees Fahrenheit.
In fact, the administration’s Climate Change Action Plan, released last June, states federal agencies “will expand and prioritize forest and rangeland restoration efforts in order to make natural areas and communities less vulnerable to catastrophic fire.”
Such preventive practices seem to be a task made for Sisyphus, as major demographic changes have put more people in the way of wildfires as they move into the wildland-urban interface (WUI). A report by the independent research firm Headwaters Economics, titled the Rising Cost of Wildfire Protection says that in the 1990s the cost of federal wildfire protection was about $1 billion a year. In the last 10 years, that cost has mushroomed to $3 billion annually.
“This tripling of federal fire protection expenses is partly due to the more severe fire seasons, but it also results from building homes in and near forests and other wildlands that are at risk from wildfires—the Wildland-Urban Interface,” the report adds. “While protecting the private lands of the WUI is largely a state and local responsibility, the development in the WUI has raised federal wildfire costs.”
An article in the Washington Post highlights the rising costs of megafires. “In recent years, the most extreme 1 percent of all wildfires have consumed 30 percent of total fire suppression budgets,” he article states. “The government has spent about $1.4 billion per year over the last 10 years fighting fires. The Rim Fire, which burned hundreds of thousands of acres near Yosemite National Park in California last year, cost more than $100 million alone.”
The Post argues that the administration’s wildfire funding proposal should avoid the partisan wrangling that has paralyzed much other legislation. The Obama proposal, according to the Post, is based on a Senate bill sponsored by Senators Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, and Michael D. Crapo, Republican of Idaho. A similar bill in the House also has bipartisan support. And a coalition of environmentalists, sportsmen, and timber producers has lobbied in support of the bill, the paper reports. It’s hard to imagine, but it’s never too late to hope for bipartisan support on this hot-button issue.