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Fire Chronicle #28
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Laura McCarthy, Forest Trust
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Nov 30, 2004 06:50 PST
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FIRE CHRONICLE: Stories of the National Fire Plan
Number 28
November 30, 2004
BLUE RIBBON PANEL OFFERS BOLD STRATEGIES TO REDUCE FIRE SUPRESSION COSTS
Large western wildfires in 2002 and 2003 cost millions of dollars to
suppress and forced the federal land management agencies to siphon funds
from essential programs. After the annual firefighting tab passed the
one billion dollar mark, and agency partners protested the practice of
borrowing money for fire suppression, the Wildland Fire Leadership
Council (WFLC) commissioned a panel on fire suppression costs in January
of 2004. Fourteen senior managers from federal, state and local
governments were charged with identifying the barriers to fire cost
containment and providing recommendations within the context of existing
budgets and resources. Their final report, “Large Fire Suppression
Costs: Strategies for Cost Management,” was presented to the WFLC for
consideration in September.
The panel began its work by sifting through the stack of reports on fire
costs generated over the past decade. These reports collectively
contained more than 300 recommendations. The panel members gathered
additional information from non-governmental organizations, federal land
management agencies and government entities such as the Office of
Management and Budget and the General Accountability Office. From this
analysis, the panel produced seven recommendations that should, it
wrote, “lead to a new paradigm that will make substantive changes in
large fire cost management.”
Past reviews of firefighting costs identified more efficient ways to
manage large fires, but the panel argued that these reports resulted in
only marginal changes. “Unwillingness to take greater risks,
unwillingness to recognize that suppression techniques are sometimes
futile, the ‘free’ nature of wildfire suppression funding, and public
and political expectations are all potential contributors to the
underlying causes for the high cost of large fires,” said the panel.
Furthermore, the likely prospect of a 20-30 year drought, the
accumulation of forest fuels after 90 years of fire suppression, and the
proliferation of houses and people in the wildland-urban interface, led
the panel to caution that the possibility of actually lowering
firefighting costs is remote. Instead, they suggested, cost management
will be needed to prevent skyrocketing expenditures in the face of
current climatic and demographic trends that will only increase the
firefighting workload.
The panel’s first recommendation is to replace the current system of
“severity funding” – where Congress pays the fire suppression tab –
because it has no built-in accountability. The new system they recommend
would provide incentives to reduce costs and to reinvest allocated funds
that are not spent during low fire years in a national suppression
reserve fund. The panel offers this hypothetical example to illustrate
their innovative proposal:
"A geographic area (region, state, etc.) receives an allocation for
wildland fire suppression of $100. If the fire season requires the area
to expend an amount less than $100 to suppress wildfires, 51% of the
resultant savings is carried over by the area to the next fiscal year to
be used as they decide on wildland fire management activities of any
kind. The remaining 49% of the savings is returned to the national
suppression reserves account. If the fire season requires the area to
expend an amount greater than $100 to suppress wildfires, the area must
contribute (pay) up to $20 of their own allocated money (from any
appropriation) before the national suppression reserves become available
to them. Thus, if over $120 is spent, the national suppression reserve
would pay the amount over $120. If the fire season requires the area to
expend exactly $100 to suppress wildfires, nothing happens."
Careful planning is another way the federal agencies can reduce
firefighting expenditures. The panel examined the resource and land
management plans produced by the federal agencies, and found that none
of them addressed wildland fire costs in their analysis of management
options. Agency personnel responding to wildfire events consider safety
first, but then, in the absence of guidance in written plans, are unable
to decide if the suppression costs are justified given the resource
values at stake. The goal of the second recommendation is “to establish
a ‘line of sight’ from land management planning through fire management
plan preparation and on into the wildland fire situation analysis that
incorporates cost management as a priority.” The report offers that
“consideration of wildland fire suppression costs in the planning
process could reduce the costs of large wildfires by: allowing for more
wildland fire use…displaying the cost of land management
constraints…[and] changing the expectations for suppression costs…”
The third and fourth recommendations address the management, placement,
and deployment of firefighting personnel. Both are based on the strategy
that the “least expensive wildfire is the one that never starts.” The
third recommendation addresses strategic pre-positioning of national
firefighting resources using modern fire prediction tools. The fourth
recommendation recognizes that “volunteer local resources are often the
first to respond to a fire start.” It offers measures to ensure that
response teams closest to the fire, including those of local and tribal
governments, make initial response.
The panel realized that “the continued rise in suppression costs
suggests that future fuels reduction strategies will not be able to
fully or efficiently mitigate the risks of hazardous fuels.” Treatments
are expensive, there are many acres needing treatment, and continued
drought is likely. Thus the panel’s fifth recommendation, which
introduces several forms of fire management triage. First, it suggests
that suppression strategies shift from 100% perimeter control to “point
of control” efforts to protect property and high-value resource areas.
It also suggests that the agencies identify and report acres burned by
wildland fire as contributing to the reduction of hazardous fuels. The
panel also recommends that the agencies analyze and manage burned areas
to ensure that excessive fuels do not accumulate there again. Finally,
the panel recommends that agencies be required to evaluate opportunities
to use recently burned areas as boundaries for wildland fire use.
The federal fire program expends more than $2 billion annually. The
several dozen studies examined by the panel showed universal concern
about data – specifically that the types of data currently collected do
not answer the most common questions about suppression expenditures, nor
about fuels treatment expenditures and treatment characteristics. Thus,
the sixth recommendation calls for a major overhaul in data collection
and interpretation. The panel anticipates that many people will find
this recommendation “boring…want[ing] solutions rather than system
improvements,” but asserts that, without better data, the agencies will
not be able to assess their firefighting effectiveness or cost
management efficiency.
The panel found that reports on wildfire costs are incomplete and
misleading, and not useful for guiding performance. The seventh
recommendation is for a new “benefit cost measure” to gauge suppression
cost effectiveness.
The panel has presented WFLC with a broad suite of action items that
address the core problems with the management systems established to
support a national fire policy of suppression. National fire policy has
evolved significantly in the last decade, and so too must the systems
that support fire policies. Failure to act on the panel’s
recommendations will ensure continually escalating fire suppression
costs that divert funds that were appropriated for proactive management,
including fuels reduction, restoration, and community assistance.
According to the panel, successful implementation of such substantive
changes will require the full support and attention of agency leaders
and careful oversight by the WFLC. The Council is currently deliberating
upon whether and how to implement the panel’s seven recommendations.
The full text of the panel’s report, “Large Fire Suppression Costs:
Strategies for Cost Management,” is available at
www.fireplan.gov/reports/2004/costmanagement.pdf
FIRE CHRONICLE is edited by the Forest Guild. Laura McCarthy, Program
Director, wrote this issue. The Forest Guild welcomes your comments,
stories, and observations about how the national fire plan is being
implemented (just send a reply message and it will go to the list
moderator). To subscribe to FIRE CHRONICLE go to
http://www.topica.com/lists/firechronicles/ or send an email message to
lau-@theforesttrust.org.
PAST ISSUES OF FIRE CHRONICLE can be downloaded from
http://www.theforesttrust.org/forest_protection.html#fire
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