Fires out West

Wildfires are ravaging almost every Western state. With months to go until the snow falls, this already is the most damaging summer since 1988. With every day and every new fire, a new record is set.

Blame prolonged drought and high winds, conditions that are not unusual but that clearly are exaggerated this year. Blame as well 92 years of poor forest management and three years of mismanagement and neglect.

From it founding in 1905 until a policy change in 1997, the National Forest Service had a stern policy regarding wildfires – kill them before they spread. The fires, often sparked by lightening, were usually dispatched with admirable speed, but the highly flammable undergrowth that remained ensured that the next fire would be bigger, hotter, even more difficult to squelch.

In 1997, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt wisely realized that the natural cycle had been upset and initiated the policy of controlled burns to clear out the undergrowth that nature for eons had cleared. He unwisely, however, initiated this policy without enough trained firefighters to carry it out and without enough money to train them. The most visible result was the devastating uncontrollable fire earlier this season at Los Alamos, in which 47,000 acres were torched and 380 buildings destroyed or damaged.

The Forest Service’s overall record of managing controlled burns has been good – just 1 percent of the more than 3,700 burns stayed within the prescribed boundaries. The number of uncontrolled fires this year will damage that record and the increased numbers planned for the next five years, especially considering the projections of more hot, dry winds, is cause for alarm.

The practice already is under attack from environmentalists who say the impact on air quality from all that smoke is too dear a price to pay for the ecological benefits, but the biggest obstacle to truly controlled burns is money.

The General Accounting Office estimates that the cost of adequately staffed, trained and equipped controlled burns on the 39 million acres at highest risk is as much as $12 billion during the next 14 years. That’s about $725 million a year, roughly 10 times the current level of Forest Service funding.

Unfortunately, doing nothing is no longer an option. The West is no longer a vast expanse of wilderness, but wilderness broken up by rapidly expanding cities and towns, by more and more resorts and vacation homes. Letting wildfires simply run their course would cause incalculable property damage and incomprehensible loss of life. Not to mention the political death of any politician who proposed it.

Secretary Babbitt is hardly Congress’ favorite member of the Clinton administration and the Interior Department is hardly the favorite federal agency of many Westerners. Giving that secretary and that department substantially more money may be an appalling prospect, but the only alternative is to wait for the snow to fall. And then wait for next summer.