FUSEE - National Fire Plan Summary Report

Abstract

The National Fire Plan was created after wildfires burned 6.5 million acres across the U.S. in 2000,including the dramatic Cerro Grande Fire that threatened the Los Alamos National Laboratory.The President,federal lawmakers and agency leaders took action to protect the nation from catastrophic wildfire and to restore fire-adapted ecosystems so fires would burn less aggressively.The resulting National Fire Plan is a complex program that addresses all aspects of fire and includes activities carried out by the USDA Forest Service, Department of the Interior,and state,tribal and local governments.President Bush modified the National Fire Plan in 2002 by introducing the Healthy Forests Initiative,which provides new tools and authorities to carry out the Fire Plan.

The purpose of this report is to provide a snapshot of the effects of the program on communities and forests.The report assembles a variety of data to create a “photo album ”of Fire Plan implementation.Consistent data to assess outcomes of the Plan across the West were nearly impossible to obtain,underscoring the need for a better system for documenting the effects of this important federal policy.

GOALS OF THE NATIONAL FIRE PLAN

The National Fire Plan is made up of five documents developed by different Administrations and state and federal entities (see chart on back cover).The most concise statement of Fire Plan goals is presented in the 10-Year Comprehensive Strategy.We o ganized this report using the Comprehensive Strategy goals:(1)improve fire suppression efforts;(2)reduce hazardous fuels; (3)restore fire adapted ecosystems;and (4)promote community assistance.A fifth goal,accountability,appears in two other National Fire Plan documents and is included in this report.

The Forest Trust used the goals of the National Fire Plan to create six evaluation criteria that reflect the interests of forest-dependent communities.The criteria do not correspond one-to-one with the goals of the 10-Year Comprehensive Strategy.For example,progress toward the goal of fire suppression is not evaluated,while two criteria are used to assess community assistance.The criteria used to evaluate the programs are:

Strategic allocation of funding to accomplish National Fire Plan goals.
Effective alteration of fuels to reduce the likelihood of catastrophic fire.
Restoration of natural fire regimes in fire-adapted ecosystem types.
Collaboration among all levels of government and with citizens.
Provision of local employment and training opportunities.
Protection of people and their property,including low-income communities,
from fire.

FUNDING

The distribution of National Fire Plan funding reflects policymakers’ emphasis on certain program goals. We reviewed National Fire Plan appropriations and expenditures from 2000-2003 and appropriations from 2004.

More than 70% of each annual Fire Plan appropriation is for fire suppression and preparedness.
For two of the last three years, the fire season was so severe that suppression appropriations were insufficient to cover firefighting costs. The USDA Forest Service and Department of the Interior paid for firefighting expenses with funds that were appropriated to other programs The “borrowed” funds included hazardous fuel reduction and community assistance appropriations. Funds for these programs were not fully restored by Congress.
The funds appropriated for hazardous fuel reduction were not fully expended in any of the last three years. Agency personnel have cited the need to suspend fuel treatments during periods of high fire danger as one reason for the shortfall. In addition, funds were not available for treatments at the appropriate time of year because they were “borrowed” to pay for fire suppression.
Funding for the National Fire Plan Economic Action Program declined steadily from 2000 to 2004, despite the ongoing need to develop and market products that utilize small diameter wood.

COMMUNITY ASSISTANCE

Economic Opportunity

Results of a number of studies from around the West provide a snapshot of the effectiveness of National Fire Plan programs at providing local employment and training opportunities.

Existing training programs contribute to the creation of new jobs and businesses in fuels reduction. However, many barriers still prevent small businesses from succeeding and providing living-wage employment in forest-dependent communities.
Many communities have lost their wood-processing infrastructure and find it difficult to attract or create new facilities to manufacture value-added products from small diameter wood. The Economic Action Program supports research and development in marketing and utilization, and when it was funded through the Fire Plan (2001-2003), resulted in new jobs and manufacturing in forest-dependent communities.
The National Fire Plan provides some economic benefits to rural communities by awarding a small percentage of fuels reduction jobs to local contractors and workers. Small local businesses were awarded more heavy equipment contracts than labor-intensive contracts, which were usually awarded to large non-local businesses.
The Plan created approximately 5,500 new fire suppression jobs in government agencies and resulted in new jobs for contract firefighters. A study from Oregon and Washington found that most of the people hired for the agency jobs are from nearby communities, while most of the contract fire suppression nationwide is accomplished through a handful of companies.
The National Fire Plan contains special authorities for fuel reduction that allow federal agencies to give preference to contractors who train and employ local workers. These authorities are helpful to rural communities but are not used consistently.
Significant barriers to rural economic development through the National Fire Plan include insufficient public investment in processing infrastructure and a new government emphasis on efficiency through large contracts that excludes small community-based businesses.

Community Protection

A primary goal of the National Fire Plan is to protect people and their property from wildfire. Federal accomplishment reports and independent studies are used to evaluate success at community protection. Community protection goals are accomplished with funds to state and rural fire assistance programs that allow local and volunteer fire departments to train firefighters and update their equipment.

Grants to a select number of communities in 2001 allowed them to prepare fire protection plans. However, after the first year, National Fire Plan funds were not appropriated for community plans.
Low-income households are more vulnerable than high-income households to the economic effects of wildfire, yet Fire Plan programs to assist homeowners do not target low-income communities. One national forest, however, tailored its technical assistance to low-income residents.

FIRE-RISK REDUCTION

Priority Setting

The National Fire Plan provided little direction to field managers about how to set priorities for fuel reduction treatments. Congress initially instructed the agencies to identify high-risk communities, but the process was poorly conceived and did not provide satisfactory results. The Western Governors’ Association suggested an approach to collaborative priority setting through the 10-Year Comprehensive Strategy. At the same time, the agencies adopted a system based on fire regime condition class. Other significant findings of our review:

The 10-Year Comprehensive Strategy Implementation Plan led to a new policy for a collaborative process to identify and set priorities for fuel treatment at the state and regional level. This policy is supported through an interagency memorandum of understanding committing to joint federal, state, local and tribal government planning of annual treatment plans beginning in 2004.
Fire regime condition class is a science-based framework for assessing ecological health. Condition class was introduced in legislation in the 108th Congress as a tool to set national treatment priorities. The Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003 applies certain provisions of the law to lands in two of the three condition classes. The law also supports the collaborative priority setting process from the Comprehensive Strategy.
The agencies recognized that coarse-resolution condition class data were insufficient to assist project planning. The new Forest Service Landfire project will develop high-resolution condition class data for the west in 2006.
Consistent identification of treatment priorities did not occur in the first two years of the National Fire Plan. However, new policies and tools are in place that may result in collaborative priority setting in 2004.

Collaboration

Several of the National Fire Plan documents called for collaboration between government and citizens to set priorities and carry out projects. The first examples of intergovernmental coordination date back to 1965 when the USDA Forest Service and Department of Interior started the National Interagency Fire Center and the Wildland Fire Coordinating Group. The National Fire Plan built on these earlier efforts to create new forums for collaboration between federal, state, local and tribal governments, including the Wildland Fire Leadership Council established in 2003.

The National Fire Plan does not provide formal channels for communities to engage in policy-oriented collaboration at the national level. For example, the Wildland Fire Leadership Council includes the National Association of Counties but does not have any community-level representation.
Collaboration that includes communities in place-based implementation of fuel reduction and restoration treatments is becoming more commonplace and successful.

Fuel Treatment Outcomes

Comprehensive evaluation of progress to reduce the likelihood of catastrophic fire by altering fire behavior is not possible with existing data. Instead, we review reports from the major 2000-2003 wildfires and provide descriptions of changes in the fuel profiles in treatment areas in the Southwest and northern Rocky Mountains.

Reports describing wildfire behavior and burn patterns indicate that strategically placed fuel breaks are effective at dropping crown fire to the ground and in particular, that wildfires slow when they burn into large areas where ground fuels have been cleared out by prescribed fire. The reports also indicate that the behavior of wind-driven wildfire is rarely influenced by fuel treatments, and that the severity of large wildfires is patchy.
Most prescriptions for fuels reduction adjust tree space and canopy closure, and remove ladder fuels, yet do not address tree regeneration even though the re-growth creates new ladder fuels.

RESTORATION

Natural Fire Restoration

Federal policy recognized fire as an important ecological process for the first time in 1995 when the Federal Wildfire Management Policy was created. This historic new policy established protocols to allow natural fires to burn (called “wildland fire use”) and to limit the century-old practice of fire suppression. Thus, we evaluate progress to implement the 1995 policy and to restore natural fire regimes with examples from Idaho and New Mexico.

The area where natural fires are allowed to burn is still small compared to the acres where fire is suppressed.
Most management units have been slow to adopt Fire Management Plans, a prerequisite for using natural fire to accomplish management goals, and many units write plans that lack the necessary substance for “wildland fire use.”
The federal agencies do not have a system to review Fire Management Plans and provide
quality control.
Prescribed burning and “wildland fire use” are the least expensive methods of reducing hazardous fuels. Wildland fire use treatments are only used to restore large areas (10,000 acres or more) in a few management units.

Restoration Treatment Outcomes

Evaluation of the effect of restoration treatments on ecosystem condition and natural fire regimes also is not possible with existing data. Therefore, we describe changes in forest structures in restoration treatments in the Southwest and northern Rocky Mountains.

Prescriptions for restoration treatment usually result in diversified forest structure and modified crown fuels.
Restoration treatments of stands with random spacing often retain the varied spatial arrangement if the prescriptions specify keeping large trees and creating new openings.
Prescriptions that consider a variety of forest characteristics usually result in a diverse stand structure. In contrast, fuel reduction treatments that rely on basal area and trees per acre to describe the desired future condition usually result in a uniform structure.

ACCOUNTABILITY

Tracking the Extent and Location of Treatments

Roughly 6 million acres of forests were treated under the National Fire Plan in 2001-2003. The Healthy Forests Restoration Act recently cleared the way for treatment of an additional 20 million acres. State by state maps showing treatment locations as points are provided on the National Fire Plan web site, yet they do not provide sufficient information to assess the extent of treatments in America’s forests or the proximity of projects to wildland urban interfaces, roadless areas, and old growth forests. As a result, some communities are tracking the location and extent of National Fire Plan projects on their own.

Some proactive communities created their own maps, which reveal that fuel reduction projects are usually located in areas where significant housing development has occurred in the wildland urban interface.
Treatments with mechanical thinning are almost always located near communities or in strategic locations to protect communities, while treatments using prescribed fire are commonly located in more remote forest areas.
The National Fire Plan Operations Reporting System (NFPORS) is not accessible to communities and others who seek to learn about the extent of National Fire Plan treatments.

CONCLUSIONS

We provide the following conclusions based on the full State of the National Fire Plan report:

The National Fire Plan successfully focuses land managers’ attention on the urgent problems created by a century of fire suppression and widespread home building in forested areas vulnerable to fire.
Efforts to reduce forest fuels and fire risk are hindered by the difficulty of establishing an equitable collaborative priority setting process and by the diversion of funds appropriated for fuels reduction to fire suppression.
Rural forest-dependent communities benefit from the National Fire Plan because of special authorities to encourage local employment. However, only modest employment gains have been documented and significant barriers to economic opportunities have been identified.
Assessment of progress to meet the goals of the National Fire Plan is difficult and piecemeal because of the size and complexity of the programs and the lack of a consistent, integrated system for tracking accomplishments and maintenance needs.

[The full State of the National Fire Plan report is available at: www.theforesttrust.org.]

State of the National Fire Plan: Executive Summary Laura Falk McCarthy Forest Trust March 2004 Abstract The National Fire Plan was created after wildfires burned 6.5 million acres across the U.S. in 2000,including the dramatic Cerro Grande Fire that threatened the Los Alamos National Laboratory.The President,federal lawmakers and agency leaders took action to protect the nation from catastrophic wildfire and to restore fire-adapted ecosystems so fires would burn less aggressively.The resulting National Fire Plan is a complex program that addresses all aspects of fire and includes activities carried out by the USDA Forest Service, Department of the Interior,and state,tribal and local governments.President Bush modified the National Fire Plan in 2002 by introducing the Healthy Forests Initiative,which provides new tools and authorities to carry out the Fire Plan. The purpose of this report is to provide a snapshot of the effects of the program on communities and forests.The report assembles a variety of data to create a “photo album ”of Fire Plan implementation.Consistent data to assess outcomes of the Plan across the West were nearly impossible to obtain,underscoring the need for a better system for documenting the effects of this important federal policy. GOALS OF THE NATIONAL FIRE PLAN The National Fire Plan is made up of five documents developed by different Administrations and state and federal entities (see chart on back cover).The most concise statement of Fire Plan goals is presented in the 10-Year Comprehensive Strategy.We o ganized this report using the Comprehensive Strategy goals:(1)improve fire suppression efforts;(2)reduce hazardous fuels; (3)restore fire adapted ecosystems;and (4)promote community assistance.A fifth goal,accountability,appears in two other National Fire Plan documents and is included in this report. The Forest Trust used the goals of the National Fire Plan to create six evaluation criteria that reflect the interests of forest-dependent communities.The criteria do not correspond one-to-one with the goals of the 10-Year Comprehensive Strategy.For example,progress toward the goal of fire suppression is not evaluated,while two criteria are used to assess community assistance.The criteria used to evaluate the programs are: Strategic allocation of funding to accomplish National Fire Plan goals. Effective alteration of fuels to reduce the likelihood of catastrophic fire. Restoration of natural fire regimes in fire-adapted ecosystem types. Collaboration among all levels of government and with citizens. Provision of local employment and training opportunities. Protection of people and their property,including low-income communities, from fire. FUNDING The distribution of National Fire Plan funding reflects policymakers’ emphasis on certain program goals. We reviewed National Fire Plan appropriations and expenditures from 2000-2003 and appropriations from 2004. More than 70% of each annual Fire Plan appropriation is for fire suppression and preparedness. For two of the last three years, the fire season was so severe that suppression appropriations were insufficient to cover firefighting costs. The USDA Forest Service and Department of the Interior paid for firefighting expenses with funds that were appropriated to other programs The “borrowed” funds included hazardous fuel reduction and community assistance appropriations. Funds for these programs were not fully restored by Congress. The funds appropriated for hazardous fuel reduction were not fully expended in any of the last three years. Agency personnel have cited the need to suspend fuel treatments during periods of high fire danger as one reason for the shortfall. In addition, funds were not available for treatments at the appropriate time of year because they were “borrowed” to pay for fire suppression. Funding for the National Fire Plan Economic Action Program declined steadily from 2000 to 2004, despite the ongoing need to develop and market products that utilize small diameter wood. COMMUNITY ASSISTANCE Economic Opportunity Results of a number of studies from around the West provide a snapshot of the effectiveness of National Fire Plan programs at providing local employment and training opportunities. Existing training programs contribute to the creation of new jobs and businesses in fuels reduction. However, many barriers still prevent small businesses from succeeding and providing living-wage employment in forest-dependent communities. Many communities have lost their wood-processing infrastructure and find it difficult to attract or create new facilities to manufacture value-added products from small diameter wood. The Economic Action Program supports research and development in marketing and utilization, and when it was funded through the Fire Plan (2001-2003), resulted in new jobs and manufacturing in forest-dependent communities. The National Fire Plan provides some economic benefits to rural communities by awarding a small percentage of fuels reduction jobs to local contractors and workers. Small local businesses were awarded more heavy equipment contracts than labor-intensive contracts, which were usually awarded to large non-local businesses. The Plan created approximately 5,500 new fire suppression jobs in government agencies and resulted in new jobs for contract firefighters. A study from Oregon and Washington found that most of the people hired for the agency jobs are from nearby communities, while most of the contract fire suppression nationwide is accomplished through a handful of companies. The National Fire Plan contains special authorities for fuel reduction that allow federal agencies to give preference to contractors who train and employ local workers. These authorities are helpful to rural communities but are not used consistently. Significant barriers to rural economic development through the National Fire Plan include insufficient public investment in processing infrastructure and a new government emphasis on efficiency through large contracts that excludes small community-based businesses. Community Protection A primary goal of the National Fire Plan is to protect people and their property from wildfire. Federal accomplishment reports and independent studies are used to evaluate success at community protection. Community protection goals are accomplished with funds to state and rural fire assistance programs that allow local and volunteer fire departments to train firefighters and update their equipment. Grants to a select number of communities in 2001 allowed them to prepare fire protection plans. However, after the first year, National Fire Plan funds were not appropriated for community plans. Low-income households are more vulnerable than high-income households to the economic effects of wildfire, yet Fire Plan programs to assist homeowners do not target low-income communities. One national forest, however, tailored its technical assistance to low-income residents. FIRE-RISK REDUCTION Priority Setting The National Fire Plan provided little direction to field managers about how to set priorities for fuel reduction treatments. Congress initially instructed the agencies to identify high-risk communities, but the process was poorly conceived and did not provide satisfactory results. The Western Governors’ Association suggested an approach to collaborative priority setting through the 10-Year Comprehensive Strategy. At the same time, the agencies adopted a system based on fire regime condition class. Other significant findings of our review: The 10-Year Comprehensive Strategy Implementation Plan led to a new policy for a collaborative process to identify and set priorities for fuel treatment at the state and regional level. This policy is supported through an interagency memorandum of understanding committing to joint federal, state, local and tribal government planning of annual treatment plans beginning in 2004. Fire regime condition class is a science-based framework for assessing ecological health. Condition class was introduced in legislation in the 108th Congress as a tool to set national treatment priorities. The Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003 applies certain provisions of the law to lands in two of the three condition classes. The law also supports the collaborative priority setting process from the Comprehensive Strategy. The agencies recognized that coarse-resolution condition class data were insufficient to assist project planning. The new Forest Service Landfire project will develop high-resolution condition class data for the west in 2006. Consistent identification of treatment priorities did not occur in the first two years of the National Fire Plan. However, new policies and tools are in place that may result in collaborative priority setting in 2004. Collaboration Several of the National Fire Plan documents called for collaboration between government and citizens to set priorities and carry out projects. The first examples of intergovernmental coordination date back to 1965 when the USDA Forest Service and Department of Interior started the National Interagency Fire Center and the Wildland Fire Coordinating Group. The National Fire Plan built on these earlier efforts to create new forums for collaboration between federal, state, local and tribal governments, including the Wildland Fire Leadership Council established in 2003. The National Fire Plan does not provide formal channels for communities to engage in policy-oriented collaboration at the national level. For example, the Wildland Fire Leadership Council includes the National Association of Counties but does not have any community-level representation. Collaboration that includes communities in place-based implementation of fuel reduction and restoration treatments is becoming more commonplace and successful. Fuel Treatment Outcomes Comprehensive evaluation of progress to reduce the likelihood of catastrophic fire by altering fire behavior is not possible with existing data. Instead, we review reports from the major 2000-2003 wildfires and provide descriptions of changes in the fuel profiles in treatment areas in the Southwest and northern Rocky Mountains. Reports describing wildfire behavior and burn patterns indicate that strategically placed fuel breaks are effective at dropping crown fire to the ground and in particular, that wildfires slow when they burn into large areas where ground fuels have been cleared out by prescribed fire. The reports also indicate that the behavior of wind-driven wildfire is rarely influenced by fuel treatments, and that the severity of large wildfires is patchy. Most prescriptions for fuels reduction adjust tree space and canopy closure, and remove ladder fuels, yet do not address tree regeneration even though the re-growth creates new ladder fuels. RESTORATION Natural Fire Restoration Federal policy recognized fire as an important ecological process for the first time in 1995 when the Federal Wildfire Management Policy was created. This historic new policy established protocols to allow natural fires to burn (called “wildland fire use”) and to limit the century-old practice of fire suppression. Thus, we evaluate progress to implement the 1995 policy and to restore natural fire regimes with examples from Idaho and New Mexico. The area where natural fires are allowed to burn is still small compared to the acres where fire is suppressed. Most management units have been slow to adopt Fire Management Plans, a prerequisite for using natural fire to accomplish management goals, and many units write plans that lack the necessary substance for “wildland fire use.” The federal agencies do not have a system to review Fire Management Plans and provide quality control. Prescribed burning and “wildland fire use” are the least expensive methods of reducing hazardous fuels. Wildland fire use treatments are only used to restore large areas (10,000 acres or more) in a few management units. Restoration Treatment Outcomes Evaluation of the effect of restoration treatments on ecosystem condition and natural fire regimes also is not possible with existing data. Therefore, we describe changes in forest structures in restoration treatments in the Southwest and northern Rocky Mountains. Prescriptions for restoration treatment usually result in diversified forest structure and modified crown fuels. Restoration treatments of stands with random spacing often retain the varied spatial arrangement if the prescriptions specify keeping large trees and creating new openings. Prescriptions that consider a variety of forest characteristics usually result in a diverse stand structure. In contrast, fuel reduction treatments that rely on basal area and trees per acre to describe the desired future condition usually result in a uniform structure. ACCOUNTABILITY Tracking the Extent and Location of Treatments Roughly 6 million acres of forests were treated under the National Fire Plan in 2001-2003. The Healthy Forests Restoration Act recently cleared the way for treatment of an additional 20 million acres. State by state maps showing treatment locations as points are provided on the National Fire Plan web site, yet they do not provide sufficient information to assess the extent of treatments in America’s forests or the proximity of projects to wildland urban interfaces, roadless areas, and old growth forests. As a result, some communities are tracking the location and extent of National Fire Plan projects on their own. Some proactive communities created their own maps, which reveal that fuel reduction projects are usually located in areas where significant housing development has occurred in the wildland urban interface. Treatments with mechanical thinning are almost always located near communities or in strategic locations to protect communities, while treatments using prescribed fire are commonly located in more remote forest areas. The National Fire Plan Operations Reporting System (NFPORS) is not accessible to communities and others who seek to learn about the extent of National Fire Plan treatments. CONCLUSIONS We provide the following conclusions based on the full State of the National Fire Plan report: The National Fire Plan successfully focuses land managers’ attention on the urgent problems created by a century of fire suppression and widespread home building in forested areas vulnerable to fire. Efforts to reduce forest fuels and fire risk are hindered by the difficulty of establishing an equitable collaborative priority setting process and by the diversion of funds appropriated for fuels reduction to fire suppression. Rural forest-dependent communities benefit from the National Fire Plan because of special authorities to encourage local employment. However, only modest employment gains have been documented and significant barriers to economic opportunities have been identified. Assessment of progress to meet the goals of the National Fire Plan is difficult and piecemeal because of the size and complexity of the programs and the lack of a consistent, integrated system for tracking accomplishments and maintenance needs. [The full State of the National Fire Plan report is available at: www.theforesttrust.org.]