THE SKY’S THE LIMIT: THE SOBERANES FIRE SUPPRESSION SIEGE OF 2016
The Soberanes Fire Suppression Siege offers an extreme example of excessive, unaccountable, budget-busting suppression spending that is causing a fiscal crisis in the U.S. Forest Service. It demonstrates the absolute necessity for Congress to perform critical oversight of wildfire suppression spending by federal agencies.
Flying Blind: Federal Misuse of Airtankers Adds to Skyrocketing Fire Suppression Costs Accountability and Reform Needed
Wildfire suppression expenditures have averaged over $1 billion per year since 2000, but with a 71 percent increase in spending in the last five years the annual average is now $2.9 billion.. Firefighting now accounts for 61 percent of the Forest Service’s total discretionary budget.8 While suppression cost-containment has been a stated goal within the agency and a keen interest among Members of Congress for the last 15 years, there are no legal or policy mandates requiring Forest Service line officers or incident commanders to limit costs, and they have tremendous discretion in suppression expenditures.11 Recent research challenging the costs and effectiveness of different suppression strategies, tactics, and resources all beg the question—what are taxpayers getting from the billions of dollars spent fighting fires?
Smoke Signals
Smoke Signals: The Need for Public Tolerance and Regulatory Relief for Wildland Smoke Emissions
1. Why forest and rangeland fires and the smoke they emit are inevitable, and how the historic deficit of fire on public land, in addition to climate change, will lead to more fire in the coming decades; 2. How fire management has changed as scientists have come to understand the vital, essential role of fire in restoring and maintaining the ecological health of wildlands; 3. How Clean Air Act regulation of wildland fire smoke is forcing land managers to institute regressive, expensive, and counterproductive fire suppression policies that go against the best science and merely defer smoke emissions into the future; and 4. How land managers can apply fire management strategies and techniques to lessen smoke emissions while allowing more fires to burn.
Wildland Fire Use
Fire is an essential, natural process on much public land, where natural ignition sources, like lightning, are abundant. Over the past century, fire suppression has altered historic fire cycles, leading to a dangerous build-up of vegetation in our wildlands. · One way for land management agencies to restore healthy conditions and protect communities is to take advantage of some natural fires. Wildland fire use projects are lightning-caused fires that are allowed to burn and spread naturally when they do not threaten people or property.
Getting Burned: A Taxpayer’s Guide to Wildfire Suppression Costs
Wildfire suppression costs are soaring to over one billion tax dollars per year. This is causing a fiscal crisis in the Forest Service which has exceeded its suppression budget almost every year for the last 20 years. The agency now spends nearly half of its total appropriated budget on firefighting, and has been forced to transfer billions of dollars away from several non-fire land management programs to pay for suppression. Recent legislative changes to suppression funding (e.g. the FLAME fund) may provide better accounting for suppression costs, but do not impose firm budgetary limits on suppression spending, nor absolutely prevent continued transfers of funds from other management programs to pay for firefighting.
A Reporter’s Guide to Wildland Fire
This Reporter’s Guide to Wildland Fire is intended to help journalists improve the accuracy, quality and value of their stories on wildfire events and fire management. Using tips and tools in this Reporter’s Guide will help journalists produce more powerful, informative and even inspiring news stories that reflect the best ideals of journalism. It is also hoped that this Guide will inspire more alternative and investigative reporting on wildfire events including a broader array of fire management issues beyond the stereotypical focus on emergency firefighting only
A Homeowner’s Guide to Fire-Resistant Home Construction
Defending homes from fast-spreading high-intensity wildfires is one of the most difficult and dangerous duties for wildland firefighters. FUSEE feels strongly that informing homeowners about fire-resistant construction materials will help wildland firefighters better protect communities, and reduce some of the risks to firefighter safety. Moreover, when rural homes and communities are better prepared for wildland fire, then more options and opportunities open up to properly manage fires to restore forests and grasslands degraded from past fire exclusion.
Collateral Damage: The Environmental Effects of Firefighting
The 500,000 acre Biscuit Fire was the Nation’s largest wildfire in 2002, and was the world’s most expensive wildfire suppression incident in history at that time. Although the wild area was over 85% wilderness and roadless area with tens of thousands of acres of climax old-growth forest, aggressive firefighting actions severely damaged the landscape, and the Biscuit Fire area became the largest USFS timber sale proposal in modern history when the agency planned to “salvage” log trees in areas severely burned by high-intensity backburning.