US fire managers predict bad year for blazes
US: May 12, 2008
SALMON, Idaho - US fire managers are forecasting a grim year for blazes in
drought-plagued Western states, just weeks after a premature start to the
Southwest's wildfire season.
This comes even as the US Forest Service, the lead agency for fighting fires
on vast swaths of public and private lands, is reassessing a years-old model
that sought to contain all blazes at all times.
Environmental and financial strains paired with demographic changes have
made that strategy ineffective in an era of record-size fires sweeping
across the West, experts say.
"We can't do things like we did in the 1970s and 1980s," said George Weldon,
deputy director of fire, aviation and air for a regional Forest Service
office in Montana. "The fire environment in a lot of situations is exceeding
our capabilities to control large fires that burn the entire summer."
Climate models show a warming West where snowmelt from the mountains occurs
earlier and dry conditions persist longer, setting the stage for blazes that
reset measures for scale and intensity.
In 2006, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography released what scientists
consider the definitive study on the link between global warming and
worsening western wildfires, the same year the nation registered an all-time
high of 9.8 million acres burned and the deaths of 24 wilderness
fire-fighters.
Today, 43 percent of the Forest Service budget - $4.5 billion for this
fiscal year - is funnelled to its fire program, up from 18 percent in 2000.
That means the agency has less money for everything from recreation to range
management, even as fire bosses become more selective about the blazes they
will fight.
FIRE-DEPENDENT ECOSYSTEMS
Heightening the challenge facing fire crews is the increased push of housing
into natural, fire-dependent ecosystems that once would have been allowed to
burn.
Last summer, blazes that broke out in the West accounted for more than 7
million acres of the 9.3 million US acres burned by wildfires, according to
data from the National Interagency Fire Centre.
Idaho led states for burned areas at nearly 2 million acres, followed by
California at more than 1 million acres and Nevada at about 900,000 acres.
Fires in those three states killed at least a dozen people, forced the
evacuations of hundreds of thousands, cost more than $1 billion to fight and
tallied an untold amount in damages.
In Idaho, smoke billowed for weeks into a host of communities from
surrounding wilderness-based blazes that fire managers determined did not
pose the imminent threat of wildfires raging near the upscale resort
community of Sun Valley, where the bulk of crews and equipment was sent.
The tactics used in that state, where lives and property trumped natural
resource values, show the shift among fire bosses in evaluating which blazes
to fight.
"We need to look at how we do business," said Weldon. "It's not driven by
costs so much as determining whether certain actions are going to be
effective."
Weather prediction will play a key role, experts said, prompting decisions
about the timing and scope of fire-suppression efforts.
With the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration Climate Prediction
Centre pointing to higher than usual temperatures this summer for the West
and lower than average rainfall, fire bosses must "be more proactive on how
to deploy fire fighting resources," said Rick Ochoa, fire weather program
manager for the National Interagency Fire Centre.
In the face of mounting wildfire risks, federal, state and local governments
are seeking to place at least some of the onus on homeowners themselves.
"Where we live and work now is going to require us to have survivable
structures and survivable communities," said Weldon. "People will have to
decide if where their houses are, what types of materials the houses are
made of and whether clearing around the houses will make them survivable
when wildfire occurs."
(Editing by Vicki Allen)
Story by Laura Zuckerman
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
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