Forest Fire Risk May Be Growing Too Hot for Feds to Handle

WASHINGTON — A thick blend of ponderosa pine, Douglas fir and grand fir reach for the heavens in a lush forest on the eastern flank of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains.

This could be a nature lover’s dream.

But to Stephen Fitzgerald, the scene in the Santiam Pass area of the Deschutes National Forest is a deadly accident waiting to happen.

“Fire is just a matter of time,” said Fitzgerald, of the Oregon Society of American Foresters. “If we don’t get anything big this year, it will happen down the road.”

One of every five acres of national forest land--39 million acres, mostly in the West--is at a high risk for damaging, high-intensity wildfires, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

While the agency considers the overall risk no greater this year than in recent years, reports of hundreds of small wildfires in the West indicate firefighters could be busy.

“The dryness that we’ve seen in the East has moved west,” said Michael Fitzpatrick of the federal government’s interagency fire center in Portland, Ore.

Forest Service officials said they take the fire risk seriously.

The agency since 1990 has increased its spending on a key fire prevention program--hazardous fuel reduction--sevenfold, to $65 million this year.

The program finances efforts such as thinning forests, killing weeds and conducting controlled burns.

Even so, the problem remains massive.

“To think we are going to turn the corner on this in the matter of a decade even is optimistic at best,” said Chris Wood, a top aide to Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck.

Critics say the Forest Service is moving too slowly, and that it might already be too late for the agency to save large swaths of forests.

Rep. Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho) has been among the most ardent critics.

In public appearances she often displays a Forest Service map of the nation’s forests. Areas that face the greatest fire threat are shaded red.

The Idaho panhandle and western Montana are shaded a darker red than anyplace else on the map, and Chenoweth calls the area “the great red spot.”

“My colleagues can see why I get so excited about this,” Chenoweth said during a House floor debate last month, gesturing toward the map. “These are federal lands that have been let go to waste.”

Her answer? More logging to reduce the amount of timber that might cause a catastrophic fire.

But environmentalists are wary of any excuse the Forest Service might use to reverse a decade of logging cutbacks, which have reduced the harvest in federal forests by 70%.

“The whole argument that logging reduces fire risk is an argument that has been developed to get the cut back up,” said Ron Mitchell, director of the Idaho Sporting Congress, an environmental group based in Boise.

Forest fires on federal lands have been on the rise in recent years, according to the General Accounting Office, Congress’ investigative arm.

The GAO reported in April that the number of fires burning more than 1,000 acres has more than tripled since 1984, and the acreage burned has quadrupled in the same period.

The GAO said 90% of the large fires since 1990 have burned in the interior West, a massive area that extends from Mexico to Canada, and from the Black Hills in South Dakota to the Cascade Mountains in Washington and Oregon.

Although people disagree on how to reduce the risk of fires, most agree on how the risk came about.

“Smokey Bear did his job too well,” Wood said.

The Forest Service has had decades worth of successes in fighting fires since the agency’s worst fire year on record--4.9 million acres burned in 1910.

High-flying airplanes and well-trained “smoke jumpers” have helped contain forest fires that used to rage naturally through forested areas as part of nature’s cleansing process.

The successes have resulted in an overgrowth of brush and smaller trees in many forests that have increased the risk of future fires.

Adding to the problem is suburban sprawl. People have moved to formerly remote forest areas such as Redmond, Ore., and increased the risk that forest fires will harm people or property.

Sprawl has also made it more difficult for the Forest Service to reduce fire risk through methods such as controlled burns.

“People don’t particularly like smoke wafting through their neighborhood for three or four days,” said George Chesley, an interagency fire manager for the Deschutes and Ochoco national forests in Oregon.

Even past logging practices play a role.

In decades past, loggers would remove the tall, desirable ponderosa pines and leave behind fir trees. The firs grow densely, have branches lower to the ground and are often more susceptible to disease and fires.

Many of the firs don’t grow as tall as the ponderosas and form ladders to quickly carry ground fires to the towering pines.

Beetle or budworm infestations also play a role, leaving trees weakened or dead and susceptible to fire. And weather--dryness and wind--may be the biggest factor of all.

With the fire threat looming, the Forest Service in 1997 decided to increase the amount of land it treats with fire prevention projects, from 570,000 acres that year to 3 million acres a year by 2005.

The agency then plans to continue treating 3 million acres a year through 2015.

Even at that pace, however, the GAO found that 10 million acres of forest land may still be at risk of a major fire in 2015.

The GAO also estimated a hefty price tag of eradicating fire risk--up to $12 billion by 2015.

Wood acknowledged that funding fire prevention could be a tough sell. But he added, “We’re not going to fix them [the forests] if the American people are not willing to make investments.”

Meanwhile, Chenoweth has introduced a bill that would allow the Forest Service to more quickly log areas at risk of a fire near populated areas. The bill is stalled so far, but she is trying to compromise with lawmakers worried about the bill.

And as for the Santiam Pass area of the Deschutes, forest officials have taken several steps in the last 18 months to reduce what they acknowledge is a fire risk. Efforts have included helicopters to remove trees, controlled fires to remove some thick undergrowth and using state and county prisoners to remove shrubs.

“We’re certainly making a difference,” Chesley said.