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Faced with criticism of its practice of monitoring certain fires rather than putting them out quickly, the US Forest Service has asked its firefighters to stop using this strategy for now, in order to prevent small fires from turning into uncontrollable conflagrations.
The policy shift came days after politicians in California and Western states, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, publicly challenged the “let it burn” approach in the wake of the Tamarack fire. The criticism was detailed in a Times article on Sunday.
Instead of letting a few small naturally occurring fires burn, the agency’s priorities will change this year, U.S. Forest Service chief Randy Moore told staff in a letter on Monday. The focus, he said, will be on firefighters and public safety.
Moore, who took over as head of the agency last month, wrote that the 2021 fire season is “unlike any previous one” and posed a “national crisis” that has forced the US Forest Service to suspend its mission of maintaining forests – at the same time letting forest fires clean them up – to make them more resistant to fires. Instead, he said, the agency will use its limited resources to protect lives and homes as more than 70 large fires burn across the United States, requiring more than 22,000 firefighters to fight.
“We are in a ‘triage mode’ where our primary focus has to be on fires that threaten communities and infrastructure,” Moore wrote, citing drought conditions across the West and coronavirus cases among firefighters. , further reducing the ranks.
Christopher Dicus, a fire and fuel professor at Cal Poly, called the change “cautious” and said the reassessment was “not at all surprising” given the “horrendous” drought and weather conditions in the city. the west.
Partly to reintroduce fire to the landscape after decades of suppression that led to dangerous proliferation, the Forest Service for many years allowed a few small fires in isolated areas to burn. The Tamarack fire was one of them.
The blaze began on July 4 with lightning strikes on a single tree in the Mokelumne Wilderness, a remote and rugged area southeast of Sacramento. Forestry officials decided to monitor it rather than attempt to turn it off, a move, according to a spokeswoman, based on limited resources and remoteness. But the blaze continued to grow, ultimately consuming nearly 69,000 acres, destroying homes and causing massive evacuations. It is now 82% contained.
Speaking to President Biden in a virtual meeting with other Western state governors last week, Newsom asked for help changing the “culture” of the US Forest Service when it comes to allowing to fires to burn.
Newsom said the “wait and see” policy was “the elephant in the room” when it came to wildfires.
“You can’t just go away, not with this climate, not with this drought,” he said last week during a visit to the Tamarack fire areas. “It’s life and death, and we can’t just fight fires like we did 20, 30, 40 years ago.
Newsom met with U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack at the August 2020 resort burn scar in northern California, the largest wildfire in California history, on Wednesday morning to discuss the how state and federal authorities can better work together on forest and fire management.
Vilsack pledged more federal assistance and cooperation, acknowledging concerns about past practices while stressing that with dozens of fires burning in the West and months to come in an extended fire season, he does not there aren’t enough resources to turn them all off.
“Frankly, I think it’s fair to say that over generations, over decades, we’ve tried to do this job on the cheap,” Vislak said. “We tried to get by, a little here, a little there, a little forest management here, a little fire suppression here. But the reality is that it has caught up with us, which is why we have an extraordinary number of catastrophic fires and why we need to dramatically increase our capacity. “
Vislak said the bipartisan infrastructure bill now under consideration in Congress would provide some of these resources, but ultimately it would take “billions” of dollars and years of catching up to create fire-resistant forests. .
Dicus, the professor, said: “A decade or more is a very reasonable wait given the scale of the problems and the amount of financial resources” it will take to solve them.
For decades, federal agencies that manage national forests and grasslands have fallen far behind in reducing brush, dead trees and other “fuels” for wildfires, in part due to a lack of financing and environmental disputes. Forests are also under stress from a bark beetle invasion after the latest drought, which left millions of trees dead in Sierra Nevada. In this volatile mix, climate change, with more intense weather conditions and rising temperatures, is making matters worse, as is the increase in the number of houses being built near wilderness.
While most experts agree that fire is part of the solution, attempts to use prescribed burns during wetter periods to help restore forests to healthier conditions have at times been blocked by California air districts. , concerned about smoke exacerbating existing air pollution.
Last year, California signed an agreement to step up the pace of preventative maintenance, such as forest clearing and more planned burns, but that work is still not federally funded. Newsom said on Wednesday the deal would cover at least one million acres of forest land each year. The federal government owns about 45 million acres in California, or about 45% of the state’s land.
While the policy change will affect how Forest Service fires are handled this season, Moore, the chief, said in his letter that the agency may resume letting the fires burn when conditions improve, including from the winter months.
Moore pointed out that fire remained an important tool and that the agency was not reverting to the “10 a.m.” policy, a directive instituted in 1935 that required firefighters to put out every fire the morning after it was started. This policy, which has led to years of aggressive fire suppression, has contributed to current conditions.
Instead, the Forest Service, Moore wrote, will revert to using prescribed burns “in the right places at the right time.”
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