Document text
> By Jim Wells September 05. 2014 2:00AM Hazardous fuel treatments vital to protection from severe wildfires No matter how much money we spend on suppressing wildfires, it will not prevent large-scale regional fires from occurring in dry forests. These fires are expected to occur in greater frequency and size, compromising many important social and environmental values and threatening lives and property. If we rely on suppression as our primary fire management tool, it will increasingly add to what instead we owe it to future generations to reduce — costs of fire management ($ billions annually), unhealthy smoke events, loss of lives and property, losses to our national treasure forests and with that their already endangered species, timber, recreation and eco-tourism opportunities, and other “ecosystem services” they provide, such as clean water, oxygenated air and the beauty of creation. The science clearly shows it’s cheaper and safer to treat fuels outside of fire season, using Hazardous Fuels Treatments (HFTs) that are ecologically appropriate, planned and prioritized to locations where treatment provides the most benefit and opportunities to minimize large-scale, high-severity wildfire. Funding for suppression will always be needed, of course. Prioritizing HFTs is the best way to support it. HFTs often decrease the undesirable effects of wildfires outright, but also indirectly, by making suppression easier and safer, maximizing the effectiveness of suppression while also minimizing its costs. HFTs that maximize the careful, professional use of controlled under-burning lessen the need for suppression by returning fire as an ecologically appropriate form of disturbance, and, on average, cost a small fraction per acre of what suppression costs. HFT programs maintain and further build a local workforce and capacity to engage in both HFT and suppression activities. There is solid scientific and firefighter consensus that HFTs are effective and will provide us the most benefits in the long run. (The very few published dissents object only to mechanical “thinning,” and the types of HFTs usually done in southwest Oregon do not fit the thinning prescriptions the dissenters are referring to.) Congress has under-funded fire management budgets for two decades, leading to money being taken from HFT programs in order to fund suppression efforts. In response to this uncertain budget environment, federal agencies shifted to a reactionary approach, increasingly spending money to suppress wildfires after they arose rather than proactively taking steps to conduct HFTs before wildfires happened. HFT budgets are in decline when they should be expanding. For any given piece of ground, the HFT approach requires up-front costs, but the suppression approach is more costly in the long run. Failing to pay now, we are consigning ourselves to pay much more later. We instead need to walk the path of encouraging fire regimes that maintain forest health. In southwest Oregon, 100,000 acres of HFTs were invested in over the past 10 years. Adding to the anecdotal evidence that exists throughout the West and across fire professions, a number of these HFTs were documented by a Bureau of Land Management fire ecologist to have prevented or mitigated severe wildfire effects and significantly aided in wildfire control during 2013, the most severe Oregon fire season in 50 years. More HFTs will be similarly documented, such as those that were instrumental in preventing the recent Oregon Gulch Fire from becoming much larger. Considerably more acres are in need of initial treatment, and many HFT areas need to be “maintained” via prescribed fire and/or mechanical means, every five to 15 years. Otherwise, the opportunities to receive returns on those investments will be lost as understory vegetation grows back. Of all the counties in the western states, Josephine and Jackson have the highest amount of developed land abutting “wildlands” (known as the “Wildland-Urban Interface” or “WUI”). The vast majority of the wildlands in the WUI in the two counties are BLM lands, 25 percent of homes in those counties are in the WUI and thus at risk, and yet, over the past three years, the HFT budget for the million-acre BLM Medford District sharply dropped to less than one-third of what it had averaged for over a decade before. The Southern Oregon Prescribed Fire Network is concerned about downward trends in funding for HFT programs on all lands, everywhere, public and private. But we and others are alarmed about the Medford District situation. A wide range of groups and individuals across the political spectrum have co-signed a recent letter to our governor and congressional delegation urging them to see to it that the BLM Medford District has robust funding for its HFT program. The rest of the public ought to clamor for that. Jim Wells of Ashland is chairman of the Southern Oregon Prescribed Fire Network. http://www.mailtribune.com/article/20140905/OPINION/140909888 © 2015 Copyright © 1995-2011 Crain Communications Inc. All Rights Reserved. Terms of Use Privacy Statement -->