Arrow-right Camera
Subscribe now

This column reflects the opinion of the writer. Learn about the differences between a news story and an opinion column.

Shawn Vestal: Better preparation for wildfires would help in fighting them

As we welcome firefighters from Australia to help battle this year’s tragic, costly and historic wildfires, it’s worth asking ourselves whether we’re doing enough to protect our own state.

State fire program budgets have not been restored since huge cuts following the recession. Last year, lawmakers rejected most of a $4.5 million request to add equipment and firefighters. And coming up with money to reduce the load of dead or dying timber in the forest has been similarly tough, said Peter Goldmark, state commissioner of public lands.

“The Legislature has been good about paying the bill after the fire bell rings, but it’s been very hard to get them to put money into preparedness,” Goldmark said in an interview Wednesday. “We desperately need to have more resources to protect the public.”

This is more than simply a question of when the state pays the bill. Giving short shrift to preparedness efforts makes it tougher to stop fires when they’re relatively small – by the time the crews and equipment arrive from other states and even other countries, things have already gotten very bad.

This is becoming a vicious cycle, and not just in Washington. As crisis firefighting takes up ever-greater resources, prevention and preparation efforts are shorted. This year the Forest Service spent more than half its budget on firefighting, for the first time in its 110-year history, according to a new agency report. At this rate, firefighting costs will make up two-thirds of the agency’s budget in 10 years. Other programs are being slashed dramatically.

This is the worst fire season on record in Washington. Three firefighters have died, buildings have burned, and communities all over Eastern Washington have lived in the smoky and potentially destructive shadow of these enormous fires. It is possible that the acreage burned this year will double last year’s – and last year was a record. So far, 732,000 acres have been torched this year, with no end in sight; last year it was 419,000.

Goldmark makes no bones about his department’s ability to keep up: “The need is huge, and we are woefully understaffed. … We can’t even get the job done properly.”

There are so many fires burning, and so many communities threatened, that as crews prioritize keeping towns, there’s nothing left for fighting fires in the forest, he said.

Meanwhile, crews from all over the country are arriving to help – from California, New Mexico, Wyoming, Colorado …

“We’re having to ask for help from other countries,” Goldmark said. “Australia is sending crews.”

Goldmark said the DNR’s budget problems stem from decisions made in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis. As lawmakers wrestled with a budget shortfall, they made significant cuts to the fire program – eliminating $25 million from an $80 million pot of state funding. (Most of the DNR’s budget comes from its management of timber and agricultural lands and other sources, not the state general fund.)

Before that, the fire program funding had been stable, he said. Between then and this year’s Legislature, Goldmark did not ask for any of that funding back.

“I’m a very conservative fiscal manager, and I know the state has had dire budget problems,” he said.

This year he proposed an increase of $4.5 million, to buy 10 new engines (to add to the current 98), hire crews for engines and helicopters, and train them. Lawmakers approved $1.2 million of this.

A lot of conservatives have rushed to claim that the fires have nothing at all to do with global warming and everything to do with reduced logging and grazing, allowing fuels to build up in the forest. Goldmark said there’s some truth to the issue of fuels buildup, and he’s had an equally difficult time securing funding for forest health initiatives to address it, at both the state and federal levels.

“It’s true that when you have overstocked stands in Eastern Washington these days they often have a large proportion of dead and dying trees,” he said. “When fire does strike the stands, it makes the fire much more unstable and destructive.”

The truth is that the fires, like any crisis, have brought out a lot of people banging the drum for their favorite prepackaged object of blame: Too much grazing. Too little logging. Government mismanagement. Government underfunding. I presume that Pat Robertson has identified the fires as a divine punishment for gay marriage.

In this vein, people might be too quick to lay all of the blame for fires on global warming. But it’s nuts to discount global warming as a factor for the hottest, driest, burningest years on record – and nuts to ignore the fact that the people who study this stuff have predicted worsening droughts and fire seasons as consequences of warming. This is not some debate about the future. It’s already happening.

The Forest Service report found that fire seasons are now 78 days longer than they were in the 1970s, and states are seeing bigger, faster-growing fires. Add in the fact that more and more people are living near forest boundaries.

“These factors are causing the cost of fighting fires to rise every year, and there is no end in sight,” said Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell in a news release about the new study.

There isn’t some magic bullet. But Goldmark says that by doing a better job of preparing for fires – by having more people and equipment ready to go the minute the fire bell rings – the state could put itself in a much better position to limit the size of fires and protect people. Even if it seems too expensive to lawmakers deliberating in midwinter.

“It is undoubtedly more expensive to bring crews in from Australia than it is to hire and train them here,” he said.

Shawn Vestal, a weekly columnist, can be reached at (509) 459-5431 or shawnv@spokesman.com. Follow him on Twitter at @vestal13.

More from this author