“This is the first bill related to wildfire that I’ve seen in Congress that actually has fire in it!” exclaimed Tim Ingalsbee, Director of Firefighters United for Safety Ethics and Ecology, a group that promotes progressive wildland fire policy
He is talking about the National Prescribed Fire Act of 2020 that has been introduced into the US Senate. The bill encourages federal land managers to greatly increase their use of prescribed fire, to light more strategic fires on public land to improve the health of forests and grasslands. This is the first bill out of Congress that actually tells land managers to put fire on the ground, rather than just put it out.
You’ve seen photos of firefighters running around in the woods and dripping burning fuel onto the ground from big metal bottles. Often, they are purposely lighting an area of land on fire, to burn it when they know the fire will help the forest, grasslands or brush lands. They want to burn up brush and debris before a hot wildfire rages through on a dry, windy day and burns at much higher intensity, risking carrying the fire from the forest floor into treetops.
Yet prescribed fire has been controversial. Sometimes prescribed fires get out of control despite the best efforts of fire managers. In 2000 the Cerro Grande prescribed fire blew out of control in New Mexico and burned buildings in Los Alamos. That same month, the Outlet prescribed fire in Grand Canyon National Park blew out of its boundaries and burned a large area of land not targeted by fire managers. Other escapes have happened as well. Most prescribed fires stay in their boundaries.
Most money for anything related to wildfire goes to what Tim Ingalsbee calls the “fire industrial complex,” meaning the federal and state firefighting organizations and the contractors that cluster around wildfires and supply equipment or other services.
Fire is big business in the western US. Wildfires are getting bigger and hotter as the climate warms and dries. In 2018, federal agencies spent $2.8 billion on fire suppression, twelve times more than they spent in 1985. In the last half decade, about 7 million acres a year are burning in the Western US. Yet only 3 million acres are prescribed fires.
Prescribed fires are lit when conditions are right with the purpose of simulating naturally occurring low intensity fire that benefits the plants and wildlife of an area. Fire managers measure the moisture of the elements of the forest, look at the condition of the atmosphere and carefully forecast the weather before lighting a prescribed fire. These burns can greatly reduce the risk of very hot fire burning through when conditions are dry and windy.
Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Maria Cantwell of Washington want to greatly increase the amount of prescribed fire taking place on public lands close to towns and cities. After all, treating overgrown forests with low intensity fire is far cheaper than using saws and crews to “mechanically” treat the vegetation. Both approaches reduce the amount of burnable matter on the ground, but fire recycles nutrients and strengthens plants and trees while opening the soil to new plants. It also kills some weeds.
Fire is a native force is many ecosystems but most areas where fire is natural have been starved of fire by people who fear fire for decades. We’ve been putting fire out since around 1900 even though lightning and native people were keeping fire present in various places for centuries.
Senator Wyden’s bill would tell federal land agencies to hire people specifically to do prescribed fires and tells agencies to train people in the art of prescribed fire and then have various places like national wildlife refuges and national parks actually light fires.
Oddly the bill would only allow all federal agencies to burn 20 million acres per year at a time when fire managers are scrambling to reduce fuels on hundreds of millions of acres of land before climate change dries out those lands and makes controlled burning impossible. Fire managers have fewer and fewer good opportunities to set prescribed fires as climate change dries out forests and the atmosphere heats up over time.
In order to get out ahead of the ever-increasing megafires that are roasting western states because of climate change, agencies need to drastically increase the amount and size of prescribed fires they light.
The bill has other targets for agencies also. These may not make much sense, but the senators want the agencies to step up and get busy with burning before it is too late.
To read the bill click here.
Tom Ribe
