Survivors of the 1871 fire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin – which vaporized 1.5 million acres of forest
and killed 1500 people – reported a wall of flame five miles wide that traveled at
90 miles per hour and tossed trains into the air.
Four decades later, an even larger inferno roared through the Rocky Mountains, scorching
an area the size of Connecticut.
These epic wildfires, and similar ones in between, helped spawn the U.S. Forest Service,
and forged its aggressive policy to not only prevent wildfires, but to smother any that
did start by no later than 10 AM the next day.
For a time, this policy seemed to work – the annual number of fires and area burned plummeted
between 1920 and 1970.
But fewer fires led to denser, more flammable forests, packed with the combustible needles
of young conifers and the tinder-dry branches of dead or dying trees.
So despite a continuing decline in the number of wildfires since 1970, the average blaze
today burns hotter, faster, and bigger than it used to, and the total area burned per
year in the U.S. has more than doubled.
Costs have flared too: the Forest Service now spends 52% of its annual budget on fire
prevention and suppression, up from 16% just 20 years ago.
What’s more, wildfires will keeping getting harder to tame as climate change turns forests
hotter and drier, and homes edge further into fire-prone regions.
The good news is that we can prevent future wildfires from getting so wild by taming forests’
fuel supply now.
Essentially, this means letting some fires burn – or even starting them ourselves – when
conditions aren’t too dry or windy, or selectively logging to thin out dangerously crowded growth.
When and where we’ve used it, this strategy has made fires cooler, slower, and less destructive.
For instance, when a blaze ripped through Okanogan County in Washington State in 2006,
untamed swaths of forest lost 92% of their trees, while just 49% perished in areas recently
thinned by cutting and controlled burns.
And in 2002, parcels of recently-burned land put the brakes on wildfires racing across
Arizona’s pine forests.
These and other successes have led forest managers to prescribe controlled burning for
much of the fire-prone western U.S., but few forests actually receive their recommended
dosage.
That's largely because, while the U.S. Forest Service can in theory write prescriptions
for every tract of land it manages, it relies on Congress for the money to fill them.
And so far, Congress allocates the vast majority of fire management funds to emergency measures
rather than preventive ones.
Plus, while emergency costs continue to surge, the Forest Service's budget doesn't, so fire
managers are often forced to steal money from already meager fuel-reduction programs to
fight this year’s blazes, thus fueling the risk that next year’s fires will be costlier,
deadlier, and more disastrous.
So as counterintuitive as controlled burns may seem, it’s time for Congress to understand
that, by not playing with fire, they ARE playing with fire.