The Antiplanner

Ray Rasker, the Antiplanner’s friend from the days when the Antiplanner worked primarily for environmental groups, has published a paper offering ten ways to reduce firefighting costs in the wildland-urban interface (WUI). That’s the private land where people are building homes near fire-prone federal lands. Unfortunately, the Antiplanner must respectfully disagree with most of Rasker’s proposals.

Rasker’s view is that fire costs have escalated in recent years as people have built more first and second homes in rural areas near public lands. This leads firefighters to make extraordinary efforts to keep fires from burning those homes. The solution, then, is to keep people from building in those areas, and at least eight of Rasker’s ten proposals focus on that solution.

For example, one of Rasker’s solutions is to “Allow Insurance Companies to Charge Higher Premiums in Fire-Prone Areas.” That sounds innocuous enough, except for the fact that insurance companies are already allowed to do that (and they do). Rasker’s real goal is to set the premiums “sufficiently high to discourage development in the WUI” (p. 45).

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Wildfire season is underway, and the Forest Service wants everyone to believe that the huge increase in fire suppression costs is because of so many new homes in the “wildland-urban interface.” But just where is this interface?

The above map provides an answer for Oregon. The pink areas are supposed to be wildland-urban interface. In addition, however, the map marks every “interface community” with a pound sign (#).

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Page 91 of the President’s 2010 budget proposes “a five-year $5 billion high-speed rail state grant program.” It also proposes to increase “funding for public transit to support commuters, improve air quality, and reduce greenhouse gases.”

The Antiplanner is all for improving the environment. But these are not the ways to do it. My research on public transit shows that transit does as much or more harm to the environment than autos. My research on high-speed rail shows that it is not much better — and any environmental benefits are entirely speculative since we have very little high-speed rail in the U.S.

In other news, pages 47 and 77 of the budget propose to take care of public land wildfire problems by dumping more money on them. Of course, that is what created the problems in the first place.

Australia’s tragic fires have reignited a debate over public land policies that echoes the same debates in the U.S. There’s the timber industry leader who says the fires could have been prevented if only the industry had been allowed to cut more trees. There’s the conservative columnist who suggests that environmentalists be lynched for preventing broadscale fuels reduction measures.

Flickr photo by Barnardoh.

Australian forests are a bit different from those in the U.S. Eucalypts tend to be very resinous in an ecologically calculated effort to dominate the forests by burning out the competition (and then grow back faster than anything else). Lodgepole pine is similar though it does not burn so explosively.

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Although there have been large wildfires in California and Texas, this has been a mild fire year so far in Oregon. As of September 21, 123,000 acres had burned compared with a total of nearly 650,000 in 2007.

Fall weather is upon us, with nighttime temperatures well below freezing, and there haven’t been any lightning storms recently, the usual cause of fires around here. So I was a bit surprised last Thursday to see a large plume of smoke on Green Ridge, a few miles from my home in Central Oregon’s wildland-urban interface (WUI).

It turns out that last Wednesday, September 24, the Forest Service set a 31-acre prescribed fire. The fire escaped Thursday and burned (as of October 1) nearly 1,200 acres on Green Ridge. According to the latest report (which is updated daily), the Forest Service has put more than 500 firefighters and five helicopters, plus several more aircraft, to work fighting what it calls the Wizard fire (after a local waterfall).

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The Antiplanner’s curmudgeonly complaints about the media’s treatment of wildfire last week were a little unfair. Somehow I failed to notice that the L.A. Times had an excellent five-part series on fire a few weeks ago.

Part one looked at the high cost of fire. While fuels were mentioned, they weren’t the most important reason. Instead, the article said, “Drought is parching vegetation. Rising temperatures associated with climate change are shrinking mountain snowpacks, giving fire seasons a jump-start by drying out forests earlier in the summer. The spread of invasive grasses that burn more readily than native plants is making parts of the West ever more flammable.”

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As previously noted, the Antiplanner recently moved to Central Oregon. In fact, I moved into what the Forest Service calls the WUI (pronounced woo-eee) for wildland-urban interface. In other words, I live within a few hundred feet of public forest land that is likely to burn any year now.

So I naturally take note when a big lightning storm two nights ago was followed yesterday by helicopters carrying giant buckets of water to local wildfires. And since it is fire season, we are now inundated with the inevitable myths about wildfire.

First, National Geographic presents a video promoting bigger Forest Service budgets. “Fires today are hotter than ever,” says the video, because past decades of fire suppression have led to more fuels in the forest. Second, on a related topic, Reuters reports that climate change is threatening Alaska’s forests.

Click to see a larger chart.

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Of the nine people killed in the northern California helicopter crash last week, seven were firefighters in their teens and twenties and two were pilots in their 50s and 60s. When I look at the photos of the firefighters — most of them under 25 years old — with their ironic smiles and (to this ex-long-haired-hippie’s eyes) goofy hairstyles, I can’t help but wonder whether we really needed to be fighting this and other northern California fires.

Iron Complex Fire on the Trinity River.
All photos by J. Michael Johnson, NPS.

I am not the only one who wonders. Former firefighter Timothy Ingalsbee points out that this particular fire, known as the Iron Complex, was “far from any community or infrastructure.” There was no social or environmental benefit, he believes, to justify spending $55 million (so far) and risking firefighters’ lives trying to suppress this particular fire.

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The Union Pacific Railroad has agreed to pay the Forest Service $102 million — the largest wildfire settlement in history — for causing a fire in California’s Feather River Canyon. Though railroad employees were almost certainly responsible for the fire, the UP could have used some better lawyers or, better yet, some economists among their expert witnesses.

Normally, if you start a fire that gets out of control, you are responsible for paying suppression costs — in this case, $22 million. But this time, the judge also ordered the railroad to pay the estimated damage to “public scenery and recreation and habitat and wildlife,” which added $80 million to the total. On top of that, the UP may have to cover the Forest Service’s costs of reforesting the burned acres.

At first glance, this sounds just. Except it isn’t clear to me that the fire actually did any damage to scenery, recreation, habitat, or wildlife. On top of that, if the Forest Service is so concerned about such damage, why didn’t it do something to fix the problems as soon as the fire was put out? In fact, it did nearly nothing for years.

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Almost every forester I’ve ever met, even ones who work for environmental groups, believes that forests “need” to be thinned. Not just some forests; virtually all forests. Take a forester and show him or her a natural forest, or even one that has been thinned but not in the last ten or so years, and they will invariably say, “This forest needs thinning.”

Is this forest “diseased and in poor health”?

At one time, these foresters argued that thinnings boosted the economic value of the trees. The trees that would be left behind would grow faster. Because you can cut more lumber out of a bigger tree, a few bigger trees are more valuable than many small trees.

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