The Wildfires of Summer

It’s the height of summer, which means the Antiplanner is thinking about hiking in nearby national forests before they get filled with smoke from wildfires. This year has already seen 3.4 million acres burn, mostly in the South and the Rocky Mountains. That’s slightly more than average, but big fires in the Pacific Coast states have yet to come.

A friend of mine forwarded to me a copy of a letter from a retired logger to his Congressional delegation criticizing the Forest Service and other federal land agencies for their firefighting tactics. He remembers when firefighters engaged in “direct attack,” meaning they drove or hiked to the edge of the fire, built a fire line (which means removing all vegetation from an area that is at least several feet wide), and then worked to keep the fire from crossing that line. Firefighters still build firelines today, but, he observes, they typically do it “miles (in places 10 or more) from the actual fire.”

That has been my observation as well, and I believe the change came about as a result of Colorado’s South Canyon Fire, in which fourteen firefighters who were engaged in direct attack were killed in what is known as a “burnover.” Basically, the fire jumped across the firelines and surrounded them.

In response, the Forest Service decided that firefighters’ lives were worth more than trees, so they changed their tactics to build firelines away from the fires and then backburn the area between the lines and the wildfire. This sounds like a good policy, except it doesn’t seem to have saved many lives.

According to federal records, an average of 15.8 firefighters a year lost their lives in the ten years before 1994. The number jumped to 35 in 1994, which was slightly unusual, but it had been 29 in 1988. Since 1995, firefighter fatalities have averaged 16.1, slightly more than before the South Canyon fire. (This includes data from 2017, without which the average would be even greater.)

It is true that firefighters are less likely to be caught in burnovers. In the decade before 1994, an average of 4.1 firefighters a year were killed in burnovers; since then, it has been 3.4. The recent average wasn’t helped by an Arizona fire that killed 19 firefighters in 2013; apparently, the state of Arizona, which was leading the firefight, didn’t get the memo about keeping firefighters well away from the fires.

While burnovers have declined, they been more than replaced by other kinds of fatalities. Aircraft fatalities grew from 2.8 to 4.2 per year. Ground vehicle fatalities grew from 3.1 to 3.8 per year. Health-related fatalities, mainly heart attacks, grew from 3.4 to 4.9 per year. Deaths from asphyxiation and falling trees or tree branches both declined, which is consistent with keeping firefighters away from the fires, but the growth in vehicle and aircraft fatalities was more than enough to make up the difference.

With numbers like these, I can’t help but feel the Forest Service is more concerned about PR than firefighter safety. Fourteen people killed in a burnover generates national headlines, giving the agency a black eye; fourteen people dying of heart attacks or in individual vehicle crashes are hardly noticed. Meanwhile, the increased number of acres burned allows the agency to claim to Congress that fires are getting worse because of either climate change or increased fuels in the forests resulting from past fire suppression or (the timber industry says) reductions in timber harvesting.

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Timber cutting can actually make fire hazards worse by leaving material in the forests that will become potential fuels. As the Antiplanner noted a couple of weeks ago, prescribed fire isn’t necessarily a useful solution either.

The real solution is to learn to live with fire. As wildfire historian Stephen Pyne has pointed out, ruralites lived with fire for many generations and even use it to increase land productivities and produce other benefits. But federal policy was decided by urbanites who considered fire to be a “horror,” so their primary goal has always been suppression.

Today, the Forest Service is motivated by its budget, roughly half of which goes for fire prevention, detection, and suppression. While it does do some prescribed burning, that is mainly in the South. Its policies allow unintentionally ignited fires to burn only in rare circumstances, and worries that one of those fires might end up burning someone’s home keep them even less frequent.

As the Antiplanner has complained before, Congress’ solution is to throw money at fire. But this is the wrong approach. Instead, we need to change the notion of liabilities from fire. If you live in a fire zone (as the Antiplanner does), then you should protect your property from fire using leave early or stay and defend techniques. Homes can be almost completely safeguarded from wildfire if the homeowners make the effort. But homeowners don’t have a powerful incentive to do that as long as the Forest Service has a seemingly unlimited budget for fire suppression.

One requirement for a fire-free home is that homes be at least 100 feet apart from one another, or a minimum of one-acre lot sizes. That’s practically illegal in California, which explains why so many homes were burned in wildfires there last year.

One concern that some people have is that more wildfires mean more greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, says one study, most of the emissions from wildfires are water vapor and particulates. The particulates may be carbon and, after the fire, they may decompose, releasing carbon dioxide. But this is made up for by carbon captured in the rapid growth of new forests after the fires. So, contrary to some claims, forest fires may be carbon neutral.

In any case, once homes are protected, many more fires can be allowed to burn themselves out. This will reduce firefighter fatalities and save taxpayers billions of dollars a year.