Search Results for: forest fires

Have a Safe and Happy Holiday

By | | Housekeeping
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This Fourth of July is a four-day weekend for many and a record 50 million Americans are expected to travel to celebrate, including more than 43 million by auto. Please keep in mind the latest highway accident data and drive carefully to wherever you are going.

Once you arrive, remember: only you can prevent forest fires, which means avoiding fireworks in dry areas. Fireworks start over 19,000 fires a year including a 47,000-acre fire in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge in 2017. The Forest Service urges people to use red, white, and blue silly string instead of fireworks, though even that is controversial.

With these cautions in mind, I hope you have a great holiday.

Congress Extends Pork Another Year

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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In a move that will surprise no one at all, Congress has extended federal funding for highways and public transit until September 30, 2021. Such federal funding was set to end on September 30, 2020, and rather than revise the law to take into account the latest trends and events, Congress simply extended the existing law for another year.

It’s not like there was any new information, such as a pandemic, widespread forest fires, or the acceleration of urban decentralization, that might lead Congress to change its funding priorities anyway. Or, to be more accurate, it’s not like any new information would actually persuade Congress to change its funding priorities, as those priorities are driven by ideology more than actual facts.
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The current law, known as the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation or FAST Act, was passed in 2015 and included five years of funding. It didn’t make sense to make the law last five years because Congress is so dysfunctional that it can’t pass any major legislation in even-numbered years, so it should have made it a six-year law anyway.

Transit Agencies: Don’t Worry, Be Happy

By | | Transportation
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Entire universities are shutting down and telling their students to go home. The governor of Washington has banned all gatherings of 250 people or more. Entire countries are shutting down. Numerous airlines have offered worried travelers flexible cancellation policies.

So how is America’s transit industry responding to coronavirus? Denver’s RTD says it is “wiping down its handrails” once a day. That’s reassuring, so long as each bus and rail vehicle only carries one passenger a day.

Seattle’s Sound Transit’s trains presumably sometimes carry more than 250 people at a time, but Governor Inslee has exempted them from the 250 limit (of course; transit gets exemptions from all the rules everyone else has to follow). The agency is firmly responding to the crisis by “putting posters on vehicles reminding everyone to follow critical health guidelines.” That’ll stop the epidemic in its tracks! Continue reading →

9. Timber for Oregon’s Tomorrow, Part 2

By | | Iconoclast
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“Just because some senators were stupid doesn’t mean you have to be!” the forestry consultant yelled at the Forest Service official. “I hope when you consider multiple use you wait ’til the trees were gone first!”

For the Forest Service, “multiple use” — the idea that national forests were managed for many things and not just commodities — was almost as sacred as “sustained yield.” It was stunning to see this consultant, one of the biggest names in Northwest forestry, lose his cool in a public forum.

The story began in 1976 when OSPIRG asked me to work on the Oregon State Board of Forestry. The Oregon Department of Forestry had been created in 1911 to coordinate firefighting efforts and manage state-owned forest lands. Continue reading →

Blank Check, Here We Come!

By | | Public lands, Wildfire
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Now that forest fires are in the news, someone noticed that President Obama has proposed a new way of funding wild firefighting. Instead of borrowing from its fuels treatment funds when the Forest Service exhausts its regular fire-fighting budget, Obama wants to let the agency draw upon a new “special disaster account” that is “adjusted each year to reflect the 10-year average cost of responding to such events.”

That makes so much sense, because treating excessive firefighting costs by giving the Forest Service more money is exactly like suppressing forest fires by throwing gasoline on them. In case you don’t hear the sarcasm, it makes no sense at all.

Obama is focusing on the wrong problem, the drawdown of funds intended for fuel treatments. The real problem is the incentives the Forest Service has to spend wildly on firefighting.

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Stimulus Package or Pork?

By | | News commentary
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The House Appropriations Committee released its proposed economic stimulus package yesterday, which has supposedly been endorsed by President-elect Obama. Much of it is not within my area of expertise, but the parts that are seem very unlikely to promote any economic stimulus.

If spending money is all that is needed to revitalize the economy, then all the government needs to do is dig holes and fill them up. Unfortunately, too much of this stimulus package does little more than that.

I am not convinced that increased federal spending will help at all, but I am convinced that it won’t help unless that spending goes for things that are truly needed. Projects that are not needed or used will not produce any “multiplier effects,” which means the stimulus will be small and short-lived. Projects that are heavily used will produce multiplier effects that not only make the stimulus more effective, they make it last longer.

The best sign of such multipliers is whether people are willing to pay for projects out of user fees. In such cases, the feds might be able to jump-start projects, but the best way would be to offer loans to be repaid out of those user fees, not grants. This will also minimize the long-term effects of deficit spending, which in the long run could dampen any benefits from the initial stimulus.

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Heck of a Job, Smokey!

By | | Wildfire
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A couple of weeks ago, the Secretary of Agriculture proudly gave the Chief of the Forest Service an award for “exemplary leadership and accomplishment in reducing the risk of catastrophic fire to both the wildland and Wildland Urban Interface areas through the U.S. Forest Service Hazardous Fuels Program supporting the President’s Healthy Forests Initiative.”

This award would be pathetic if only because the Secretary gave it to the only agency in the Department of Agriculture that could be considered eligible for such an award. But it is particularly ironic in view of the forest fires that are now burning hundreds of homes in southern California.

Just why does the Forest Service deserve such an award? So far in 2007, more than 8.2 million acres have burned — and counting. That’s is almost twice the average number of acres burned in the last 40 years.

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DOGE Is Failing

By | | News commentary
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Last November, I wrote that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency ran the risk of following in the Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government footsteps. That program evaluated all sorts of ways to make government work better, but ended up doing almost nothing but laying off employees. The layoffs lasted only a few years, after which Congress restored the number of employees and agency budgets.

Gallatin National Forest; Forest Service photo.

Instead of simply cutting employees, I wrote, Musk should focus on creating new incentives for agencies to operate more efficiently and more effectively. “Such new incentives would focus agencies on the people they are supposed to serve rather than on simply increasing their budgets,” I added. “More important, if properly designed these would be lasting changes, not ones that would disappear as soon as the next administration takes office.” Continue reading →

Will LA Finally Learn Its Lesson?

By | | Wildfire
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It was the worst wildland-urban fire in California history up to that point. Hundreds of homes were incinerated despite every firefighter in Los Angeles being called up in an unsuccessful effort to fight the Santa Ana winds. Hydrants ran out of water as 50-mph “devil winds” drove fires fueled by “the fastest burning ground cover in the western hemisphere” across major highways that would normally provide sufficient fuel breaks. Famous movie stars, writers, and composers lost their homes and a former vice president of the United States was photographed spraying water from a garden hose on the cedar shake roof of his rented house to protect it from the flames.

Other than a ban on wooden roofs, little has changed since the Los Angeles Fire Department made this film after the Bel Air Fire of 1961.

Just two years before this fire, the National Fire Protection Association had studied Los Angeles and declared (according to the above film) that “combustible-roofed houses closely spaced in brush-covered canyons and ridges serviced by narrow roads” was a “design for disaster.” They were ignored, but the 1961 Bel Air Fire, which burned 6,000 acres and 484 homes, was something of a wake-up call. After the Los Angeles Fire Department made the above film, the city banned wood-shingled roofs and required some landowners to clear their properties of brush. Continue reading →

Schools Demand Continuance of Old Taxpayer Scam

By | | Public lands
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“Rural schools in California already struggle with declining enrollment, staffing shortages and wildfires,” says Carolyn Jones, writing for Calmatters, a left-leaning policy web site. “Now they’re facing the possible loss of money they’ve relied on for more than a century.” What Jones doesn’t say is that the counties have been scamming federal taxpayers for that money for decades and they’d naturally rather continue the scam than have to raise the money locally.

No children live in the Trinity Alps Wilderness Area, which imposes no costs on the Trinity Alps School District. Yet the school district superintendent somehow finds it “mind boggling” that Congress might not force federal taxpayers to pay the district for every acre of wilderness area and other national forest lands that happens to be in Trinity County, California. Photo by Kee Yip.

Federal lands aren’t taxable by state or local governments. When Congress began setting aside national forests, it decided to make it up to local governments by giving them 25 percent of any revenues the forests earned. In some places, the counties got 50 percent. Congress specified that national forest payments to counties had to be spent on roads and schools. Continue reading →