Search Results for: forest fires

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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Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire

By | | Wildfire
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The Antiplanner’s exurban area has been filled with smoke the last few days as winds have blown soot from wildfires in western Oregon towards central Oregon. As bad as the air has been here, it usually wasn’t as bad as it was in New York City a couple of months ago due to fires in Canada.

Smoke obscures the sun from New York’s Long Island in June 2023. Photo by Don Sutherland.

Canada has seen more land burn so far this year — more than 34 million acres as of August 18 — than any full year in its history: the previous record was 17.5 million acres for all of 1995. The Maui fires, of course, have had unprecedented impacts, with at least 115 known dead to date and more than 1,000 missing. Many are blaming these fires on or saying they are evidence of human-caused climate change. Continue reading →

Pouring Fuel on the Fire

By | | Public lands, Wildfire
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The Forest Service today seems to believe that its main mission is to reduce hazardous fuels. The agency was spending close to half a billion dollars a year on this program, an amount that was doubled by the 2021 infrastructure bill. Yet there is a huge debate among fire ecologists over whether this program makes any sense.

Would any amount of prescribed burning prevented this 2020 fire from burning thousands of acres?

The latest volley in this debate was published earlier this week in a peer-reviewed journal called Fire. Representing those who disagree with the Forest Service’s fire policy, the paper charges that supporters of the policy have deliberately overlooked evidence that it won’t work. Continue reading →

Spending More, Getting Less

By | | Wildfire
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Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Forest Service Chief Randy Moore have announced a new strategy to fix the nation’s wildfire crisis. Not surprisingly, the most important part of that strategy is to give them a lot more money.

Click image to download a 34.0-MB PDF of this report.

The Forest Service plan, if it could be called that, consists of two simple steps: 1. Give them enough money to do 5 million additional acres of hazardous fuel treatments a year for ten years. 2. By the time that ten years is up, they promise to write another plan for the next ten years. Continue reading →

Boulder’s Open Space and the Marshall Fire

By | | Policy brief, Regional planning, Wildfire
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At 11 am on December 30, 2021, a small fire was reported near the intersection of state highway 93 and Marshall Road in Boulder County, Colorado. Though driven by high winds, it took a full hour for the fire to creep across three miles of grasslands to the town of Superior, where it proceeded to burn 533 homes to the ground. It also crossed U.S. 36 into the city of Louisville where it burned another 332 homes, as well as 106 homes in unincorporated areas outside the two cities. In addition to killing at least one and possibly three people, the fire also destroyed about 100 other structures, including a hotel, and damaged 150 or so more. In all, it burned more than 6,000 acres in 30 or so hours before snowfall the evening of December 31 put it out.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

As it happens, I had given a presentation on wildfire to the Independence Institute, Colorado’s free-market think tank, just two months before the fire. The presentation noted that state and local land-use regulations that require compact development make cities more vulnerable to fire. The Tubbs fire in 2017 destroyed nearly 3,000 homes in Santa Rosa, California and nearby communities while the Camp Fire in 2018 destroyed more than 14,000 homes in Paradise, California and nearby communities. Continue reading →