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Senators, Bush admin say growth partially to blame for fire costs |
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Members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, the Bush administration and an inspector general yesterday took aim at the increased growth in rural and forested areas as a primary cost for the dramatic increases in wildland firefighting costs.
Since 1990, 8.4 million new homes were constructed in the wildland urban interface (WUI), accounting for 60 percent of all new homes nationwide. "I don't know what we can do about it, but nobody's doing anything about it," said ranking member Pete Domenici (R-N.M.). "It's just growing like wildfire."
According to figures released yesterday, about 9.9 million acres burned nationwide, 5 million acres of which were on federal lands. The Forest Service and Interior Department spent nearly $2 billion on fire suppression.
"We need to restore some balance," said Agriculture Department inspector general Phyllis Fong. "They will continue to rise unless something is done about development in the WUI."
In November, a Fong report said states and local governments should be forced to pick up more of the costs to convince those entities to limit development in the wildland-urban interface. Assigning more of the financial burden to states or local governments may convince them to limit development, a power the Forest Service does not have.
"My understanding is if there weren't houses there, it would burn much more freely, and cost far less money to fight," said Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.).
Firefighting is now 40 percent of the annual Forest Service budget, the senators noted.
"It's much like us looking at the Social Security budget and saying this can't go on," Domenici said. "The department's not going to have money for the other things. they're going to look and say where is it?"
Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey acknowledged the problem, noting that awareness of the dangers of living in the WUI has not reached the public perception as with coastal areas threatened by hurricanes or floods. "We are today in that regard where we were with flood plains 15 years ago," Rey said.
"The ideal today in the fastest growing region, in the intermountain West, is to have a nice house in the woods," Rey said. "Every new subdivision presents a new challenge."
But Rey defended USFS and the Interior Department agencies, saying they have learned from the stream of congressional, department and independent reports on the firefighting problem. He also said nobody complains in the middle of the fire season, when firefighters are defending communities.
"Cost containment is a very important priority in January," Rey told reporters. "It becomes less so in August when the fires are burning. The greatest inconsistency that I see in the fire program is the advice I get from elected officials while the fires are burning as compared to the advice I get after the money's been spent to put them out. That's elected officials at all levels of government."
Paul Beddoe of the National Association of Counties said too much of the blame is being laid at the feet of local communities.
"We recognize the need for local governments to do a better job for taking fire risks into account when they're planning growth and development," Beddoe said. "We've been asking the Forest Service for help to deploy that info to counties for years and haven't been too successful for getting those attention.
"Counties across the country and particularly in fire prone areas in the West have been working as good partners with these guys since 2000," he added, since the first Western Governors' Association 10-year plan. "To have them start turning on us it's pretty hard to take."
Aside from the USDA IG's suggestion to make states and counties pay more to encourage them to act, Rey noted that insurance companies should prod policyholders to use better building materials or improve defensible space around homes to protect property from fire damage.
While some insurers have acted in the aftermath of major fires in Colorado and California, change is slow in coming, Rey said.
"The reason it's slow is they don't suffer large losses on one incident the way they do in a major hurricane," he explained. "So it hasn't moved as quickly through the insurance industry as some of the restrictions on flood plain development did previously."
As for firefighting costs, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) had a practical suggestion after reading a newspaper story from last year that noted a caterer that serves the stars in Hollywood also was contracted to serve fire crews and charged $10 for iced tea. Wyden suggested using local contractors to provide less expensive services, as well as volunteers, who might bring iced tea for free to firefighters.
"Can we bring some common sense to this?" Wyden asked.
Rey, after disputing the aim of the story, said the agencies would not be abandoning commercially contracted food services for fire crews, even if they also serve actors.
"We use commercial caterers," Rey began. "They're in business doing catering. They cater at movie sets too. At movie sets they feed, yes, the people who star in the movies as well as all the other workers on the set. That's what they do. We pay them a commercial rate for their service. Are we going to replace a system of commercial contract caterers with volunteers? I don't think so."
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 18 October 2007 )
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