As I was listening to NPR the other day, I was startled to hear that the Forest Service spent fifty percent of their budget on fighting wildfires. Startled not because it’s not important or because I was surprised by the high number of wildfires. Wildfire is a part of hot weather and summers out west, particularly in the mountains. With the steep terrain of the Rocky Mountains, once a fire gets going, just a little bit of wind can cause a chimney effect, with the steep hillsides drawing the fires up them. My first summer working as a Park Ranger at Sequoia National Park, I witnessed a wildfire climb just such terrain leaping up the hillside in mere minutes.
No, what surprised me about hearing they spend fifty percent of their funding on fighting fires was it seems very reactive rather than proactive particularly over what I see in the Forest Service land that surrounds our neighborhood. I’ve always felt we were lucky to live in a neighborhood that is surrounded by the Roosevelt and Arapaho National Forests. It’s great to take our dogs out for a walk in the evening, and just up the street from where we live be able to walk a Forest Service Trail to North Boulder Creek. The roads that led to our home also pass by several sections of Forest Service land as well. But what astounds me is to see dead and down wood and also huge slash piles that have been sitting there for over five years now. Every day I walk our dogs, I pass by huge mountains of slash that must be tinder dry, as they have been piled there for years, and wondering “why the heck don’t they do something about that?” There have been plenty of opportunities to burn them that past several winters, even into May, where we have had 2 to 3 feet of snow on the ground. And yet, the piles continue to grow and dry out.
So, I have to wonder, why doesn’t the Forest Service spend more money on mitigating wildfire risk, by doing prescribed burning in winter, selective cutting, even conducting public outreach to residents instead of constantly just reacting to wildfires after they have started and become destructive? In recent years, mountain residents have received a lot of judgment and scrutiny for living in places that are fraught with risk for wildfires, and rightfully so. Insurance companies are conducting much more rigorous inspections of properties, requiring owners to be more aggressive with mitigating before issuing policies. If we as residents are required to be proactive, shouldn’t the Forest Service, the primary federal agency who manages public lands in the western U.S. be required to do the same?
