“Safe aggressive initial attack is often the best suppression strategy to keep unwanted wildfires small and costs down,” Hubbard wrote in his memo.
Wildfires went from taking up 16 percent of the U.S. Forest Service budget in 1995 to more than half of it 20 years later.2 They also consumed more than 10 percent of all Department of the Interior agency budgets, cost state governments up to $2 billion a year, and resulted in almost incalculable costs to local and county governments.
But while the cost of wildfires drew a trend line that climbed as steeply as the Rocky Mountains, politics and economics brought cuts to government programs to fight, prevent, prepare for, and recover from forest fires. Between 2010 and 2012, the federal budget to deal with wildfires had dropped by $512 million, or about 15 percent. In August 2013 the Forest Service ran out of money to fight forest fires just as the nation reached its highest level of wildfire threat, forcing it to divert $600 million from other programs, including those to reduce hazardous fuels, in order to continue chasing smoke. The feds had already cut funding to thin dangerously overgrown forests by nearly a quarter of the previous year’s budget.3
“A person has to wonder. Is this going to be the new norm—frequent record-setting fires, while the number of federal firefighters and air tankers continue to shrink?” Bill Gabbert, a former fire management officer and hotshot, wrote on his website, Wildfire Today.4
A 2009 federal review of the nation’s wildfire policy noted that government agencies overshot their firefighting budgets in each of the five previous years due to the increasing size and destructiveness of wildfires. Between 2002 and 2014, the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior diverted $3.2 billion from research, forest health, and recreation to fighting fires.5
Counterintuitively, the government’s solution to the decreasing funds available to battle wildfires is to fight more fires. “I acknowledge this is not a desirable approach in the long run,” Hubbard admitted in his memo.
For many, his order to fight fires in wilderness areas wasn’t a desirable approach in the short run either. Resources sent to blazes in remote forests would be difficult to redeploy to fires that threatened communities and infrastructure. And some of the blazes they extinguished were likely to beget more serious fires later, while drawing desperately needed funding and resources away from other critical programs that prepare for future fires.
“We have a choice on how we receive the inevitable smoke from Montana’s fires,” wrote Bob Mutch, a retired Forest Service fire manager with 40 years of experience, in the Missoulian, “in smaller, regular doses over time, the result of free-burning fires in wilderness and sound forest management practices outside wilderness, or in super-sized doses from megafires that are the result of fire exclusion, unnatural fuel accumulations, and a changing climate.”6
FOR OTHERS, HUBBARD’S ORDER didn’t go far enough. Some pointed incriminating fingers at the Whitewater-Baldy Fire, which, although it improved the health of the parts of the Gila Wilderness where Pepe Iniguez had his study plots, burned nearly 300,000 acres, destroyed a dozen cabins, and forced the evacuation of several towns.
“As I toured the Whitewater-Baldy fire, a Forest Service Fire Manager told me, ‘This forest will not grow back for 100 years.’ How is this ‘managing our forests’?” Steve Pearce, the Republican representative for New Mexico’s second district, wrote to me.
“The policy of ‘let it burn’ only works when nature is in balance,” he continued. “But currently, it is not. After the fire, tons of ash [washed] into the streams, killing endangered species. How is this approach ecologically sound?”
As the Whitewater-Baldy Fire burned, Pearce took to the floor of the U.S. House to make a blistering attack on the policies that had allowed the fire to run its course in his district. “It’s a tragedy, what’s going on in the most pristine parts of our country,” Pearce said, “wilderness areas where fields have been allowed to burn and where we’re going to see . . . absolute destruction.”7
As opposed to the forest cathedrals that Iniguez saw after the blaze, Pearce cited soils cooked almost into glass and debris flows that would “flood towns completely off the face of the Earth.”
Like Iniguez, Pearce believes that western woodlands are overgrown. But instead of letting wildfires clear out the woods, he thinks that the forests need thinning by logging companies and that flammable grasses should be mowed down by grazing animals. He urges a return to the Forest Service’s firefighting policy of the 1930s.
“In visiting with the head of the U.S. Forest Service this week, I asked about a policy that used to exist to put out fires . . . the 10 a.m. policy,” Pearce said. “That is, if we see a fire running at any time today, we’re going to put it out by 10 a.m. tomorrow; and if we don’t get it out by 10 a.m. tomorrow, we’re going to put it out by 10 a.m. the next day. I want you to go back to the 10 a.m. policy.”
Foresters and firefighters, however, have long cited the 10 a.m. policy—which grew out of the response to the Big Blowup of 1910 and for nearly 40 years saw every natural wildfire ordered extinguished by the morning after it was first seen—as a major cause of many of our nation’s forests growing explosively dense in the first place. “I think the whole idea of the 10 o’clock policy isn’t going to work,” Iniguez told me.
When the policy was in place, from the 1930s into the 1970s, firefighters took risks that aren’t tolerated today, he said. And for much of that time, western forests, aside from regional droughts like the one in the Jemez Mountains in the 1950s, were in a cycle of cooler and wetter weather that helped extinguish fires.
In their polarized views of how to restore health to the nation’s forests—letting fires burn as opposed to putting them out fast—Iniguez and Pearce represent two camps battling in the ash of the past decade’s epic fire seasons.
On one side, fire ecologists see flames as being as much a part of the forests as the trees, and believe that allowing natural fires to burn will heal those forests and keep them healthy. Firefighting, they say, should focus on protecting homes, watersheds, and infrastructure, while blazes in more remote woodlands should be allowed to run their course.
On the other side of the debate, an alliance often called the “fire-industrial complex” believes that timber harvests and grazing animals can thin the woods, while investments in more aggressive firefighting and bigger and better technologies can protect the valuable resources that related industries depend on, as well as the communities spreading fast into the forests.
Few firefighters or foresters deny the impact of the current warming and drying climate in driving the increase in western wildfires. Some also note that the wetter and cooler climate during much of the previous century fed the crisis by breeding overconfidence in firefighters’ ability to extinguish wildfires. This has led policy makers to believe that with more firefighters, improved technologies, and more equipment, we can once again extinguish every forest fire the day after it ignites.
“The time when we were successful at doing fire suppression, from the 1930s to the 1980s, it’s not really comparable to the current situation,” George Wuerthner, an ecologist who edited the book Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy, told me. “Even with more modern equipment, with airplanes and helicopters, we can’t stop the fires.”
Indeed, while the nation’s investment in fighting wildfires exploded, so did the fires. “I’ve had firefighters tell me, ‘It’s like dumping dollars on the fire,’ ” Wuerthner said.
While judicious logging and grazing can reduce the amount of fuel available to burn in the forests, they can also increase fire activity. Timber interests prefer to harvest large trees, which are more profitable, but these are the very trees that make forests resilient to wildfire. Small trees and brush, the removal of which improves the health and lowers the flammability of the forests, hold little value. Debris from logging activities, known as slash, can fuel fires if it isn’t cleaned up properly. New logging roads allow more people
into the woods, which leads to more campfires, more sparks from vehicles, and more flashes from firearms to ignite blazes. “The more logging roads you have, the more starts you have,” Wuerthner said.
Even ecologically sound logging and thinning can increase the potential for fires. “When you reduce the density of the trees, the shrubs and grasses fill the gaps,” Wuerthner said. “Logging will increase evaporation. Logging roads will allow wind to penetrate the forest.”
If increased logging, grazing, and firefighting efforts often result in more destructive fires, why does every big wildfire season bring new calls to send more air tankers, loggers, and cattle onto public lands? For Wuerthner and many other fire ecologists, the answer is simple: money.
Rich Fairbanks, a former fire planner for the U.S. Forest Service and onetime foreman of a hotshot crew, points out that while most forest firefighting in the past was done by federal employees, today the private sector does much of it. “Privatization has changed firefighting, and not for the better,” he said.
Private companies supply everything from firefighters and bulldozers to caterers and mobile shower facilities for the fire camps. Most don’t get paid if they’re not actively fighting a fire, so they lobby to fight as many fires as they can. Today the private sector provides about 40 percent of the nation’s wildfire-fighting resources.8
“There are a lot of people who see a return to a 10 a.m. policy as a way to make money,” Fairbanks said. “Almost all of the helicopter forces are contractors. Some of them do have money, and some of them do get involved in politics.”
Developers building what Fairbanks calls “suicide subdivisions” also push for increased firefighting so they can build deeper into dangerously fire-prone landscapes and continue using flammable building materials. “That’s one of the uncounted costs that developers get away with,” Wuerthner said. “It’s because county commissioners won’t say ‘no’ to any developer.”
Helicopters working wildfires cost up to $35,000 a day on standby, plus around $7,000 an hour for flight time, while air tankers run around $10,000 a day and as much as $5,000 an hour when in the air. But much of the expense of a wildfire is just for getting the fire camp up and running. Cattlemen’s Meat Company (with the slogan “We Feed on Disasters”) and For Stars Catering (which serves Hollywood film productions as well as firefighting camps) can feed 2,500 firefighters at a cost of more than $100,000 a day when they are running at capacity. A 12-stall shower trailer for fire crews to scrub down in runs $4,735 a week. Mobile laundries charge as much as $500 an hour.
“There will be an increasing polarization of this debate,” Crystal Kolden, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Idaho who focuses on wildfire, told me. “Science suggests that we should let more of these fires burn, particularly in wilderness areas. Fires become self-regulating over time. Older fires are a firebreak to newer fires.”
But the terror that large wildfires inspire, she said, allows profit to trump science. “There’s a lot of money to be made in fire suppression. Those private entities . . . have an incredibly powerful lobby in Washington, D.C. Contractors are very good at playing on the public’s fear of large wildfires.”
Nowhere is the debate more heated than among current and former employees of the U.S. Forest Service.
“I’m actually appalled that, after all of our experience over about 100 years, [Steve Pearce] would have even considered a 10 a.m. policy,” said George Weldon of Missoula, Montana, who was deputy director of fire and aviation for the Forest Service’s northern region when he retired in 2010.
“I’m just amazed in the . . . years since I quit, how they’ve moved backwards,” he said of the Forest Service’s fire policies. He told me that he saw marked improvement in the health of the Selway-Bitterroot and Bob Marshall Wildernesses of the northern Rocky Mountains, where he worked, and that he was outraged when the Forest Service ordered suppression of fires deep in those remote forests.
Weldon cited air tankers, which he helped manage when he was fighting fires, as an example of how industry drives wildfire policy. “The Forest Service is looking at spending $500 million to get new-generation air tankers,” he said. “But there’s never been a scientific study that demonstrates the effectiveness of large air tankers. If a study was ever done, in my opinion, they are not worth the money at all.”
Weldon and other retired Forest Service firefighters cited estimates that air tankers are effective only about 30 percent of the time. “It’s a prime example of how powerful the fire-industrial complex has become in a very short time,” he said.
Weldon believes that the Forest Service and other federal agencies involved with firefighting present wildfires as disasters because they need to make up for budget cuts and loss of revenue from the decline of timber sales. “It’s not only the politicians and industry. It’s the agency,” he said. “They’re trying to keep their agencies alive, and the way to do it is to play on people’s fears.”
Yet, of the half-dozen reports that Congressman Pearce has on his website to support a return to the 10 a.m. policy, the one prepared for him by another retired Forest Service leader is the most pointed in its attack on letting fires burn.
Bill Derr, a retired special agent in charge of law enforcement on California’s Forest Service land, wrote that the “ambiguous” national fire policy contributes to the increase in wildfires and their damage. “The elimination of the time-honored 10 AM Control Policy,” he wrote, prevents the Forest Service from containing fires early and makes them more costly. “Allowing unplanned fires to burn has often resulted in escapes and more significantly created a belief by many Forest Service managers that fire is a positive change agent on the landscape thereby reducing their sense of urgency.”9
Many fire ecologists, including Pepe Iniguez, told me how natural wildfires bring “positive change” to America’s wildernesses, and I saw it for myself as I hiked through the Gila Wilderness, partially following the route that the Granite Mountain Hotshots had taken when they had come to fight the Whitewater-Baldy Fire with burnouts and chainsaws the year before they were burned over on Yarnell Hill.
I hiked through the vast burn zone of Arizona’s Wallow Fire, the largest fire in Arizona history, which burned a month before the Las Conchas Fire, and then made my way into the Gila. For more than 100 miles, every forest I passed contained signs of recent fires. Ponderosa pine stands thinned with prescribed burns, natural fires, or timber operations showed blackened bases but green tops. Other, tighter stands looked like pincushions of black, 60-foot needles. An elk cow led her calf through the scorched trees. In the distance, the fire had left vast sections of the Mogollon Rim burnt of any color but black.
At the Glenwood Ranger District office I chatted with Shane Manning, a Forest Service engine captain who fought his first fire in the Gila when he was 12. “I threw a little dirt on it,” he said.
Shane had worked for the Forest Service for 13 years when I stopped in. In just that time, he said, he’d seen a lot of changes. “Fire’s year-round here now,” he told me. “Most of our monsoons have been so dry.”
The previous January he had been fighting fires in the wilderness. “You really have to be on your A game anymore,” he said.
The first crew to fight the Whitewater-Baldy Fire thought they’d have it under control in three days. Six weeks and hundreds more firefighters later, they were still at it.
It took me a few hours to reach the heart of the burn in the Gila, where I walked through the nuked forest. First, as I turned in a circle, I could see nothing but blackened, standing trunks. Farther in I wandered through an area where all that was left was cinders, ash, and charred trunks on the ground.
On my way out of the burn zone I stopped at the Gila Hotshots base and chatted with their superintendent, Dewey Rebbe. Dewey, tall with a gray ponytail, an earring, and the kind of lanky fitness that comes with years of chasing fires in the woods, lamented that while poorly managed logging and grazing coul
d make forest fires worse, eliminating them altogether could do the same thing. “There’s got to be a middle way somehow,” he said.
Dewey brought up spotted owls, the poster child for environmentalists wishing to protect old-growth forests and, consequently, a scapegoat for the nation’s struggling timber industry. In many areas where logging was banned to protect the owls, high-severity fires ended up driving them from their habitat anyway.
“You look at every owl pack when fire comes through, and they’re gone,” he said. In one forest he noted that four or five owl packs had abandoned the area after fires, he said. Of course, other birds, like black-backed woodpeckers, sometimes took their place.
“Cutting trees is good for the forest,” he said. “Cattle are good for the forest, in moderation.”
Later, along a road in the forest, I noted a few dozen cattle grazing and, at one point, saw a patch of cinnamon fur beside one of them lope into the trees. When I climbed from my car, the cattle scattered, too. The bear and the cattle that hardly noticed each other but ran from me seemed to point to Dewey’s “middle way,” in which wilderness can exist beside our domesticated forests.
All photographs courtesy of the author, unless otherwise indicated.
An air tanker drops retardant around threatened and burning houses during the Fourmile Canyon Fire outside Boulder, Colorado, on Labor Day 2010. The fire burned 6,200 acres and 168 homes. It was the first of four fires in four years that would break the “most destructive fire” record in Colorado.
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