Author: Bill Gabbert

After years of effort the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy has been released. The 93-page document helps managers make decisions about short and long-range planning and how their choices fit into the broader goals of the Cohesive Strategy, which revolve around:

• Vegetation and fuels
• Homes, communities, and values at risk
• Human-caused Ignitions
• Effective and efficient wildfire response

The document calls for increased emphasis in all four of the above categories. One of the surprises was how often managing “fires for resource objectives” (we don’t call them “let burn” fires any more) was suggested as one of the tools for reducing fuels. The phrase was mentioned 15 times, not including the table of contents. It usually included a caveat of a possible increased risk due to putting fire on the ground, and that it is not suitable in all areas. Prescribed fire was another tool that was often recommended.

The elephant in the room

While the topic of “effective and efficient wildfire response” was listed several times in headings, little in the way of specifics of how to improve the response was mentioned. Here is an example from page 51:

Management efforts to simultaneously emphasize structure protection in combination with efforts to reduce fire size through either increased response capacity or pre-fire fuels management seem warranted.

And on page 57 it looked at first like they were taking a strong stand to improve fire response, but then the writers minimized the value of it to a certain extent:

General guidance regarding response includes:

• Enhance wildfire response preparedness in areas more likely to experience large, long-duration wildfires that are unwanted or threaten communities and homes.
• Enhance wildfire response preparedness in areas experiencing high rates of structure loss per area burned.
• At the community level, emphasize both structure protection and wildfire prevention to enhance the effectiveness of initial response.

It would be shortsighted to assume that a safe and effective response to fire is the only priority. Indeed, one could argue that the suppression challenges today are symptomatic of more fundamental underlying issues. The current trajectory of increasing risk cannot be headed off by simply adding more preparedness and suppression resources.

As we have often said on Wildfire Today, the prescription for keeping new fires from becoming megafires is:

Rapid initial attack with overwhelming force using both ground and air resources, arriving within the first 10 to 30 minutes when possible.

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