Wildfire Today

A Congressman from Texas, Republican Kevin Brady, has introduced a bill that would consolidate the fire management programs in the Departments of Interior and Agriculture and reduce their total funding by 10 percent. The bill is H.R.235 and is titled Cut Unsustainable and Top-Heavy Spending Act of 2011, or CUTS Act.

Here is Rep. Brady’s fire management proposal:

Consolidate Federal Fire Management Programs, Reduce Funding by 10%

This amendment would consolidate federal fire management program and reduce overall federal funding for these efforts by 10 percent, as called for in the President’s Fiscal Commission report.

According to the Commission, “There are numerous firefighting programs within the Department of the Interior (DOI) and the USDA Forest Service (FS). Since FY2001, funding for these activities has nearly doubled according to the Congressional Research Service. Despite this increase in funding, three of the past four years have seen a record amount of federal acreage burned. Within DOI and USDA there are almost identical accounts for how funds are intended to be spent – the only difference is that these funds are spent on lands managed by different federal agencies. There are even duplicative research accounts on wildfire research. Specifically, both agencies have the following accounts: Preparedness, Fire suppression operations, Hazardous fuels reduction, Burned area rehabilitation, and Joint fire science. In FY2010, $975 million was appropriated for DOI firefighting activities and $2.592 billion for FS wildfire activities. Total funding between the two was $3.567 billion in FY2010, not including emergency appropriations. Since 1999, GAO has repeatedly found that these activities should be more cohesive and cost-effective. In 2009, GAO noted that Forest Service and Interior agencies had not defined firefighting cost-containment goals or developed a strategy to achieve such goals, despite GAO recommendations in 2007 to do so. Instead, costs have continued to rise.”

Rep. Brady’s proposal implies that the Presidents National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform recommended that the fire management agencies be consolidated. However, the Commission’s report did not make that recommendation. The title of item #38 in the report is “Create a more cohesive and cost-effective fire management service”, which is a little vague, but Rep. Brady’s quote from the Commission’s report stops just before item #38 says:

This option would require the agencies to follow GAO recommendations, and develop clear cost containment plans, in order to reduce the yearly spending between the programs by 10 percent, or just under $400 million annually.

The above portion that Rep. Brady left out clarifies that the Commission did not recommend consolidation of the fire management agencies, but only to improve their fiscal management.

Consolidation of the five federal wildland fire management programs has been bandied about for decades. The agencies affected would include the National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Forest Service. There have also been proposals over the years to not only consolidate the fire management programs, but to merge these agencies into one agency, or to put them all into a new Department of Natural Resources.

In the current cost-cutting environment, if a monetary savings can be projected, then the chances for major changes along these lines are higher than they have been for a long time.

Rep. Brady’s bill proposes cuts in dozens of other areas also, including:

• Freeze the pay of federal employees for 3 years
• Reduce the federal workforce by 10 percent
• Cap federal travel costs
• Reduce federal vehicle costs by 20 percent
• Eliminate federal funding for National Public Radio
• Eliminate resource conservation and development programs
• Eliminate emergency operations center grant program at DHS
• Eliminate Save America’s Treasures and Preserve America at NPS
• Eliminate challenge cost share grants at DOI

You can follow the progress of H.R.235 Cut Unsustainable and Top-Heavy Spending Act of 2011 at OpenCongress.org.

Thanks Greg

A ground-breaking web site has just transitioned into the alpha-testing phase. It is a new way to research a topic, and combines facts gathered from Wikipedia and other sources with photographs, videos, graphics and maps. The site is Qwiki. If you search on Qwiki for “2010 Russian wildfires”, for example, a voice will read text that appears on the screen describing the fires while a dozen photos, or sometimes a collage of photos, scroll across.

The screen grab below is from the Qwiki presentation about the Cerro Grande fire that burned out of Bandelier National Monument into Los Alamos, New Mexico in 2000.

Warning! This site can easily turn into a wonderful way to waste spend hours of your time. If you have ever used Wikipedia, going from link to link, Qwiki, with the photos and other eye candy sucking you in, may get you hooked, like me.

I looked at about 20 of their narrated slide shows, and the more mainstream topics like Mount Rushmore or Galileo are quite fleshed out, containing many photos and graphics. Some of the more obscure topics like “Wildland fire engine” may only have a couple of photographs.

You can suggest that more photos or videos be added to a slide show by clicking on “Improve This Qwiki” at the top of the page, but the photos have to already be on another web site.

If you click on a photo during the slide show you’ll see a description of it along with a link to the site where the photo originally appeared.

Here are some other wildland fire-related topics on Qwiki:

• Wildfire Suppression
• Controlled Burn
• Cedar Fire (San Diego County, 2003)
• Yellowstone NP fires of 1988
• Old Fire (San Bernardino County, 2003)
• Santa Ana Winds
• October 2007 California Wildfires
• Cerro Grande fire, Los Alamos, New Mexico 2000

The presentations I saw were 25-50 seconds long, so it will not serve all of your research needs, of course, but it is a good way to get an overview of a subject, and the links associated with the images can lead you to more details on the topics.

The site has not even officially advanced to the beta testing phase yet, so you may see some bugs or some photos that are not related to the topics, but  it’s an amazing site that will change the way we conduct research on the internet.

You’re welcome.

A small plane owned by the Montana Department of Natural Resources (DNRC) crashed Wednesday at the Helena Regional Airport. The two pilots on board, who were conducting a training exercise at the time, were not injured.

The DNRC is not saying what they suspect caused the crash, nor will they provide the names of the pilots until after the NTSB completes their investigation.

The DNRC uses the Cessna 180 for wildfire detection and coordination.

UPDATE @ 10:33 MT, January 27, 2011

The pilot was performing crosswind touch-and-go landings when the accident occurred. The aircraft ended up beside the runway upside down. Both the pilot and the passenger, who was also a pilot, walked away. A report today said the aircraft was a Cessna 185 and that there was visible damage to the front of the plane and the propeller.

An appeals court ruled Tuesday that the U. S. Forest Service can be sued by three property owners who were not warned that firefighters were going to ignite a backfire near their land.

The Bullock Fire burned 30,563 acres in the Santa Catalina Mountains near Tucson in May and June of 2003. Much of the fire was on the Coronado National Forest. During the suppression efforts a backfire did not go well, and some private property burned. The land owners are claiming that if they had been notified about the backfire they would have been better off somehow. They also claimed that they told the Forest Service about their property, but USFS employees later said the properties were not defended because the firefighters had not been informed that the properties existed. However, they were marked on a map.

The property owners attorney introduced as evidence a quote from the Forest Service Manual:

A line officer is responsible for ensuring “that the public and cooperators are informed of the selected alternatives [in deciding on wildfire suppression efforts]”.

The appeals court decision reversed an earlier district court ruling that gave the Forest Service immunity under the discretionary function exception to the Federal Tort Claims Act.

Carlos Bea, one of the three judges on the appeals panel, wrote the following in the decision:

We reverse the district court because, although no statute or agency policy dictates the precise manner in which the Forest Service must act when it lights a backfire, there is no evidence in the record that the Forest Service’s failure to notify the property owners of the backfire it lighted was susceptible to a policy analysis grounded in social, economic, or political concerns.

If the appellants had been notified of the proposed backfire, they might have been able to take measures to protect their properties, or at least ensured the Forest Service took measures to do so. For purposes of this appeal from a motion to dismiss, we find appellants’ pleadings adequately state such a possibility.

It is interesting that the Forest Service is being sued, not for negligence in burning the private property, but for not telling the land owners that they were going to use the tactic of a backfire in their suppression efforts. What if the chosen tactic had been direct line construction and the fire spotted across the line? Would there still have been a lawsuit?

The property owners must have some pretty sharp lawyers that dug very deeply to find this loop hole. And the three judges on the appeals panel obviously have no clue what goes on during the suppression of a wildfire.

This could open a large can of worms. What else are we going to have to notify land owners about while suppressing a raging wildfire? How many people and how much time will have to be devoted to holding the hands of property owners while at the same time we are frantically trying to save public and private land from burning?

Are we going to have to have a “Technical Specialist, Attorney” listed on our Incident Action Plans now?

I hope the federal government appeals this ridiculous decision by the 9th Circuit Court.