Amazingly, a large wildfire is still burning in California as the year nears its end. Supposedly the largest California wildfire in recorded history, the Thomas fire has burned nearly 300,000 acres and more than 1,000 homes and other structures.
A firefighter looks at the Thomas Fire on Christmas day.
While the Thomas fire is not quite 100 percent contained, any additional acres it burns will not much change the year’s total of 9.6 million acres burned, which is almost 50 percent more than the previous ten-year average of 6.5 million acres. The extent of burning in California (more than 1.2 million acres) and the Pacific Northwest (more than 1.0 million acres) fueled controversies over public land management in general.
For example, Representative Greg Walden (who just happens to represent the Antiplanner’s part of Oregon) blamed fires on environmentalists, suggesting that more logging and fuel treatments would have led to “healthier forests” that were more resistant to fire. Noting that an acre of fuel treatment costs only a fifth as much as the Forest Service spends on fire suppression, per acre burned, Walden says, “It’s five times more expensive to fight fire than it is to do the fuels treatment to reduce the impact of fire.”
But that’s false logic, partly because you don’t know in advance which acres are going to burn in any given year. Less than 1 percent of forests burn in a typical year, so you might have to treat a hundred times as many acres as might burn, which would end up being twenty times the cost of fire suppression. Another problem is that the federal government, and the Forest Service in particular, spends way too much money on fire suppression, so a comparison of fire suppression with fuel treatments costs isn’t valid. Finally, even the best fuel treatments don’t make lands immune to fire, particularly in hot, droughty years.
Forest Service researcher Mark Finney supports the idea of fuel treatments, but he disagrees that logging makes an effective treatment. Logging typically removes the large pieces of wood that are difficult to ignite, leaving behind the fine pieces that are easy to burn. Thus, it can make areas more fire prone, not less.
Finney admits that fuel treatments are ineffective if only applied to small areas. But you do start to see effects, he says, when 20 to 40 percent of an area is treated. Do the math: if fire suppression costs five times as much as fuel treatments, and you have to treat twenty times as many acres for treatments to be effective, you still end up spending at least four times as much on treatments as on suppression.
The real question is why we need to spend so much money on either suppression or treatments. Fires are a natural part of the forests; always have been and always will be. The story that a century of fire suppression has allowed fuels to build up to unnatural levels is just another ego-trip on the part of the Forest Service; the truth is that its fire suppression efforts were never effective enough to produce that result.
As the Antiplanner has noted frequently, if protection of homes and other structures is the goal, treating the land right around the structures is both necessary and sufficient to protect those buildings. It is necessary because fuel treatments elsewhere are no guarantee that fire brands flying through the air won’t ignite new fires as much as a mile away. It is sufficient because, even if fires burn out of control 150 feet away, they won’t be hot enough to ignite a wooden structure (with a non-flammable roof) through radiant heat alone.
While 2017 was an above-average fire year, more acres burned in 2006 and 2015. Still, that makes 2017 the third-worst year since 1960. Why was it so bad? In a word, drought, and in particular, late-summer drought. Although California’s drought officially ended in 2016, there was still plenty of dry wood in the forests, and the rapid growth of grasses in response to spring rains quickly dried out at the end of the summer, creating severe fire dangers.
Are the recent droughts evidence of global warming? Probably not, as the United States had worse droughts in the 1930s and 1950s than any recent decade. However, charts being used by climate-change skeptics to show that fires were many times worse in the 1930s are wrong.
The Antiplanner examined these historic data, that were once posted on the National Interagency Fire Center‘s web site, in a 2002 report and indeed found raw Forest Service data showing hundreds of millions of acres burned in the 1930s. However, a close look at the data revealed that, in the 1930s, the Forest Service was opposed to prescribed burning and insisted on counting all prescribed fires as wildfires. Deducting the prescribed fires would probably still leave more acres burned in the 1930s as in recent years, but an accurate count of real wildfire acres from those years is impossible today. After I published this report, the Fire Center took the pre-1960 data off of its web site as unreliable.
I am not an expert on climate change, but I can say that fires are going to be bad in droughty years no matter what the cause of the drought and no matter what you do to prevent them. Some fuel treatments might be worthwhile as fire breaks on the boundaries of public and private lands, but protecting homes and other structures should be the responsibility of the structure owners, not the wildfire agencies. If Congress is really concerned about saving money on wildfire suppression, it should turn federal wildfire programs over to the states, which are much more efficient than the Forest Service.