Why Are We Spending Billions Fighting Uncontrollable Wildfires?
Experts say some of our most expensive efforts are futile
We’ve seen an alarming spate of wildfires recently in the U.S. As of October, 52,934 wildfires have burned 8.8 million acres in the U.S. in 2017. That’s the fourth most acres burned in the last 18 years, but the fifth least number of fires — which means that wildfires are burning bigger, longer, and more often. And a lot of money has been spent to extinguish them:
Almost $2 billion was spent by the Department of the Interior and the U.S. Forest Service to suppress wildfires in 2016. The cost will continue to rise: the average area burned by wildfire annually in the Pacific Northwest is projected to increase from the current 425,000 annual acres to 800,000 million acres in the 2020s, 1.1 million in the 2040s, and 2 million in the 2080s. But what most people may not know is that a chunk of that money, like hundreds of millions, is used to fight a hopeless battle.
Wildfire experts and wildland managers know that some fires are impossible to stop. They’re just too big. Unfortunately, because so many people now live in places where they’re highly likely to be smack in the middle of the way of a wildfire (like luxury homes near national parks), firefighters can’t just monitor massive blazes that they would otherwise let burn. A visible effort must be made to stop the fire from burning homes, even if experts know it’s futile. And the most visible type of effort is also the most expensive: aerial retardant.
Planes that drop bright red retardant and dump water on top of fires are wildly expensive and worryingly ineffective. The U.S. Forest Service spent more than $1.6 billion on aerial firefighting tactics between 2007 and 2011, more than a quarter of total firefighting costs. But an analysis of the use of aerial retardant found that although Forest Service policy is to use airdropped retardant primarily in initial attacks of smaller fires, airdrops were in fact used about half of the time on larger fires, and most of those fires escaped anyway. The escape rate was 2–5% when aerial retardant was not used, indicating that airdrops are happening when fires are already beyond human capacity to control.
Aside from the economic cost, battling uncontrollable wildfires is incredibly risky for firefighters. Max Moritz, a fire ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley, told the New Yorker:
To reduce flood damage, we make floodplain maps. To reduce earthquake damage, we form earthquake commissions. When it comes to fire, we hand everything over to the firefighters.
And as a brief aside: the firefighters incurring the highest risk are usually volunteers. In rural fire-prone areas (especially those with a lot of vacation homes), it’s politically tough to pass levies that would pay for equipment and personnel.
Whose responsibility is it to pay for the people who incur the risk of living in a forest? At what cost are we required to protect every house? On defending homes in the backcountry, Beth Lund, a U.S. Forest Service incident commander and veteran of 40 seasons, says:
People have built out in the wildlands that have no defensible space. They still have firewood on a wooden deck creating a ladder right to the eaves, and pine needles on shingle roofs. People are not taking responsibility. They want to live in nature, but fire is part of nature.
Folks living in risky areas should be required to have wildfire insurance, just as people living in floodplains must have flood insurance. It’s common sense, and it will keep disaster relief costs down for all taxpayers.
As our climate gets drier and hotter, the U.S. West need to start taking major pages out of the Southeast’s wildfire playbook by putting funds into prevention and preparation, not into flashy and ineffective disaster response. Wildfires will continue growing fiercer and more frequent, and we must adapt our approach to them as we would to any other rapidly developing climate threat.
