With the drought and heat bearing down, about 100 wildfires are blazing across the western U.S. and in some places, like Idaho, firefighters are so overwhelmed that private citizens have jumped in on the fire lines to help out.
“What we’re getting now are much more intense fires because of all those years of suppression,” the Associated Press quoted John Freemuth, a Boise State University professor and a public lands expert as saying. “Those kinds of intense fires are usually not allowed to burn.”
With 11,000 square miles, or over 7.0 million acres of land burned so far this fire season, most of the fires were in Alaska. But now, an increase in the number of fires in Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Washington, and California has caused a lot of competition for resources, with a number of requests going unfilled.
CNN reported on Monday that about 200 active duty military personnel have volunteered to help in fighting fires, and in California today, over 440 California National Guard soldiers joined firefighters, and thousands more are being trained, according to Cal Fire’s Mike Mohler, reports Fox News.
The debate on prescribed burns of forest lands is raised again
The question of prescribed burns is not a new one, and it usually raises it head about this time every year. Most people may remember the 1988 Yellowstone National Park wildfire. That year was exceptionally dry, and controlled burns got out-of-hand and combined to make the largest wildfire in the recorded history of the national park. A total of 793,880 acres or 36 percent of the park was affected by the wildfires.
Before the early 1960s, prescribed, or controlled burns used to be thought of as detrimental to forest lands, and fires were immediately suppressed wherever they started. However, by the early 1980s, the role of fire as being ecologically beneficial took hold and a policy was adopted to let wildfires burn under controlled conditions.
As devastating as the Yellowstone fire appeared to be, it has become a lesson in how fires actually help the environment. Controlled wildfires aid by cleaning out the underbrush and dead plant matter. This helps beneficial plants and trees to grow with less competition for nutrients and also gets rid of invasive plants.
But with many of the wildfires burning across the west this week blazing unchecked, wildfire managers are being forced to let some fires burn unchecked, and that has renewed a longstanding debate about whether it is better to fight a fire or to sometimes just let it burn out.
Steve Ellis, deputy director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, flew over a 443-square-mile rangeland fire in southwest Idaho. He told the AP he could see where the fire had crossed fire-retardant lines put down by planes. Ellis said some fires were just unstoppable.
John Segar is one of eight members on an interagency group based in Boise, Idaho that decides how to deploy the nation’s wildland firefighters. “The decisions are essentially triage decisions,” he says. And while there is that long-standing debate over whether it’s better to let a fire burn or put it out, Segar says that conditions are so very volatile that every current and new fire is being attacked with the intent to put it out. “It’s just been too dry and too hot,” he said. Letting fires burn “really hasn’t been a consideration this year.”
Lack of government funding to US forest Service
Republican Senators Mike Crapo and Jim Risch of Idaho and Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon have been pushing for firefighters to be allowed to use dollars set aside for natural disasters to alleviate the lack of money for fighting these fires. Firefighters have already started using money set aside for prescribed burns to offset expenses accrued by the fires they are dealing with now.
Professor Freemuth says, “It’s sort of an East-West issue where other members of Congress and other parts of the country don’t get it because they don’t see these kinds of fires.” But even some westerners don’t want the prescribed burns because of the smoke pollution. “It’s like two environmental values having to be reconciled: the need for the right kind of fire and the need for good air quality.”
