Colorado this year may have escaped the monster forest fires it experienced in the recent past, but terrible fires meanwhile have ravaged several Western states. And that pattern is now the norm. As a report this month from the U.S. Forest Service points out,
Western states should brace themselves for more such conflagrations, given the buildup of forest fuel after decades of fire suppression, hotter summers and the lengthening fire season.
As a result, the Forest Service now devotes more than half of its budget to suppress fires — an unprecedented development.
Worse, the agency projects that within a decade, it will “spend more than two-thirds of its budget to battle ever-increasing fires, while mission-critical programs that can help prevent fires in the first place such as forest restoration and watershed and landscape management will continue to suffer.”
You don’t have to accept the prediction of “ever-increasing fires” to recognize that catastrophic blazes should be treated like the natural disasters they are and paid for like other disasters — with emergency funds.
Congress makes annual appropriations for fire-fighting, yet when suppression costs exceed the budgeted amount — as they often do — the Forest Service absorbs the expense by siphoning money from other accounts.
A more sensible solution would be to tap a disaster fund for the largest fires, since they consume a disproportionate amount of the Forest Service’s fire-fighting budget.
One possible solution: the bipartisan Wildfire Disaster Funding Act, whose supporters include Colorado Sens. Michael Bennet and Cory Gardner and which would fund major wildfires through an account similar to those that fund other disasters.
Until a solution like this is adopted, fire prevention funds will be raided to pay for fire suppression. And that makes no sense.
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