Carbondale Fire Chief Ron Leach looked up from outside the fire station into the hills of Missouri Heights, where a growing number of high-dollar homes are being built amid towering piñon and scrub oak ready to burn.
If a fire starts there, Leach said, firefighters face a thin line between containment and conflagration.
“Our only hope is to get on it early and get slurry bombers on it and prevent a tragedy,” Leach said. “That’s our only hope.”
Trends in federal funding for wildfire fighting efforts make that kind of strategy tougher for local firefighters, though. A few years ago, federal agencies often picked up the tab for expensive efforts that can keep smaller fires from becoming big ones. Planes dropping fire retardant slurry, helicopters dropping loads of water and teams of trained hand crews can cost thousands, but they can make a big difference in the early hours of a fire.
In recent years, though, cutbacks in federal agencies such as the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management have left local agencies picking up the bill for extraordinary efforts to stop fires that are burning mostly on private land. Pricey slurry bombers and helicopters are hard for small agencies to afford. That threatens to put local fire managers in the awkward position of having to choose between saving lives and property or saving money, and between fire containment and cost containment.
“It absolutely plays into the decision-making. Absolutely,” Leach said. “You can’t say it doesn’t. Because when an agency you work for has a budget and when these resources are expensive … that’s real money. When we have to worry about the cost of those resources, when that has to be in our thought pattern, it absolutely affects your decision making.”
Fire officials say the blazes most affected aren’t the smallest fires, which can be put out quickly by local crews. They’re not the biggest blazes, either, which are handled by state or federal officials who pick up the bill. The blazes most affected are mid-sized fires, which can burn hundreds of acres and last for days, and threaten to blow up into massive fires if they’re not knocked down quickly.
“I don’t want those guys to have to worry about calling and ordering these resources when the fires are small,” Leach said. “That’s where big fires come from — from small fires.”
Expensive but effective
Air support can play a critical role, but an expensive one. A loaded slurry bomber can cost up to $6,000. Smaller planes can cost $1,500. Helicopters may cost from $800 an hour for smaller choppers to up to $4,000 an hour for massive ones.
Leach said he’s never shied away from ordering whatever resources he’s needed, despite the cost. On last spring’s County Road 100 fire, he called for air resources, even though no planes were yet available for the summer fire season. He brought in a prison hand crew from Buena Vista, which left the department with a $12,000 bill still to be paid.
Taken to its logical end, though, the dilemma could leave fire managers with a clear choice: fight the fire when it’s small and pick up the tab, or let it get big and leave it to the federal government.
“I guess that could always be a concern, but the hope is that no one would be thinking that,” said Kelly Rogers, district forester for the Colorado State Forest in Grand Junction.
“Usually when the bell goes off, it’s guys that have other jobs that jump in the truck and do their jobs as best they can,” he said. “I don’t think those guys are necessarily thinking about cost containment or who’s paying for what.”
State steps in
Zach Ornitz/Aspen Daily News(Left) A hotshot crew patrols the perimeter of a 2007 New Castle fire as part of a federal effort to contain the blaze. With federal financing being cut, local fire departments say they will increasingly have to foot the bill for wildfire responses.
With federal funds dwindling for local firefighting efforts on private land, the state legislature has stepped in with a special fund designed to eliminate the financial worry from initial firefighting stages.
The Wildfire Emergency Response Fund was created after Colorado’s big 2002 fire season, which saw the Coal Seam fire in Glenwood Springs and the Hayman fire in eastern Colorado. The fund pays for the first air tanker load, first hour of helicopter time and up to two days of hand crews, in an effort to take the stress of firefighting costs off local authorities.
Last year, Rogers said, his Western Slope district paid over $70,000 from WERF coffers to local agencies. Rogers said a special appropriation from the state legislature this year boosted the funds available to about $200,000.
“At least it buys them a little bit of time,” he said.
Rogers said the shift in resources has been gradual over the past 10-15 years. Local, state and federal agencies tend to cooperate with each other, he said, and mutual aid between them is still common. But gradually, federal agencies became reluctant to pay for expensive efforts on fires burning mostly on private land.
“What it comes down to is shrinking budgets with federal agencies, and an increasing percent of their budget is being spent on fire suppression,” Rogers said. “There is a feeling with the federal ranks that the state, sheriffs and county fire districts need to step up and cover their fair share of fire suppression. It’s a big impact for federal agencies.”
Federal costs up
Federal wildfire spending has risen steeply in recent years. Nearly half the Forest Service’s budget goes to fire suppression and prevention. Most of that money goes to fighting the most devastating fires. Two percent of the fires account for 80 percent of federal firefighting costs.
Last year, federal firefighters spent almost $1.8 billion combating fires on 9 million acres. In the past few weeks, fires in California alone burned over 800 square miles. Some cost over $1 million a day.
“We recognize that we don’t have all the money in the world,” said Frances Reynolds, legislative affairs coordinator for the Forest Service in Denver. “We’re trying to take a more careful view of what values are at risk for the fire before we take a full-blown response.”
A bill that recently passed the House would bolster funds for the biggest fires, but it would likely do little to stop small ones from growing. The Federal Land Assistance, Management and Enhancement Act, or FLAME, would establish an emergency federal fund for suppressing catastrophic fires and require federal agencies to create a comprehensive strategy for dealing with wildfires. After passing the House on Wednesday, it goes on to the Senate for approval.
The bill is a “step forward,” Reynolds said, but it falls short of the funding boost the Forest Service hoped for. Fire budgeting is based on a 10-year average of costs.
“As costs have risen dramatically in the past few years, a 10-year average does not reflect the costs of firefighting now.”
Leach said he worries that federal funding will continue to wane, even as firefighters deal with more and more fires. That’s partly because of a growing population living in what were once wild areas, he said, and partly because of more fires burning in hotter, drier summers.
“The stakes are higher around western Colorado than ever,” Leach said. “There’s more people. There’s more homes. There’s more money and everything than there was 25 years ago. The stakes are very high.”
dfrey@aspendailynews.com
