I read the Ingalsbee article to inform my blog post this week. This article details extensively the barriers and reasons for many of the high costs in fire management. The forest service is routinely over budget and it isn’t because they don’t know how to fight fires or manage fires. The issues lie in perverse incentives and archaic policy that are fueled by stigma and blame.
The article really emphasizes the dangers of fire borrowing because of how much it weakens the role of the Forest Service in preventing other management programs. It also brings up the biggest issues in fire management for the future: climate change, WUI (at risk areas and housing development) areas, and fuel accumulation. It is interesting that they predict climate change to have the strongest effect on wildfire costs in the future, as so much of the focus seems to be on fuel loads. So much of the fire management issues are directly tied to systematic inefficiencies. The article goes very in depth on operational and institutional based costs. Ingalsbee predicts that operational costs are likely the easiest to decrease without systemic change. This includes very specific targeting methods towards most at-risk WUI areas, and imposing more let burn policies in wildlands. One issue brought up as a barrier are the lacking incentives for fire managers to be able to make these decisions. So often they are blamed and held accountable for making the best decision for forest health using the best scientific information available.
Perhaps the most interesting thing I learned from this article was the incredible privatization among firefighting. It seems like this would decrease collaboration as a result of having more complex lines of communication and a more diverse set of managers. The article claims that about half of all firefighting is done by private companies. They cost more to employ, and often do a worse job and are part of a system of over-aggressive fire fighting tactics. The privatization of federal workers is supposed to decrease costs by increasing competition, but this isn’t happening largely due to an ideology focused on profit off of improper ecological management. This article is very critical of private fire fighting companies, and even suggests a federal workforce, which very much reminds me of FDR’s CCC. This article has a lot of potential solutions to rising fire management costs. Fire ecology amazes me because in know other field I have studied have I seen such obvious management solutions but such an amazing contradictory sociological understanding and stigma.
One reply on “Week 2: Taxpayer’s guide to Wildfire Suppression costs”
Owen,
You bring up some good points in your blog post for this week such as privatization of firefighting driving costs up rather than down through competition and the dangers of fire borrowing. I agree it is extremely frustrating to seeing the perverse use of the forest service budget, and increasingly so each year. You mentioned that the paper supports allowing fires to burn when seemingly appropriate, but there has been such encroachment into the wildland by urban development that we often don’t have the option. A significant increase in wind in any given direction could be catastrophic to a town or watershed tat would have been safe provided early suppression was applied. These types of situations are the exact ones in which fire managers get in trouble for making decisions to allow a fire to burn, even when all evidence pointed to a fire being safe to burn out by itself. A fire that is exploding in severity might also have adverse financial implications on the budget for the that year or years in the future. This may already be done, but if some sort of standardized cost-benefit analysis was done on each fire within the first 24 hours of discovery that determined if the fire and area mixed with the foreseeable conditions was appropriate for it to burn by itself.