That dangerous combination of factors helps explain the increasingly voracious wildfires that have ripped through the western United States in recent years, say scientists, lawmakers and historians.
After a brief decline, wildfires are again on the rise in acreage burned and the cost of containing them.
While the deaths of 19 firefighters Sunday in Arizona marked the most lethal firefighting incident in generations, the 8,400-acre blaze that led to the tragedy has become more the norm than the exception.
“On average, wildfires burn twice as many acres each year as compared to 40 years ago. Last year, the fires were massive in size, coinciding with increased temperatures and early snow melt in the West,” U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwelltold lawmakers on Capitol Hill last month, adding, “The last two decades have seen fires that are extraordinary in their size, intensity and impacts.”
Opinions differ on the precise reasons for the phenomenon. But broad agreement exists that climate change, economic development, and state and federal policies on fire prevention have played a significant role in shaping the fires raging across Western landscapes.
“This is the cost of how we live today,” saidStephen J. Pyne, a professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University and a well-known fire historian. “Context does matter. Everything that’s out there, fire reacts to. . . . How we develop things, what kind of vegetation we have, how we live on the land, what fire protection measures we take.”
The paradox of destructive wildfires of recent years is that the West actually suffers from a “fire deficit,” Pyne said.
“We’re getting large, high-intensity fires where they shouldn’t be,” he said. “In an ideal world, we would get three or four times more fires than we’re getting, but they would be on a smaller scale. More landscape, but less intensity. We have too many of the wrong kind of fires.”
Figures from the Idaho-based National Interagency Fire Center show that federal spending on firefighting has risen dramatically over the past two decades. In 1993, the data show, federal agencies spent about $240 million fighting fires on nearly 1.8 million acres of land. Last year, the government spent nearly 10 times as much, about $1.9 billion, to combat fires on about 9.3 millionacres.
In addition, NIFC research shows that of the largest documented wildfires in U.S. history, most took place either before the early 1900s, when the government settled on a policy to fight all wildfires, or in the past two decades.
The trend seems unlikely to change anytime soon. The Quadrennial Fire Review, a wildfire crystal ball of sorts that comes out every four years, predicted in 2009 that the effects of climate change would lead to “greater probability of longer and bigger fire seasons, in more regions in the nation” — in particular, shorter, wetter winters coupled with warmer, drier summers. The report also foresaw strained fire agency budget resources at all levels – federal, tribal, state and local.
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