The recent conflagration in California’s Sonoma and Napa counties, with the loss of human life and wholesale destruction of communities, vineyards, and vast forests, should be yet another wake up call for Coloradans. Our state experienced its own warnings with the Hayman fire in 2002, the Waldo fire in 2012 and Black Forest in 2013. But in reality, relatively little preventive work has occurred since these fires. Meanwhile, wildfire threats are worsening and we are not prepared.
I have had the unique opportunity of serving twice as director of Colorado’s Department of Natural Resources, where we dealt with the pine beetle epidemic and its corresponding buildup of flammable fuels. I also have overseen the United States Forest Service during a period of record forest fires across the United States.
At both the state and federal level, these governments have struggled with the enormous costs of fighting fires and finding additional resources to address the underlying causes of such fires. But there are emerging solutions which will require broad private and public sector participation rather than relying solely on the work of a few governmental agencies. This article describes some of the solutions at hand and the path forward. But first, let’s address the realities on the ground.
Our planet is getting warmer. We have had a decade of record-setting temperatures. Many of our surrounding forests are old, monolithic, dense and diseased. In Colorado alone, more than 4 million acres of forests have succumbed to the bark beetle epidemic. These forests are tinder boxes waiting to ignite.
Nationally, we are witnessing for the first time dozens of mega fires exceeding 100,000 acres or more. These wildland fires are destroying up to 10 million acres a year, double what occurred in the previous decades. So, too, these fires are behaving in new and unpredictable ways: they are incredibly intense, creating their own weather patterns, sending embers a mile ahead, burning so hot that they bake and denude the soil of all nutrients. The scaring of the land and vegetation is often so bad that it may take decades to regenerate. Post-fire rainstorms, with the absence of trees, cause flooding more damaging than the fires themselves.
Our fire season is 78 days longer than two decades ago. And perhaps most concerning, the majority of new housing starts occur in or adjacent to the very forests that are at risk. We are reaching a dangerous tipping point. We are seemingly going in the wrong direction.
Instinctively, our reaction is to invest in ever-increasing fire suppression measures — more air tankers and fire fighters. Yet even an army of firefighters and aircraft cannot always control the conflagration.
In California, more than 11,000 firefighters were unable to quickly and fully contain blazes that ultimately took 45 lives, destroyed over 8,000 structures, and consumed over 200,000 acres of land. The U.S. Forest Service, charged with suppressing fires on public lands, is today spending more than 50 percent of its budget on fire suppression in contrast to the 15 percent it spent 20 years ago.
So much of the Forest Service’s budget is directed to fire suppression that the agency cannot deal with the root causes of the fires.
The best answer to this growing challenge is widespread and strategic restoration of our forests on both public and private land. By restoration, I mean thinning forests manually or with mechanized equipment, removing underbrush, engaging to a far greater extent in prescribed fires, and occasionally replanting new, diversified trees. By doing this, forests become less dense and more fire resilient. That is, when fire comes, it will not burn as hot, it will stay on the ground instead of in the trees, and it will allow firefighters to get on the ground to extinguish the blaze. We cannot restore all the land but we can selectively focus on where best to put our dollars. To those who fear the vast clearcutting of our forests, fear not.
Importantly, these restored forests will better perform their inherent functions: storing, filtering, and releasing water; sequestering carbon; providing wildlife habitat; being a mecca for outdoor recreation; and allowing solitude when we need to get away from it all. Many of our overgrown forests today do not fulfill these functions and may lose all functions when the big fire comes.
Realistically, restoring our forests will take megabucks. Removing hazardous fuels, thinning trees, even managing prescribed fires can cost anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per acre. Such work must be preceded by planning and environmental analysis.
In Colorado, we will need to treat strategically at least a million of acres of public and private forests if we are to deal with the fire challenge. The arithmetic adds up, well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. While a lot of money, it is a mere fraction of the value of our collective properties. The Hayman, Waldo, and Black Forest Fires property damages alone exceeded $1.2 billion dollars not including fire suppression and post-fire flooding costs.
The recent California fires will surely add up to more than $3 billion, not counting the more holistic lost taxes and diminution in property values. While restoration costs are expensive, the actual fire and its aftermath will be more expensive, not to mention the loss of human life.
Historically, the Forest Service has been largely responsible for restoration on public lands. But in the future this agency and the federal government alone cannot shoulder the burden. The Forest Service restoration budget is woefully insufficient to meet the challenge. And once a serious fire erupts, the agency is expected to allocate all available resources, including its restoration budget, to extinguishing it. Unfortunately that transfer of restoration money is often not repaid or repaid too late.
Over the last seven years, the Forest Service has started to look to public-private partnerships to enhance restoration opportunities. Previously, the common assumption was that these lands were under federal ownership and hence the federal government should pay for restoration. That’s when the forest were relatively healthy and fire resilient.
But today the reality is otherwise. If the Forest Service cannot alone reduce the fire risk, then all of us are at risk. Water districts, whose watersheds often fall within public lands, now understand; they must partner with the Forest Service and private landowners to protect their water. Slowly, electric utility districts, recreational users, ski resorts, insurance companies, real estate developers are also beginning to appreciate that they, too, are in this together. This will require a coordinated Colorado battle plan, bringing together all the relevant public and private actors, in a major, unrelenting, strategic effort.
Absent this plan, Colorado will see even more damaging fires from which we will not quickly recover. Ask yourself what would happen to the Vail Valley if a catastrophic fire swept over it. Or a swift, uncontrollable fire destroyed Evergreen. Colorado Springs, seemingly safe at the foot of Pikes Peak, could not withstand the Waldo fire. These are not imaginary scenarios and we need to be ready. Think about how long and painful the recovery will be and how the pre-fire environment may not be restored for decades to come.
The tipping point is here. Colorado has the capacity and the ingenuity to meet this challenge. The real question is whether we have the will.
Harris Sherman is senior counsel at Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer. He served as under secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture from 2009-13, overseeing the U.S. Forest Service, and has twice been Colorado’s director of natural resources.
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