Trump Administration Unveils New Focus in Combating Wildfire Threat

Federal officials announced a new strategy Thursday to attempt to deal with the wildfires that have devastated much of the West in recent years, pledging to coordinate with the states most affected to “recalibrate our wildland fire environment” and better identify priorities.

“We cannot do this ourselves,” Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said at a Thursday press conference in Washington, D.C. “This is real shared stewardship. Fire knows no boundary ... It just goes.”

The event Thursday was attended by Trump administration officials and several senators from western states, who spoke of the impact wildfires have had on their states.

“The best thing we can do is work together on hasty response,” said Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell. “We do have a new normal, and we have to meet it with very aggressive response.”

Cantwell said one of the plan’s main concepts is more fuel reduction, limiting the amount available to feed the spread of fires. The report issued by the U.S. Forest Service — which is part of the Agriculture Department — listed strategies like controlled burns and increased logging to reduce that risk.

Perdue said the decisions on where to target those efforts will be made in conjunction with local authorities.

“Working with the states will provide us with a strategic plan,” he said. “These are joint decisions.”

Proposals for controlled burns in the spring have often drawn complaints about smoke impacts, Cantwell said, but that may be changing as residents of the West adjust to long, severe wildfire seasons.

“Seattle would take a little bit of smoke (in the spring) instead of the all-summer-long smoke we’ve been getting,” she said.

Cantwell and several of her colleagues attributed the recent wildfire crisis to climate change and the hotter, drier weather that has resulted. Asked about that conclusion, Perdue acknowledged the climate is warmer, but attributed it to “cycles.”

“The solutions are the same,” he said. “If you want to debate the cause, you can do that.”

The strategy announced Tuesday is part of ongoing efforts to grapple with the wildfire issue. In 2014, Congress passed the Good Neighbor Authority Act, allowing the Forest Service to make agreements with states to conduct forest management on federal land. That provision was expanded to include road work in the 2018 omnibus bill. 

That bill, passed in March, also phased out the “fire borrowing” practice that had forced the Forest Service to raid other parts of its budget when big wildfire seasons incurred massive firefighting costs. Soon, the agency will have $2 billion set aside each year, apart from its own budget, for the costs of fighting wildfires.

“A few months ago the U.S. Congress gave the Secretary of Agriculture ... new tools to fight fires,” Cantwell said. “We want every tool possible that was authorized in the omnibus bill.”

The new strategy also calls for sharing the use of remote sensing, fire simulation and mapping technologies with regional and local partners.

Interim Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen acknowledged that past strategies will be inadequate to thwart the growing wildfire threat, and that the plan will have to be enacted on a scale not yet achieved to be successful.

“These forests need active management to be resilient,” she said. “Business as usual at the USDA Forest Service will no longer work for us anymore.”

Perdue called it a “smarter, more aggressive approach,” adding: “We must increase the number and size of our projects, access larger landscapes and increase boundaries.” He did not have a cost estimate for the plan, calling it less of a “quantitative figure” than a strategy to guide efforts going forward.

Still, with the cost of wildfires already incurring a massive burden on the West, Cantwell said any preventative effort is worth the investment.

“If you do some treatment in advance, (you can) reduce the costs,” she said. “For the U.S. taxpayer, (Forest Service firefighting) is starting to be a $2 billion a year bill.”