Here are some excerpts from a story from the L.A. Times, with the headline: Forest Service changes ‘let it burn’ policy following criticism from western politicians (emphasis mine)
Facing criticism over its practice of monitoring some fires rather than quickly snuffing them out, the U.S. Forest Service has told its firefighters to halt the policy this year to better prioritize resources and help prevent small blazes from growing into uncontrollable conflagrations.
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The [Tamarack] fire began as a July 4 lightning strike on a single tree in the Mokelumne Wilderness, a rugged area southeast of Sacramento. Forest officials decided to monitor it rather than attempt to put it out, a decision a spokeswoman said was based on scant resources and the remote location. But the blaze continued to grow, eventually consuming nearly 69,000 acres, destroying homes and causing mass evacuations. It is now 82% contained.
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Instead of letting some naturally caused small blazes burn, the agency’s priorities will shift this year, U.S. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore indicated to the staff in a letter Monday. The focus, he said, will be on firefighter and public safety.
The U.S. Forest Service had to make a call about whether to put out a fire or to monitor it and let it burn out. In this case, they decided to monitor it, and the fire grew out of control.
Now, imagine an alternate universe where the Forest Service spent some of its scant resources on putting out this fire, and then another fire popped up somewhere else, and they didn’t have the resources to fight that one effectively, and it went out of control. The news coverage would, undoubtedly, be equally unkind.
Practitioners often must make risk trade-offs in the moment, when there is a high amount of uncertainty. What was the risk that the fire would grow out of control? How does it stack up against the risk of being short staffed if you send out firefighters to put out a small fire and a large one breaks out elsewhere?
Towards the middle of the piece, the article goes into some detail about the issue of limited resources.
[Agriculture Secretary Tom] Vilsack promised more federal aid and cooperation for California’s plight, acknowledging concerns about past practices while also stressing that, with dozens of fires burning across the West and months to go in a prolonged fire season, there are not enough resources to put them all out.
“Candidly I think it’s fair to say, over the generations, over the decades, we have tried to do this job on the cheap,” Vilsack said. “We’ve tried to get by, a little bit here, a little bit there, a little forest management over here, a little fire suppression over here. But the reality is this has caught up with us, which is why we have an extraordinary number of catastrophic fires and why we have to significantly beef up our capacity.”
Vilsack said that the bipartisan infrastructure bill working its way through Congress would provide some of those resources but that ultimately it would take “billions” of dollars and years of catch-up to create fire-resilient forests.
The U.S. Forest Service’s policy on allowing unplanned wildfires to burn differs from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, and I’m not a domain expert, so I don’t have an informed opinion. But this isn’t just a story about policy, it’s a story about saturation. It’s also about what’s allowed (and not allowed) to count as a cause.
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