A fire in the Spring Mountains of Nevada this month is one of the many blazes that have devastated areas in the West and Southwest. (Ethan Miller, Getty Images)
The West is burning: Does anybody east of the Mississippi River care?
It takes an event like the Yellowstone Park fires of 1988, the fire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado in 1994 that took 14 firefighter lives, or the Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona that killed 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots on June 30 to focus the entire nation's attention on fire in the West.
Let's not lose this moment. What lessons should the nation take from the disaster in Arizona?
The loss of the 19 Hotshots is another example, and a horrible one, of how wildland fire has become more dangerous and destructive, and likely will get worse in the years ahead. Fire seasons are starting earlier and lasting longer. States set new records each year for destruction of property and acreage burned. Many more homeowners and others are in harm's way. Federal agencies are drawing down fire prevention funds to pay for fire suppression, which means a worse problem in the future.
As historic wildfires raged the past several years, the U.S. Forest Service tilted its budget toward preparedness and suppression — the latter getting a 27 percent increase in the Obama administration's 2014 budget. Fuel-reduction programs have suffered, however, with funding being reduced in this category by 37 percent, to $201 million.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in May, "Part of the challenge that we face with limited budgets, when you take resources to suppress fires, you sometimes have to take it from the very resources that you would use to restore property or to prevent fires to begin with. And that just basically shifts the risk to a much longer term and more serious risk."
As I write this from my family cabin in northwestern Montana, and the nation mourns the loss of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, the West is enduring a virulent heat wave. When I was young, we would go through a summer at the cabin with the temperature topping 90 only rarely. In June, temperatures here hit the high 90s several days in a row; in the Southwest, they topped 115. Back in the day, June in Montana was reliably cold and wet.
Fire is part of western living, a lurking threat in the collective psyche, like grizzly bears and mountain lions. Everybody has a relative or knows someone who fights fire. You don't drive far without seeing a Hotshot or Forest Service rig. The crew members look young and fit and awfully grown up.
Voices from the fire line tell us, again and again, "These are the most extreme fire conditions we've ever seen." Out on the line, global warming is real. But the young love the physical labor and hardship, the discipline, the camaraderie, the incredible rush that comes from close contact with one of nature's most powerful forces. It's us older folks who fret.
The reasons for severe fire go well beyond hotter temperatures. They include bad land use decisions, long-term drought, insect damage, and — this is very important — more people building houses in previously wild areas. Firefighters fight harder for homes, and sometimes with fatal results. For the past 20 years, I've watched fire seasons grow more troublesome as I've crisscrossed the country writing about big, fatal wildland fires.
In early June, I made the long drive out west from my home in Washington, D.C. On the Great Plains, I encountered Dust Bowl conditions: unplanted fields, dirt blackouts, a parched landscape.
When I reached Boulder, Colo., an early fire season was well underway on the Front Range, the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park. My first book was about the 1994 South Canyon Fire on Colorado's Storm King Mountain that killed 14 firefighters. At that time, Colorado was often called the "asbestos forest," because fires there almost never became big and destructive. That's true no more. This June, Colorado set its second record in a row for destruction of property by wildfire.
In Boulder, there were headlines about firefighters battling a "killer fire" on the Front Range. The Black Forest Fire near Colorado Springs killed two residents as they apparently prepared to evacuate the fire; the case is under investigation. That fire eventually blackened 21 square miles and consumed more than 500 homes, making it the most destructive fire in terms of property in Colorado history. The previous year, the Waldo Canyon Fire, within sight of where the Black Forest Fire burned, took 300-plus homes.
There currently are 20 large fires burning across the West, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. More than 1.8 million acres have burned thus far this year, which is below the 10-year average of 2.4 million acres for this date. Size matters, but the fire season is just getting into full swing. And severity is best measured in lives, property and potential risk as well as acres.
After the deaths in Arizona, the Forest Service called for a stand-down to give the fire community a chance to reflect on the risks its people face each day. The nation should do the same thing.