Four years after the most expensive fire season in history, two years after an exhaustive federal report on high firefighting costs, the U.S. Forest Service still is burning through dollars like wildfire through chaparral.
Last month, tax dollars flew out the agency's door at an average of $12 million a day -- $500,000 an hour. By the time you finish reading this paragraph, $1,250 more will be spent.
If current patterns hold, 2006 will become the most costly year ever, exceeding the $1.27 billion spent in 2002.
The pace of the spending, which has drawn the concern of Congress and the White House Office of Management and Budget, threatens to siphon money from other programs, among them reforestation efforts designed to help the land heal from fire.
The cost has been aggravated by the nature of this year's fire season, which began early and so far has crackled across a record 8.8 million acres. But that's hardly the only reason for the soaring tab. Others include:
A blank-check budgeting process that prompts Forest Service managers to throw money at fires but neglect the thinning projects that reduce their size, ferocity and cost. "There are no effective incentives" to corral costs, says an internal Forest Service memo obtained by The Bee.
The growing use of contract air tankers, as well as industrial-type helicopters that can cost $30,000 a day or more, to replace air tankers grounded after fatal crashes in 2002.
"They are absolutely incredible machines," said Joe Stutler, a retired Forest Service firefighter and commander. "But when you have a helicopter that costs $8,000 an hour, and you're flying it 12 hours a day, you do the math. We've got over a hundred of those in the system right now."
Intervention by members of Congress with no firefighting experience who demand aerial water and retardant drops that aren't needed -- just to satisfy frazzled constituents.
"It's like me trying to help a brain surgeon," said Mike Edrington, a retired Forest Service fire and aviation manager who said he was pressured by California congressional representatives to call out the military on San Diego County wildfires in 2003.
Edrington resisted. "I'm frustrated because we spend a lot of energy trying to deal with that instead of focusing on fire," he said.
Other factors kindle costs, too, none more key than the dramatic accumulation of tinder-dry vegetation across the West and a riptide of humanity moving into forested regions, making it impossible to let wildfires just burn and risky to stage controlled burns.
"Usually, when somebody drops a match, there's a house in the way somewhere," said Kenny Duvall, a retired Forest Service fire aviation officer in Southern California.
But the more wildfire is suppressed, the more flammable debris builds up, laying the groundwork for bigger and more dangerous fires -- and more spending to put them out.
"We keep throwing more money at it, but are we getting any better at what we do?" said Bob Coward, a retired Forest Service pilot from Redding. "Are we saving any more acres or being more effective? I don't know."
This is the fourth time this century that fire spending has topped $1 billion. This year the money is buying everything from 67-cents-a-gallon fire retardant -- the orange stuff that streams out of planes -- to $10.25-a-gallon iced tea, $13.12-a-pound trail mix and $58,129-a-day air tankers.
Near Foresthill last week, the 8,398-acre Ralston fire not only spewed smoke from Reno to Roseville, it dipped into the pocketbooks of taxpayers, too -- at a rate of about $1 million a day. As of Sept. 15, $10.5 million had been spent for air support, ground crews, engines, portable toilets, portable showers, bulldozers, even a fire behavior analyst flown in from Florida, according to a Forest Service information officer.
The 1,471 firefighters working the blaze Friday represented just a fraction of the 20,000 in the field nationwide. This year's fire season has stretched resources so thin that more than 400 firefighters and managers have been called in from Canada, New Zealand and Australia to pitch in -- adding to the expense.
The Forest Service says it is trying hard to lasso costs. Last month, Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth sent a memo to the field, announcing appointment of a controller for fire spending and imploring managers to "be especially careful to evaluate cost containment as an objective in your suppression strategies."
Where, specifically, does the money go? Documents from the 2,270-acre Harding Fire in Tahoe National Forest last year give a sense of it: bags of ice, bottles of water, bulldozers, tires. More than half the tab went for two items: wages for firefighters and air support.
In all, $3 million was spent in six days. The money paid hundreds of $300-a-day federal firefighters and $460-a-day private contract firefighters. It paid for more than two dozen $1,000-a-day fire engines, a $4,500-a-day portable toilet company, three large helicopters each rented for $10,000 to $31,000 a day, and one $52,000-a-day El Segundo catering company -- For Stars Express Inc. -- that specializes in catering to movie sets and Hollywood stars.
This year, For Stars is again working fires. It is charging the government $10.25 a gallon for iced tea, $8.16 a pound for salted peanuts and $15.89 for a sack lunch -- prices that reflect not only the cost of the grub but getting it to the field.
"It's exorbitant," said Jim Wills, a private fire contractor whose crews worked the Harding Fire. "How much can you make a bag lunch for?"
Others disagree. "Fifty thousand dollars a day doesn't strike me as out of line," Michael Vickers, a paramedic on the Harding fire, said in an e-mail. "Caterers usually provide, along with the mobile kitchen, hand-washing stations, huge tents to eat under and portable lights."
But he added: "There is however a fair amount of waste. Today's bag lunches now have a shelf life of only 12 hours. . . . Once that time limit is exceeded, it's to the Dumpster they go."Sacramento Bee
