State funds burning up for wildfire management

After a record-breaking fire season in 2018, the Utah legislature was asked for an additional $20 million on Tuesday from the Natural Resources, Agriculture, and Environmental Quality Subcommittee to address wildfire management in the upcoming year.

Last year, the state experienced close to 1,000 wildfires that were exacerbated by severe drought from Utah’s driest water year since records have been kept in 1895. Members of the subcommittee are seeking additional funds after fire suppression costs jumped from $18 million in 2017 to $42 million in 2018.

Larissa Yocom, an assistant professor at Utah State University specializing in the interaction between forest, fires and climate, said that drought and fire are definitely linked. While the relationship can be complicated depending on ecosystems and vegetation, winter snowpack and the time of snowmelt has a big impact on fire.

“Just having a longer fire season and enabling fuels to start drying out sooner means that you’ve opened your window up further,” Yocom said, referring to the anomalously low water year in 2017.

As climate change is projected to decrease snowpack and result in increased temperatures for the Southwest, fire management is becoming an increasingly hot and expensive topic.

Henrik Panosyan, a graduate student studying climate science at USU, said that global warming has already impacted our wildfire frequency and intensity. “Climate change made these already drought prone areas more drought stricken,” Panosyan said.

While an additional $20 million could be a good start for prevention and treatment, Yocom suggested the additional funding won’t be enough. “There’s so much more forest than we’re able to put treatments in,” she said. “It’s a drop in the bucket and every year we’re falling further behind.”

The Dollar Ridge Fire in Duchesne County claimed 400 structures, a relatively nominal loss compared to the 85 lives lost in the California Camp Fire. These destructive, costly and deadly fires are often fueled by a surplus of deadfall from a history of fire suppression.

One method toward reducing the impact of these fires on wildland-urban interfaces can be achieved through prescribed burning: fighting fire with fire.

“We need more fire in wilderness areas that are not going to affect human lives,” Yocom said, drawing a connection between the co-evolution of fire and ecosystems in the Southwest, “[Historically] Fire sizes were probably smaller, but we had a lot more area burned, making a patchy, mosaic landscape.”

This mosaic landscape was more resilient to intense fires due to the discontinuity of deadfall for fire fuel.

Better fire management doesn’t only face economic hurdles; social support for prescribed burns can be difficult to find.

“It would be great if we could have more social acceptance of fire and smoke,” Yocom said. “That would really enable managers to do more prescribed burning and allow fires to burn where they are doing ecological good.”

In population centers already impacted by poor air quality, smoke can be an unwelcome and unhealthy site for some in the summer months, but Yocom believes effective management might require a tolerance for more frequent and carefully managed burns.

“There’s not a no-fire option,” she said. “Fires will burn. We only have the choice of hopefully influencing what kind of fire it is.”