NOELLE STRAUB Star-Tribune Washington bureau | Posted: Tuesday, July 10, 2007 12:00 am
WASHINGTON - With an intense fire season under way, the U.S. Forest Service has been employing some new tools and strategies to fight wildfires in the West, said Marc Rounsaville, the agency's deputy director for fire and aviation management.
In a wide-ranging interview Monday, Rounsaville said indications show the fire season is running two to three weeks ahead of schedule in some parts of the West.
Across the country both the number of fires and acres burned are rapidly outpacing the 10-year averages of those measures, he said.
"We had over 1,000 fires the last four days, burned several hundred thousand acres, a number of structures damaged or lost and several incidents including the one civilian fatality up in South Dakota," he said.
Lately Forest Service officials have talked about implementing a policy of "appropriate management response," or AMR, to give them more flexibility in firefighting decisions.
Rounsaville said the term is not new, although "it's been bandied about a whole lot more this year than in years past," Rounsaville said.
"Appropriate management response is whatever's appropriate given the fuels, resource availability, conditions on the fire," he said. "That could be full-blown, throw-everything-at-it suppression, or it could be monitored; and it'll most likely be somewhere in between those two extremes."
Agency officials have said the strategy will move it from aggressively attacking wildfires of all sizes to a more risk-informed, performance-based strategy that will reduce costs.
"But appropriate management response doesn't necessarily mean that we'll do less on a fire than we've always done," Rounsaville said. "It just means we're going to be more thoughtful, more mindful about the actions we take on the fire and more accountability in the decisions we make on the fires."
Rounsaville said AMR relies on some predictive tools that give the agency a better indication of potential fire spread over a longer period of time than it had in the past. He said some of the tools used to help make decisions on fires were piloted last summer and the models adjusted a bit.
"We feel that even though they're still somewhat a little bit experimental in a way, they're not fully operational kinds of tools, we felt compelled to, just because of what we saw coming on with the fire season knowing we needed to be more judicious in the placement of our resources, we felt compelled to press these into service," he said.
The tools include a computer-based mapping program that predicts fire spread using fuels data the agency collected over the past several years. They also include a rapid assessment of values at risk in the area.
"(We) are able to predict where the fire might be five days from now, seven days from now, and that gives us a little more comfort in some of the decisions we make as to whether or not to be very aggressive or to be less aggressive on any given fire," he said.
The modeling tools have been used on fires in Minnesota, Georgia, Florida and some in the West, he said.
The Forest Service has also pledged to rein in firefighting costs.
"We hope to be able to continue to provide the same level of service on the ground that we have in the past," Rounsaville said. "We will make more judicious use of the resources we have."
Some resources, including medium and heavy helicopters and hotshot crews, will be managed more on a national basis, he said.
"We're going to be more aggressive in reallocating resources, we're going to be more aggressive in pre-positioning when we see these lightning events and things coming, so that we can get the fires on initial attack and we don't have as many large fires," he said. "We're also going to be evaluating fires that have the potential to be quite costly."
When fires are expected to hit a certain cost threshold, the agency can put in place a representative to work with the regional and local fire management personnel in a collaborative process to make decisions on firefighting strategies, he said. That has been done once already this year.
The number of homes being built near the woods in the West has been increasing. "If it continues on the path it's been on, it's going to be more complicated, more dangerous and more expensive," Rounsaville said. "And we're working hard to turn that battleship."
He emphasized that safety will remain the agency's first priority even with the growing number of houses near forests.
Asked whether the government will at some point tell homeowners that their homes cannot be protected unless they take certain precautionary measures, Rounsaville said, "I don't know if we go that far."
But he added, "We do go so far now even on some fires as we triage structures and homes, you know, we tell folks, sometimes we have told people in the past that defending their property under conditions that it is, is going to be difficult if not impossible. And so we try to be honest with them that way."
The Forest Service does not have as many air tankers as it did in 2002, prior to "the catastrophic crashes," he said. The agency had 41 then, but has 19 on contract now. It also has access to another six military units, he said.
But the agency is working with private vendors that are trying to develop new air tankers according to Forest Service requirements and standards.
"I can't tell you right now what'll be the first next-generation air tanker to come online for the Forest Service, but I can tell you we're working hard to figure that out," he said.
His message to firefighters and other Forest Service employees is to be safe.
"It's going to be a long, difficult fire season," he said. "We want folks to get their rest, to be alert, to be situationally aware, to assess risk and don't take any unnecessary chances. Safety is our message is our message today, tomorrow and all the way through fire season."