Critics say the Forest Service's pause on prescribed burns is just masking dangerously outdated fire mitigation policies that have failed to adapt to climate change and megadrought.
On May 20, USFS Chief Randy Mooreon its land for a 90-day safety review. The New Mexico fire has burned more than 340,000 acres and is still not fully contained.
“We’ve seen pretty substantial changes to the climatic conditions, particularly here in the Southwest, but across much of the Western U.S. And we need to address that by developing new tools that account for the fact that we’ve got these persistent drying trends in a much warmer and much drier atmosphere,” Hurteau says.
“If we were to shift those resources and funding into prescribed burning, have as many crews as possible to manage prescribed burning, that would be a big help.” The people who fight wildfires are often the same ones doing the controlled burns. So there are growing calls for the Forest Service to do more to help develop a dedicated, prescribed fire workforce with training academies and recruiting. Experts have long called for creation of a professional corps dedicated to expanding prescribed fire — experts who can move swiftly across geographic and political boundaries the same way wildfires always do.
The GAO probe, she says, will examine policies and procedures and come up with recommendations lawmakers might turn into action.The Forest Service is well aware that fuel levels, as it states in its own reports, are now at “crisis proportions.” The agency’s blueprintconcedes that “the scale of work on the ground has not matched the need, and it will take nothing less than a paradigm shift to protect the Nation’s western communities.
The federal agency says that at least 234 million acres of forest are at a high risk of dangerous wildfire. But in the last decade, controlled burns have treated less than 1% of that total.
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