I'm glad to see that the issue of wildland fire fighting is being raised. In my home state of Oregon, USA, we have had over 500,000 acres burned in the last 30 days. The cost will likely exceed $150 to $200 million dollars US just to suppress the Oregon fires. To date, there have been over 5,700,000 acres burned in the United States which is substantially above the five year average of 2.0 million acres. For folks that are interested in the daily blow-by-blow description of the fires, you can check out http://fwspceaa.nifc.r9.fws.gov/~amundsone/Situation_Report.html. I believe that there are two primary reasons why these fires are burning so many acres. First, seven decades of fuel loading on these lands. Second, the Forest Service and BLM have been downsized in personnel and no longer have adequate resources to fight fire dangers that are much greater than 20 years ago. The big question, as addressed by Andrew Gray, is who is going to pay for the fuel reduction costs. Although I want to sound pessimistic, I don't think that there will ever be a program to reduce fuels. Environmental groups will object to any type of fuel reduction program as simply an attempt to log trees. Instead, we will simply spend hundreds of millions of dollars every couple of years fighting fires on public forests that will no longer be generating any timber sale income. -- Martin Desmond ForestNet http://www.forestnet.com 374 West 12th Avenue, Suite 5, Eugene, Oregon USA 97401 1-541-334-6235 (phone) 1-541-344-6179 fax
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