Some BC residents can relax as crews make progress corralling two wildfires

“We must treat catastrophic wildfire not like a routine expense but as the natural disasters they truly are”, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, who oversees the Forest Service, has said.

The BC Wildfire Service has received reports of people not complying with the partial campfire ban in the Cariboo Fire Centre.

Over a dozen years, the agency has transferred to its wildfire program almost half a billion dollars from the National Forest System, the account that funds everything from timber sales to invasive species control on 193 million acres of forests and grasslands, according to the data.

Cantwell, the ranking member on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said the Forest Service and Interior need adequate funds to fight fires, but they also need to ensure the money is being spent efficiently.

“We as a national firefighting community are spread very thin”, Eardley said.

Since 1998, fire staffing within the Forest Service has grown by 114 percent, while non-fire staffing has decreased by 39 percent.

“Most of them were heat-related, and they were treated at a local hospital and released”, Andrew Mitchell, a spokesperson for the Angeles National Forest in San Gabriel Mountains National Monument, told KPCC. While there are some problems with data from those early decades, they are valid enough to show that recent changes in droughts and fires are due to cyclical variations in climate, not to human-caused warming. The agency sounded the alarm about rising wildfire costs, saying that fighting fires will consume more than 50 percent of its budget this year and could be up to two thirds of it by the year 2025, based on current trends. As of yesterday, 173,000 acres had burned in the Southwest, compared with 2.0 million acres as of the same date in 2011 and 460,000 in 2008. It is true that, as of August 14, more acres have burned this year than any year in the previous decade.

A weekend video showing deputy incident commander Rob Allen discussing fires in the Chelan area of Washington State gives a sense of what firefighting planners are now facing.

Tester met with Regional Forester Leanne Marten and her staff during his Missoula stop, with the discussion once more highlighting how the firefighting, or suppression costs are actually taking money that should be used for fire prevention. Meanwhile, more homes are being built in places where the risk of fire increases each season.