Why We're Spending More and More Fighting Wildfires
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Why We're Spending More and More Fighting Wildfires
It’s not your imagination forest fires really are getting worse.
As of this week, more than 7 million acres of American land have been scorched by wildfires this year. That’s about the size of Massachusetts, and more than any other year at this point of the season, in at least the last decade. This week, active duty military personnel were mobilized to help fight fires for the first time since 2006.
Vast swaths of America are on fire — there are currently about 95 large fires active across 10 states — but this year is no anomaly. The number of wildfires touching more than 50,000 acres has been increasing over the last 30 years, and the total acreage burned this decade is more than double the area burned in the 1990s.
And fighting fires isn’t cheap. Suppressing wildfires requires hotshot teams, hand crews and tankers and helicopters to dump chemicals to keep the flames at bay.
This year, the Forest Service, which is responsible for most of the country’s fire-fighting efforts, has a budget of $708 million for fire suppression and another $303 million in a special account created in 2009 for firefighting. The overall fire management budget of $2.5 billion is up about 60 percent from a decade ago.
Tourists flee Washington town as wildfire threatens homes
Even with escalated funding, it probably won’t be enough. Already this year, about $830 million has gone to suppression. Costs have overshot the budget in 10 of the last 13 years, according Forest Service spokesperson Jennifer Jones. And this has been a problem for a while: From 1990 to 2003, fire suppression costs exceeded appropriations for all government agencies nearly every year, according to a U.S. General Accounting Office report.
