1 Billion Acres At Risk For Catastrophic Wildfires, U.S. Forest Service Warns
i started working for the forest service in 1962. it was my place of choice, since i was surrounded by many folks doing interesting work, all concerned with NURTURING the forest, doing thorough fire prevention, checking all timber cut to make sure it followed guidelines and honestly recorded volume. biologists monitored streams, recreation people made sure the rules by users were not damaging, and so on.
in the past twenty years all those workers disappeared. the auto shops were closed, so repairs had to contracted out, expensively. road crews vanished, those who used to clear the brush from back roads, grade them. now culverts collapsing , roads overgrown, making it difficult for even the new, bigger fire engines to reach flames from lightning. the planting crews no longer plant trees, the nurseries where thousands of seedlings grown closed and vacant.
the recreation staff has dwindled to perhaps one person per forest. visitors pretty much free to do what they want, despite the regulations. 90% of the people the fire people doing prevention vanished. to back this up, here's a quote from a retired fire guy on facebook:
Mark A. Brown As you said, prevention is the key. In the 70s I was a prevention patrolman with a 200 gal tank and 500' of hose. Our district, Clackamas District on the south end of Mt. Hood Nat'l Forest, was divided into five patrol routes which covered all of the district. Each route was covered by a patrolman each and every day. Every lake on the district was walked, every campsite and heavy use off-site camps were covered each and every day, they also met with the public, instructed on fire safety, posted fire safety signs, etc. I drove around the district last summer and never saw a single forest service truck at all. The whole district seems abandoned. The old Ripplebrook Ranger Station is now a convenience store. The Clackamas District and Estacada District combined into one and is administered from Estacada. With no presence showing, people are doing whatever they want up there it seems.
thus, it's not just a matter of what i've seen with my own eyes.
the forest service has been gutted by washington. look at this mandala of government expenditures. can you see how little is being spent on food and agriculture, see that little sliver at the top?
services once provided through the department of agriculture to the forest serve gone. so can the forest service be condemned? only smoky the bear acts as a constituency attracting the public. and fires consume so much money the service falls in the donut hole at certain point, thereafter required to use management funds, leaving even less for everyday use.
and lookouts have been drastically reduced in number. once eight lookouts peered into the half a million acres i now cover by myself. and even where last year we had world disaster starting on our forest, the CAMPFIRE, 27,000 homeless, 87 dead, the fire fund for our district reduced. gone are the days when having big fires would mean more money in the budget for next year.
i love this picture of smoky the bear. what can he see, hiding behind a house at ground level?
this is the reality. compare it with what lookouts have always been able to see:
the forests divested of guardians, certainly not observed by the public. the shell remains, as the forests die from the ground up. we're picking cherries from a dying tree, and i don't think our grandchildren will thank us for it.
