With a vast swath of the West primed for wildfires, federal foresters are preparing for the worst with a budget that might run dry and a fleet of air tankers that in some cases aren’t ready for takeoff.
A combination of extended drought, warming weather and an abundance of withered trees and grasses have created ideal conditions for fire — more than 22 million acres were blackened by wildfires from 2011-2013, primarily across the West.
“It looks like it’s going to be a serious enough season to where we run out of money again,” said Tom Harbour, director of fire and aviation management for the U.S. Forest Service.
“I’m really concerned, there is no question,” Harbour said. “I think we are going to have a lot of fire.”
The agency is doing what it can to prepare for wildfire season by burning sections of forest in high-risk areas to remove dead or dry vegetation that could fuel a fire.
In no place is the situation more worrisome than in California, where several years of stingy rainfall have turned forests and scrub into matchsticks and tens of thousands of homes are perched along fire-prone areas.
Firefighters battled a blaze in the mountains east of Los Angeles this week, where temperatures neared triple digits. And states from New Mexico through southern Oregon have been left parched by a lack of rain and snow.
But even as fire risk has increased in recent years, the number of large air tankers dropped.
About a decade ago the Forest Service had more than 40 of the big tankers at its disposal — the draft horses of firefighting aircraft that can dump thousands of gallons of flame-snuffing retardant in a single swoop, far more than a helicopter.
According to federal analysts, the fleet hit a low of eight aircraft at one point last year, depleted by age and concerns over the ability of the planes, in some cases flying since the dawn of the Cold War, to stay in the sky.
The core of the fleet was expected to include 17 aircraft for 2014, but seven of those planes aren’t ready to fly.
The agency hopes to have all the tankers off the ground by summer, but Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colorado, has called the delay unacceptable.
“These tankers promised to be a game-changer for Western communities grappling with the perennial threat of modern mega-fires,” Udall wrote to the Forest Service in April. “I am deeply concerned that delivery of the remaining five will be further delayed and unavailable for the 2014 wildfire season.”
The Forest Service does not own the large tankers but strikes agreements with aviation companies that buy used aircraft, modify them for firefighting duty and then offer them for government lease. The agency also leases helicopters and smaller aircraft to douse fires.
The up-and-down pursuit of a faster, more reliable tanker fleet has played out against a backdrop of increasingly destructive blazes.
From 2000 to 2008, at least 10 states had fires of record-breaking size. In 2011, a wildfire scorched 538,000 acres in Arizona and New Mexico, an area so large it would cover much of the state of Rhode Island.
Costs for daily air tanker availability doubled from $15 million in 2007 to $33 million in 2010. Meanwhile, the cost of fighting wildfires has soared, up from 13 percent of the agency’s budget a decade ago to over 40 percent. That’s forced the agency to strip funds from other programs to keep up, officials say.
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