The Forest Service Needs More Fire Fighters — It Saves Money

Amidst the carnage of the Trump Administration from the elimination of foreign aid to a proposal to cut pensions and elderly health care by $4.5 trillion, a modest cut of 3,000 Forest Service staff may not seem to affect most of us. But these direct service cuts tell the important stories — and one important American story: if in an era of climate turbocharged wildfires, we have far too few firefighters. Not too few everywhere: New York with 20,000 full time fire staff for 300,000 acres is relatively well staffed. But the US Forest Service, charged with protecting 91 million acres, with only 15,000,has woefully too few “first hour” boots on the ground of any wildlife that breaks out and whose magnitude will be shaped by the number of firefighters deployed in the first few flame spreading hours, There were too few Pulaskis helping to damp the mammoth fires that devastated exurban Northern California three years ago; as the winds soared downslope in LA this year the number of fire fighters Chiefs could put in the likely ignition zones was limited not by capacity but by overtime budgets. The costs of those fires: $54 billion and counting. That’s an incomprehensible amount of overtime that would have saved money!

Almost every one of Musk and Trump’s “wasteful” cuts runs the risk of fantastically expensive losses. Ben Franklin taught us the folly of investing too little in fire prevention: “a stitch in time saves nine.” And suppose that Elon Musk had found 3000 underemployed staff in the Service — why wasn’t that windfall used to fill in the holes in current Forest Servicing fire capacity?