Suppression
- More than $1,000,000,000 is spent every year on wildfire suppression (click here for 1987 fires cost)
- Wildfire is divided into two regimes - "moderate" and "catastrophic" (click here for relationship between suppression cost and response time)
- Resources are oftened budgeted for an "average" year that may not be experienced (click here for ranking of fires by cost)
Fuels Management
- The Forest Service is requesting more than $400,000,000 per year for the next 15 years (2003-2017) for fuels reductions on 30,000,000 hectares
- New growth exceeds current treatment rates
- Smoke management mandates and community resistance limit opportunities for fuels treatments
1987 Fire Suppression Costs
Wildfire suppression costs for August 1987 are shown above for fires on Forest Service land in the western US. The image to the left with the open circles shows locations of August 1987 wildfires. The size and color of the circle reflects the fire supression cost (larger circle means larger fire, blue circles least costly; red circles most costly). Note the concentration of large, expensive fires in northern and central California. The two panels on the right help explain the larger and more expensive fires in the northern California region. The top panel shows the 1987 drought index, red areas indicating extremely dry conditions. The lower panel shows anomalous lightning activity, with red indicating 1987 areas with more lightning strikes than normal. Dry conditions and unusual lightning activity over northern California contributed to the large and costly 1987 wildfires. In contrast, a large area of unusually high lightning activity over Utah combined with a moderate drought index contribued to low wildfire activity.
1987 Suppression Cost and Response Time
The image above is an initial attempt to understand the relationship between wildfire suppression cost and the time it takes for heavy engines to respond. Suppression cost is shown along the x-axis; note this axis is log ranging from $100 to $10,000,000. The y-axis shows the percent of fires that fall into four categories. These categories are defined by two variables: burn index (BI) and response time (hour). BI is a Bureau of Land Management index that indicates the risk of fire (height of flames) and is based on weather and climate factors (this is known before a fire would start). Green indicates fires that are responded to in less than an hour and red indicates fires that take more than an hour to respond to (with heavy engines). Solid lines indicate fires with low (less than 70) BI and dashed lines indicate fires with high BI. In general, the response time has a greater impact on suppression cost than BI, with slower response times resulting in higher suppression costs.
Cumulative Fire Suppression Cost
The figure above examines the cost of suppressing wildfires over 100 acres. Wildfires are ranked according to total acres burned and these are on the x-axis from largest (left) to smallest (right). The cost of fighting each fire is accumulated on the costs of the larger fires and that accumulating cost is shown on the y-axis. This figure then shows us that 90% of the total costs of fighting all the fires is spent on the largest 20% of the fires: big fires = big suppression costs. This figure is for California wildfires from 1987 to 2000.