Babbitt starts bid to fight fire with fire using prescribed burns

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt launched a campaign yesterday for selective burning and thinning of up to 2 million acres of overgrown federal forest to reduce the threat of catastrophic wildfires.

More than a century of large-scale livestock grazing on the fine grasses that carry healthy natural fires and forest management practices that viewed fire as an enemy have led to a decade of increasingly hotter, bigger and more destructive blazes throughout the West.

So Babbitt and Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman now want Congress to provide $40 million to $50 million more in next year's budget to begin a long-term ``hazard-fuel reduction'' effort.

By combining that money with fire suppression funding and working with state and local agencies, Babbitt said four or five times as much crowded, disease- and insect-damaged forest as this year can be thinned and burned.

``But it is not enough,'' he told several hundred people at Boise State University in Idaho. ``I challenge Congress to help us escalate the restorative use of fire to make forests safer, healthier and more resilient; to reduce costs, dangers, size and severity of fighting large wildland fires.''

Speaking primarily to federal and state land managers and local environmentalists, Babbitt cited the nearby Boise National Forest as a dramatic example of forest health problems. Wildfires burned an average of 3,000 acres a year in the Boise forest before 1986. Since then, more than 63,000 acres - a 21-fold increase - have been blackened annually.

In two areas of the forest where prescribed burning was conducted to thin undergrowth, large fires in 1992 and 1994 were ``stopped in their tracks,'' Babbitt said.

Last year in Arizona and New Mexico, wildfires burned 339,101 acres, the fourth-highest total in records that date to 1916, said Thomas Swetnam, a fire ecologist at the University of Arizona. The top three fire years in Arizona and New Mexico since 1916, based on total acres burned, were 1994, 1993 and 1989, he said.

In Southern Arizona's Coronado National Forest, 110 wildfires charred 7,649 acres last year, U.S. Forest Service fire dispatcher Mark Hostetler said. Most of the burning occurred during the 6,317-acre Clark Peak fire on Mount Graham, near Safford. That fire broke out April 24 near Riggs Lake, and more than $7.3 million was spent fighting it.

There were 110 wildfires on the Coronado last year, about 30 less than the 10-year average, Hostetler said. Forty-eight of the fires were classified as human-caused, and 62 were caused by lightning, he said.

The human-caused wildfires burned 7,451 acres, while the lightning fires charred 198 acres on the Coronado, Hostetler said.

Nationally, federal agencies spend about $1 billion a year fighting wildfires, 10 times as much as 20 years ago.

``At the root of the recent infernos lies a basic yet overlooked truth: We don't have a `fire problem' in the West; we have a fuels problem,'' Babbitt said. ``We can't stop fire's hunger any more than we can stop a lightning strike.

He said cutting down big trees and mandated salvage timber programs, which Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and other Western senators advocate, are no answer.

``We must not sacrifice the integrity of God's creation at the altar of commercial timber production,'' Babbitt said. ``If our forest patient has a long history of poor eating habits and indigestion, then we need to burn off the unhealthy fat, not practice forest liposuction.''

Arizona Daily Star reporter Jim Erickson contributed to this story.

Search the Star Archive for a recap of the Rattlesnake fire, a 1994 blaze in the Chiricahuas that demonstrated vividly what can happen to a forest where fire has been ruthlessly controlled.