In recent years, the number of people living along the boundaries of the national forests has grown rapidly. The Forest Service Is Attempting to Address Wildfire Threats

In recent years, the Forest Service has taken steps to address the increasing threat of catastrophic wildfires on national forests. To implement its increased emphasis on reducing accumulated fuels, the Forest Service restructured and redefined its fiscal year 1998 budget for wildland fire management to better ensure that funds are available for these activities. The Congress has supported the Forest Service’s efforts to reduce accumulated fuels by, among other things, increasing the funding for these activities in recent years. The Agency Lacks a Cohesive Strategy for Overcoming Several Barriers to Reducing Accumulated Fuels

Several significant barriers must be overcome in developing a cohesive strategy to reduce wildfire hazards on the national forests of the interior West. A second significant barrier that must be overcome in developing a cohesive strategy is that both the timber sales management program and the fuels reduction program funded by appropriations currently contain incentives which tend to focus efforts on areas that may not present the greatest fire hazards. As a result, in order to reduce fuels on more acres, they often focus treatments on areas where the costs of reducing fuels are low, rather than on areas with the highest fire hazards, including especially wildland/urban interface areas. However, the agency’s contracting procedures for commercial timber sales—as well as for service contracts that do not involve selling timber but are let simply for the service of removing excess fuels—were not designed to (1) facilitate the systematic removal of large volumes of low-value material over a number of years, (2) readily combine funds for conducting timber sales with funds for reducing accumulated fuels, or (3) allow contractors to retain this low-value material to partially offset the costs of its removal. In conclusion, Madame Chairman, the increasing number of uncontrollable and often catastrophic wildfires in the interior West, as well as the significant costs to resolve the problem of increasing hazards to human health, safety, property, and infrastructure present difficult policy decisions for the Forest Service and the Congress: Does the agency request, and does the Congress appropriate, the hundreds of millions of dollars a year that may be required to fund an aggressive fuel reduction program? Since 1990, 90 percent of national forest acres burned by fire were in the interior West.
Why GAO Did This Study

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the wildfire hazards faced by communities located adjacent to national forests in the dry, inland portion of the Western United States, focusing on: (1) the extent and seriousness of threats posed by national forest wildfires to nearby communities in the interior West; (2) agency efforts to address them; and (3) barriers to successfully implementing these efforts.

What GAO Found

GAO noted that: (1) during this century, two major changes have occurred in the national forests of the interior West: (a) the Forest Service's decades-old policy of putting out fires in the national forests resulted in increased undergrowth and density of trees creating high levels of fuels for catastrophic wildfires; and (b) the number of people living along the boundaries of national forests has grown significantly; (2) as a result, the increasing number of large wildfires, and of acres burned by them pose increasingly grave risks to human health, safety, property, and infrastructure in these areas which are commonly referred to as wildland/urban interface areas; (3) during the 1990s, the Forest Service began to address this problem by: (a) establishing an objective of increasing the number of acres on which excessive fuel levels are reduced; (b) announcing a priority for such reductions in wildland/urban interface areas; (c) restructuring its budget to better ensure that funds are available for such reductions; and (d) proposing demonstration projects to test innovative approaches for reducing fuels; (4) Congress has supported these efforts by increasing funding for fuels reduction, authorizing demonstration projects, and authorizing a multi-year research program to better assess problems and solutions; (5) these efforts may fall short because the Forest Service lacks a cohesive strategy for overcoming several barriers to effectively and efficiently reducing fuels on national forests; and (6) these barriers include: (a) potential conflicts between fuel reduction efforts and other agency stewardship responsibilities, including protecting air quality, watersheds, and wildlife habitat; (b) program incentives that tend to focus efforts on areas that may not represent the highest fire hazards; (c) agency contracting procedures that are not designed for removing large amounts of materials with little or no commercial value; and (d) the high costs of such removals, which may be as much as several hundred million dollars annually.