Playing With Fire: Defunding Wildfire Management Efforts

When my parents moved to the Rogue Valley in 1992, it was raining ash. They drove into town under a dull orange sky while temperatures soared into the hundreds. My mom recounts that they wondered out loud if they were moving to Hell. By most accounts, Southern Oregon is beautiful. Opportunities for outdoor recreation abound: the fishing is world famous, there are hundreds of scenic hikes to explore, as well as skiing, camping, rowing and rafting. But the same green wilderness that lends Southern Oregon her charm and beauty is also the center of one of the curses of living in the Rogue Valley– Fire Season.

Forest fires have always been a risk of living in Southern Oregon. The earliest major fire I remember was the Biscuit Fire in 2002, which burned about 500,000 acres in Southern Oregon and Northern California (See link 1). The lightning-caused fire sparked major debates over forest management, and it is still one of the most intensely studied forest fires in history (See link 2). But all that came after. The summer that the fire raged we were just surviving it, and there were lots of little kids like me being told we couldn’t play outside because the air wasn’t good for us, listening to hushed stories about evacuations, and watching the fire glow on the ridge-lines at night.

Since 2002,  Fire Season in Oregon has only gotten worse. Since 2011 we have had at least one major fire (burning more than 100,000 acres) every year except for 2016 (See link 3) And lest you think 2016 was an easy year, we still had five fires that each burned over 20,000 acres as well as numerous smaller fires (See link 4). The fire reporting by both the Oregonian and the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center is excellent, and I highly recommend you look at these reports to understand the full extent of fire damage in Oregon over the last decade.

When I moved back to Oregon at the beginning of the summer last year I thought I was ready for Fire Season, but 2018 had other ideas. On June 21st, 2018 a lightning strike started the Boxcar fire, which would go on to burn 100,000 acres and kick off one of the worst Fire Seasons in my memory. The last fire of the year burned into September, ensuring smoky skies that didn’t clear until well past the beginning of the school year.  By August 15th our little town of Medford had some of the worst air quality in the world, with a particulate matter rating of 237. For context, anything over 200 is considered “very unhealthy” and residents are encouraged to stay inside. In total 901,613 acres burned in 2018, costing 514.6 million dollars in fire fighting costs (See link 5).

And we weren’t alone. In 2018 California had their worst fire year on record ever, losing 1,893,913 acres in total (See link 6). The widely publicized destruction of the small town of Paradise, and later the burning of celebrity homes in Malibu brought national attention to the crisis. A state of emergency was declared in Northern California, as several large fires destroyed communities, with thousands of structures and hundreds of thousands of acres burned. I-5 was closed in areas of California and Oregon as the fires threatened residential and commercial traffic. It was, in short, a brutal summer for us all.

The drama continued in California as their fire season stretched into the fall. President Trump, after approving the request to declare a national emergency, threatened to withhold future federal relief if the state did not improve their forest management and “remedy” the situation (See link 7).

Trump continued to attack California’s fire management all the way into this year, leading to speculation about whether the state would be reimbursed for damages and expenses or not. State leadership, residents and firefighters have all spoken out against Trump’s attacks on the state, calling them “reckless and insulting to the firefighters and people being affected” and commenting that “fires do not respect politics . . . so I would beg the President to pursue a major disaster declaration and not make this a political incident” ( See link 8 for more complete interviews). As the winter dragged on and Fire Season ended, the debate faded from the national consciousness. But here on the West Coast the battle is far from over.

At the end of May, Trump announced he was cutting funding to twenty-five Job Corps Civilian Conservation Centers nationwide, prompting backlash from civilians, firefighters and a bipartisan group of lawmakers. It was a news item that went relatively undiscussed, overshadowed by the weekly political drama, but for those of us living in areas regularly affected by forest fires it could have major consequences.

The first thing we have to address here is what exactly Job Corps Civilian Conservation Centers are. The JCCCC program is a joint effort between the US Department of Labor and the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service. The program is designed to give disadvantaged youth vocational training in Fire and Disaster Relief, so they can then return to their communities to be productive members (See link 9). JCCCC kids learn a lot of skills, but are especially known for “urban forestry, hazardous fuels reduction, construction, and firefighting”. They are a valuable extra workforce during major disasters like forest fires (See link 10).

In Oregon these extra helping hands are particularly crucial. Brian Hickman, a graduate of the program in Oregon, stated that the students helped with prescribed burns as well as offering support to the main fire camps, cooking and managing supply lines. Last year twenty-five students were assigned to help on the 36 Pit Fire, and the Eagle Mill fire crews also received JCCCC assistance. The closures being discussed are set to go into effect nationally this September, with 16 centers turning private and 9 centers closing all together. Four of these centers are in Oregon. Two will close (Timber Lake and Fort Simcoe), and the remaining two will be turned over to private companies (Angell and Wolf Creek) (See link 11).

After the defunding was announced, the US Department of Agriculture Secretary, Sonny Perdue stated: “As USDA looks to the future, it is imperative that the Forest Service focus on and prioritize our core natural resource mission to improve the condition and resilience of our Nation’s forests, and step away from activities and programs that are not essential to that core mission”. The Department of Labor then released a statement that referred to the closures as “modernizing and reforming part of the Jobs Corps program” (See link 12). These announcements did not go over well, and the backlash was pretty immediate.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, banded together to send a letter expressing their disagreement with the decision. The group pointed out that the efforts of these students have played a huge factor in our disaster relief efforts over the decades. In 2017 students provided approximately 450,000 hours of wildfire response and 5,000 hours in response to Hurricane Harvey. Senator McConnell also sent his own letter, referencing the 100 Kentuckians who would lose their jobs and stating that the program plays an “important role” in training young people, especially in “rural and economically depressed areas”.

These lawmakers were not alone in their complaints. Fire fighters said it felt like “a slap in the face” to receive news of the closures directly before the assumed start of this year’s Fire Season. The National Federation of Federal Employees president, Randy Erwin, spoke to the Huffington Post about the decision, saying “these centers are disproportionately located in conservative leaning districts and states” and continuing “No member of Congress, regardless of political affiliation, wants to see small towns in their districts and states decimated by the closure of a federal facility” (See link 13).

Here in Oregon, Senator Merkley has been vocal about his dislike of the decision. In an interview obtained by the Oregon Public Broadcast he stated that in the past three years, JCCCCs in Oregon have trained over 900 students who have offered nearly 120,000 hours of wildfire response work. He commented on the Oregon closures saying “Here we’re talking about taking people away from fighting fires and taking away from these programs that are helpful for students on an alternative track. So it hurts in a number of ways” (See link 14).

We seem to have avoided the early start to Fire Season that we saw in 2018, but firefighters have already extinguished 181 small fires so far in 2019. While we may be currently smoke free, the threat of the next big fire looms large in the Rogue Valley. According to a Forest Service report cited by Oregon Live, Medford is in the top five cities in OR and WA most at risk from wildfire damage (See link 15). It’s a threat we take seriously. You don’t have to drive far to find the burn scars from last year’s blazes, a sobering reminder of what we’re facing here in Southern Oregon. As we rally our defenses to brace for another summer, I am acutely aware of how important each member of that defense is. While for the President and his Federal Agencies funding to these programs may be just a part of a larger political and business strategy, here in Southern Oregon and in other at-risk communities across the nation it’s not just politics, there are communities and lives on the line.

Articles Referenced:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biscuit_Fire
2. https://kalmiopsiswild.org/1019/the-biscuit-fire-time-to-bury-the-myths/
3. https://www.oregonlive.com/wildfires/2017/09/the_worst_wildfires_in_oregon.html
4. https://gacc.nifc.gov/nwcc/content/pdfs/archives/2016_NWCC_Annual_Fire_Report_FINAL_2017-2-28.pdf
5. https://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/news/2018/10/10/oregon-wildfire-costs-hit-record-high-2018/1581132002/
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_California_wildfires
7. https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-threatens-pull-federal-funding-california-wildfires-gross/story?id=59102371
8. https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/11/politics/california-wildfires-trump-tweets/index.html
9. https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/r4/home/?cid=stelprdb5377779
10. https://www.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/pubs/38771
11. https://katu.com/news/local/closing-civilian-conservation-centers-will-impact-at-risk-youth-graduate-says
12. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-administration-to-pull-out-of-rural-job-corps-program-laying-off-1100-federal-workers/2019/05/24/b93c5af4-7e5b-11e9-8bb7-0fc796cf2ec0_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e2f1e1f50b84
13. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-gets-gop-pushback-on-plan-to-close-job-centers-and-lay-off-workers_n_5cf93d22e4b0e63eda973263
14. https://www.opb.org/news/article/forest-service-job-training-center-close-oregon-washington/
15. https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2019/06/firefighters-brace-for-tough-pacific-northwest-wildfire-season.html