The so-called Healthy Forests Initiative is not designed to protect people’s homes from the wildland fires that burned Southern California in October-November 2003. Recent analyses performed by The Wilderness Society’s Center for Landscape Analysis revealed that the majority of the 774,000 acres burned is not prioritized by the legislation that is currently being debated in Congress. (Details of the analysis are below the map.)
Land Ownership
Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), we overlaid digital maps of land ownership from the California Department of Forestry with burn perimeter maps collected by firefighters in the field. As of November 1, 2003, the fires in Southern California had burned a total 774,115 acres. The majority (68%) of the area within the burn perimeter was non-federal (524,950 acres). Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands targeted by the proposed legislation represent only 32% (249,165 acres) of the burned area.
Vegetation
By overlaying the burn perimeters with a satellite classification of land cover from USGS (National Land Cover Dataset), we also determined that 73% (566,922 acres) of the vegetation burned was shrublands or grasslands. Forested lands only accounted for 22% (169,724 acres) of the burned acreage. Other land cover classes such as agriculture, barren or water, accounted for the remaining 5% (37,469 acres) of the area within the burn perimeter.
Wilderness Areas
Three wilderness areas were affected by the fires, the Cucamonga Wilderness (3,528 acres, 0.4% of total area burned), Otay Mountain Wilderness (17,694 acres, 2.3% of total area burned) and the Sespe Wilderness (26,386 acres, 3.4% of total area burned). In all, designated wilderness areas amounted to only 6.1% of the total burned area.
Roadless Areas
62,474 acres of Roadless Areas burned. This represents 8% of the total acreage within the burn perimeter.
Total Area Burned | 774,115 acres | 100% |
Ownership | US Forest Service | 209,558 acres | 27% |
BLM | 39,607 acres | 5% |
Non-federal | 524,950 acres | 68% |
| | |
Vegetation | Shrub-Grassland | 566,922 acres | 73% |
Forest | 169,724 acres | 22% |
Other | 37,469 acres | 5% |
Conclusion
As the House and Senate try to resolve differences between two versions of the Healthy Forests Initiative, lawmakers have pointed to the destructive fires in Southern California as justification for passing either version of their bill quickly. However, neither the House nor the Senate version adequately targets the top priority for fire management, community protection on private lands. The House version ignores private lands altogether. The Senate version would allow funding to be spent on private lands, but only if Congress specifically directs that it be spent on private lands in subsequent appropriation bills. Moreover, a variety of other factors well beyond the legislation contributed to the severity of the fires: decades of fire suppression, hot Santa Ana winds, high ambient temperatures, four years of drought, and thousands of homes built in harm's way. The House bill restricts the allocation of resources to federal lands, while the Senate bill fails to require that resources be allocated to non-federal lands. As demonstrated by this analysis, the Southern California fires would hardly have been affected by treating fuels on federal land because the majority of the fires burned on privately-owned land.
Furthermore, the Healthy Forests Initiative calls for thinning forests. The Southern California fires burned large expanses of mostly chaparral, shrubs and grasslands Thinning forests would not have influenced these fuel types. In fact, it is unlikely that these large expanses of chaparral could be treated in a way in a way that would alter the spread of these natural fires. Once again, this underscores the importance of taking measures to safeguard communities by clearing brush and fine fuels from the immediate vicinity around individual homes.
In addition, the charge that designated wilderness and inventoried roadless areas are to blame for causing such blazes is unfounded. The fact that only 8% of the fires were in roadless areas and only 6% of the fires were in designated won Wilderness areas supply ample evidence that these protected places do not pose a risk to communities that are typically located far from these remote areas.
In conclusion, the Southern California fires illustrate that a fire management bill can only be effective if it works across all land ownerships and jurisdictions with resources prioritized toprotectpeople’s homes from naturally flammable landscapes. This means granting communities the resources they need to protect themselves, not opening our National Forests to big timber interests in the name of fuel reduction.
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