On Sept. 27, the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission released its 340-page report. It included 148 recommendations to the administration as well Congress and state, local and tribal governments.
Background
The commission was authorized as part of the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. It directed the secretaries of Agriculture, Interior and Homeland Security to establish the commission withing 30 days.
The commission’s mission was to make recommendations to improve federal policies relating to the prevention, mitigation, suppression and management of wildland fires in the United States as well as the rehabilitation of land in the United States dev¬astated by wildland fires.
The commission’s 50 members came from federal agencies, state, local and tribal governments, and representatives from the private sector. The commission has met monthly over the last year to discuss and craft these recommendations.
The report stresses, “There is a need for a paradigm shift toward systems and structures that are more comprehensive and better address the interrelationships between communities and landscapes and between pre-fire mitigation, response, and post-fire recovery efforts.”
Report and recommendations
The news release and the report’s introduction describe seven key themes that address the issues of preparing, fighting and recovering from wildfires. The first of the seven themes is “Urgent New Approaches.” The focus of this theme is to “establish a Community Wildfire Risk Reduction Program to proactively address risk, change financial incentives and change agency metrics to better focus on performance of ecological health over acres treated.”
The other six themes are supporting collaboration, shifting from reactive to proactive thinking and planning, enabling beneficial fire, supporting and expanding the workforce, modernizing tools for informed decision-making, and investing in resilience.
Enabling beneficial fire addresses the issues around prescribed burns. “[The] need to expand beneficial fire, such as prescribed and cultural burning, must be balanced with the public health threats associated with smoke and reduced air quality produced through beneficial fire and implemented through pre-fire planning …”
Seven separate chapters form the bulk of the report address issues that are incorporated in and similar to the themes. However, the chapters are organized in chronology from wildfire preparation to response and then post-fire activities.
For example, Chapter 1 is “Creating the Foundation for Success” that focuses on actions to prepare for wildfires. These include being proactive before possible ignition; community planning; a capable evacuation and alerting infrastructure; policies to support continuity of operations for both electric and water utilities; and vegetation management.
Examples of the recommendations in this section are a suggestion that Congress should consider developing federal standards for electric utility wildland fire mitigation plans and should encourage adopting those plans by all transmission and distribution electric utilities.
Other recommendations establish prescribed fire targets based on natural fire regimes as determined locally and invest in fuels reduction treatments.
The next chapter is on public health. Protection of water supplies is an important emphasis of this chapter. “As these cases clearly demonstrate, high-severity wildfires pose substantial risk to drinking water supplies, including contamination and degradation of water quality, damage to water collection and conveyance infrastructure, and reduction of water storage capacity resulting from post-fire sedimentation.”
Not only water but other public health consequences of wildfire are addressed here. Many include recommending more funding for programs and management. But the commission also connected this recommendation with its stress of greater use of prescribed burning.
“The Commission’s discussions about smoke, human health, and wildfire were some of this body’s most extensive, and most challenging. Ultimately, the Commission did come to a number of consensus recommendations, all of which are grounded in agreement on two core acknowledgements: that there is a need to increase beneficial fire, and, at the same time, there is a need to reduce the impact of smoke on humans.”
Improving agencies’ capability to respond to wildfire addressed several topics. The first was interagency cooperation and collaboration. This is very similar to what occurs on the Hill during Mountain Area Taskforce Safety meetings, which include firefighters and law enforcement personnel from the various levels of government — U.S. Forest Service, Cal Fire, Idyllwild Fire, Sheriff’s Department and California Highway Patrol.
One chapter discusses preparing for consequences after a wildfire is controlled. However, the commission sadly noted, “The end of the post-fire period is also poorly defined. Impacts vary by fire, and can occur days, weeks, or years after the fire; and, in some cases, can cause permanent change. For many communities, high-severity wildfires result in an ongoing watershed emergency for years, increasing the risk of flooding, debris flows, and other cascading events. Further complicating the definition of the post-fire period, extended and variable timelines, together with increasing fire frequency, can create environments where both pre- and post-fire mitigation actions overlap.”
The commission recommended increasing the speed to allocate mitigation and recovery funding as well as expanding the availability of Fire Management Assistance Grants.
The remainder of the report addresses recruiting, training and paying firefighters as well as greater investments in the science of fire, data collection and developing models to predict fire locations and movement.
In its conclusion, the commission stated, “The resulting recommendations reflect one of the most sweeping and comprehensive reviews of the wildfire system to date … While the resulting recommendations are extensive and diverse, they are also complementary and interrelated.
“Rather than selecting one or more potential recommendations to carry forward for implementation, the Commission urges audiences of this report to take an ‘all of the above’ approach. There is no single solution to the wildfire crisis; the scale of the issues necessitates solutions that are integrated, comprehensive, and broad in scope. The urgency of this need cannot be overstated. Severe wildfires are creating overwhelming losses, damage, and costs to communities and ecosystems across the country. The solutions are in hand, it is now incumbent upon us all to act upon them.”
The entire report can be found on the Town Crier website at: https://idyllwildtowncrier.com/2023/10/09/wildland-fire-mitigation-and-management-commission-report/.
Support for the report’s recommendations began the day it was released and is continuing. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who was instrumental in getting the authorization language into the “Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act,” said, “The latest findings released by the Commission provide useful recommendations which we can use to prevent, manage, suppress, and recover from wildfires. I look forward to reviewing these recommendations and working with Senator Mark Kelly (D AZ), Representative John Curtis (R UT), and our colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support efforts that efficiently manage wildfires, enable responsible prescribed burning, and implement additional science and technology resources in our wildfire risk reduction and response.”
And the Congressional Western Caucus, chaired by Dan Newhouse (WA-04), also shared these views. “This report highlights what we already know; we must take a proactive approach in combating catastrophic wildfires,” said Newhouse in the press release. “It’s time for Congress to take immediate action by empowering local officials with the tools and resources they need to prevent and combat wildfires plaguing their communities.”
The president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, Randy Erwin, issued strong support for the personnel recommendations. “It is no secret that low pay and staffing levels are serious obstacles to properly addressing the wildfire crisis. The Commission’s report solidifies the need for Congress to provide appropriate funding for federal wildland firefighter salaries to protect this country from dangerous megafires, which are only increasing in size and severity. If firefighters are not paid a living wage, we will simply not have a workforce to protect America from the wildfire crisis.”
And the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) issued a supporting statement, too. “If we truly want to shift the trajectory of the wildfire crisis, the status quo cannot continue. Significant changes must be made to better prepare communities from wildfire,” said Michele Steinberg, director of the NFPA wildfire division, who served as a member on the commission. “When NFPA launched its Outthink Wildfire™ initiative a couple of years ago, we identified a full ecosystem of preventative and mitigation strategies in order to make these needed changes.”
