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Barriers To Fire Use And Thoughts On Their Resolution

Barriers to fire use exist at various levels of society - National, Regional, and Local - and occur within and/or between different institutional structures - Congress, the Agencies, and the Public. Appropriate strategies for overcoming these barriers will occur at various levels as well.

This illustration sites some of the key barriers and their potential resolution within this matrix.

Widespread use of FIREWISE practices would significantly reduce risk to properties at the wildland fringe. Success requires actions and leadership in all major institutions at all levels.

Conflicts in definitions of acceptable burns - from smoke vs. clean air, to other fire effects and fire behavior - also poses a barrier to fire use. Smoke vs. air quality issues involve all major institutions: the agencies would need to ensure calculation of realistic trade-offs, the public would need to understand these trade-offs, and Congress may need to sanction of fire use even in the face of Clean Air Act violations. Acceptable fire effects and fire behavior need to be carefully defined because severe fire effects and behavior, while hazardous to manage, are normal and 'healthy' in some systems. Resolution of these conflicts will require on-going discussions and learning by all major institutions.

Currently, the crisis-orientation of fire management/policy and the budget allocation system encourage management of all fires as suppression events. Changes to the budget system require Congressional and national level Agency actions.

The suppression-orientation within the fire fighting organizations is primarily cultural - created and maintained by training, experience and camaraderie. Adjustment towards appropriate management response that emphasizes fire use and confinement as a first choice will require individual and organizational actions at all levels.

Lack of support for managers who accept calculated risks to use fire, particularly lack of support for those whose actions fail due to unforeseeable natural events, discourages many from taking risks in the first place. Support for justified risk-takers would need to begin at the national level and filter down to the local levels.

A pervasive focus on short-term losses from fire, particularly for marketable commodities, blinds all - managers and the public - to the potential short and long-term benefits of fire. Explicitly considering the benefits of fire when making decisions about incident strategies would help to ensure maximum benefit and minimum cost of fire management. Since decisions about fire are made locally, but often by nationally trained teams and under federal guidelines, changes in focus must occur at all levels.

Many federal areas have no choice but to suppress fires due to lack of direction in their Long Range Management Plan, or lack of a Fire Management Plan. These documents are written locally, but priorities are often set at the national level. Lack of common units of analysis (e.g., stand structure vs. fuel loading) between fire and resource management groups within the agencies inhibits their communication and integration. Local planning and monitoring plans that use common terms or crosswalks will enable more coordinated actions in support of national goals.

Smokey Bear symbolizes an incredibly successful agency campaign to impress upon the public the risk of fire. There is also a much less conscious, but equally successful, campaign resulting in the public perceptions that fire is a discretionary action: initial attack combined with air tankers put fires out. Unfortunately, neither is perception is completely true: fires - like hurricanes - are not preventable, but they are mitigatable; and although initial attack is successful 98% of the time, in severe fire weather, the effects of air tankers are limited. Changing this message requires action at all levels of the agencies and includes not only new educational campaigns but also listening and learning about social perceptions of fire and fire management.