Randal O'Toole - Are we fighting wildfires the wrong way?

Every wildfire season sparks the same debate over climate change, forest management, and government funding. But are those explanations missing the bigger picture? Randal O'Toole, Adjunct Scholar at Cascade Policy Institute and author of The Perfect Firestorm, joins the show to discuss what actually drives Western wildfires and why homeowners may play a larger role than government agencies.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome back to the Lawrence Larson Show. It's a pleasure to be with you. I want to talk about the Forest Service, because the Forest Service and the timber industry and the environmentalists, they all have their favorite excuses when the wildfires begin to happen, whether they're happening in Canada or happening on the West Coast or anywhere else. So what if none of them is actually right? I thought we'd talk about that with Randall O'Toole, who's an adjunct scholar at Cascade Policy Institute, a forestry graduate of Oregon State University, and the author of Reforming the Forest Service and the Perfect Firestorm. Randall, good to have you back.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

I'm glad to be here. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

So tell me this. It really gets down to what we're doing with all these forests, that America owns a couple of 198 million acres of forests, and uh and the federal government does not do a very good job of managing them, and the state government is only moderately better. Am I right in that assessment?

SPEAKER_01 0:58

Well, I think you're right in that assessment. But I think the important thing to understand about wildfire is that we in the West live on a fireplain. It's like living in a floodplain. If you live in a floodplain and you build a house, you should put it on stilts or put it on pontoons or something that accepts that it's going to flood sometime. If you live in a fireplane, you need to design your homes and your landscaping to protect them against fire. If you're not willing to do that, then it doesn't really matter what the Forest Service or the timber industry is doing, your house is going to burn down.

SPEAKER_00 1:34

Yeah, and one of the things I've always noticed, Randall, I wanted you to comment on this, is that I will see stories, TV news stories from all over the West Coast and other places in the western United States, and I'll see that somebody's entire house is burned down. And then I notice, because fire usually doesn't consume the entire tree, that the house is invariably surrounded by trees that are very, very close. Does that mean that when it comes to actually protecting people and their homes from forest fires or wildfires, that the primary responsibility has to be on the landowner himself to keep a defensible space?

SPEAKER_01 2:09

That's exactly right. I tell people if you want to know who burned your house down in the wildfire, look in the mirror. Because if your house burned down, it's probably because you weren't taking a good care of your property and making sure it was fire safe. And that's, you know, uh we can look at house to house to house and see some houses survive right next door, other houses burned down because some of them did a better job. They didn't have cedar shaped roofs, they didn't have burnable soffits, they had their vegetation around the house was rather sparse, and so on.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

And yet I don't I also don't want to see the government make these requirements or rules that say you must do it, nor do I want the government to come in and say, I'm sorry, you'd you'd love to clear the brush around your house if it's brush, uh, but you're not allowed to because of the the rare O'Toole tree frog or or something, some other similar excuse.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

Well, I don't think we need to require it, but the Forest Service spends billions of dollars on fire suppression. I think they could take a little bit of that money and give people uh grants, or maybe even just low interest loans to protect their properties, make their properties defensible from fire, instead of spending, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars a year on prescribed burning and thinnings and things like that, which frankly don't do anything to protect people's homes from fire.

SPEAKER_00 3:38

So the prescribed burns really don't do much good? The ones where they go in and do a set fire at a certain time of year when it's safe to do it and burn up all the extra trash that's on the forest floor?

SPEAKER_01 3:48

No, they don't. And you know, I can point to you, point you to fires where they did thousands and thousands of acres of prescribed burns before the fire, and the fire comes along, and yeah, it the the fire didn't kill all the trees where the prescribed burning was done, but it smoldered along in the underbrush, and then it reached somebody's home, and wham, it the home got uh blown up in fire. So uh you can't rely on the Forest Service to keep your house safe if you live in a fireplane. You have to keep it safe yourself.

SPEAKER_00 4:23

I guess there is a part of me that wishes the Forest Service and the state agencies that do the same job and the BLM would go out and take a look at where fires have been historically, take a look at weather patterns and wind patterns, especially, and then do a fair amount of both clear cutting and replanting in a way to make those spaces more defensible. Is that a sensible approach to the government side of this?

SPEAKER_01 4:46

A problem with that is that when you replant after a clear cut, for the next 50 years, you're gonna have a dense stand of trees that have branches right down to the ground, and that's gonna create the perfect fire ladder. So when a fire comes along, every single one of those trees will burn up. Whereas the tr forest that you cut down probably had trees with all their lower limbs had fallen off. Yep, and that doesn't completely protect them against fire, but it makes them a lot more resistant to fire.

SPEAKER_00 5:19

The other thing is when you mention, you know, maybe give people grants to go out and make their houses more defensible space. I guess I wish the private sector would, the market force would work. That is, you've got a house, it's surrounded by trees that are close to the house, there's no defensible space. Your insurance company says, Well, here's your premium for this year, but you can make it a whole lot lower if you would just take these actions and put a defensible space around your house. That seems to me like a proper incentive to say you want to spend an extra two or three thousand dollars a year on fire insurance, don't clear your land. If you do want to have the lower rate, then clear the trees immediately around your house and make it defensible. Isn't that a proper function for the market and not for the government to just wander around handing out cash?

SPEAKER_01 6:06

You're exactly right. And the fact is that until very recently, the vast majority of houses that burn down in this country are in cities. They're not out in rural areas or in the what's called the wildland urban interface. And so insurance companies haven't had an incentive to pay much attention to it until states like California started passing laws limiting the ability of insurance companies to raise their rates for people who weren't managing their property properly. And so the insurance companies just pulled out. You know, so we don't want to have the government try to regulate the insurance industry, but it would be good for the insurance companies to take a look and see how they can encourage people to make their homes safer. Now, I will tell you that my insurance company wrote me a letter and said if there's a fire threatening my house and I live in a rural area, that they will come out and they'll spray my entire yard with fire retardant, and then when the fire danger is over, they'll come and clean it off. And so uh I don't have to do anything. I actually do, though. I've made my yard very fire resistant, but it's nice that some insurance companies are starting to think about this.

SPEAKER_00 7:19

Although, do they really have to clean it up? Isn't most of that fire retardant stuff uh in the borate bombers and all that, isn't that fertilizer at the end of the day?

SPEAKER_01 7:28

Uh most of it, uh well, some of it actually is uh poses a danger to pregnant women. Uh most of it will uh is it's water soluble, so when it rains, it'll go away. But it it wouldn't hurt to have somebody come and wash it away for you so you don't have all this gummy stuff on all your own. Fair enough.

SPEAKER_00 7:48

But let's keep the government out of regulating the insurance company. I'm look, I'm no fan of insurance companies, but on the other hand, if the government says you're not allowed to raise rates and tell the people with dangerous houses that they have to make their houses safer, I think that's just uh bottom line stupid, but that's California. That's Randall O'Toole with a Cascade Policy Institute. Back in a moment, you've got the Lars Larson show.