Fire Season Forecast To Be Normal But That Isn't Good News

Fire Season Forecast To Be Normal But That Isn't Good News

The forecast for this year’s wildfire season is for a normal year however, normal does not mean a year without fires as Vilsack explains
Vilsack: “Even with a normal season, we are looking at thousands and thousands of fires and we all know that many of those fires will be very,very large and expensive fires.”
Even a so-called normal year is far worse than it used to be. On average, wildfires burn twice as much land area each year as they did 40 years ago and the threat continues to increase.
Vilsack urges Congress to help USDA to be proactive in addressing these huge catastrophic fires — rather than having to take money out of critical restoration and capital improvement projects US Forest Service budget — to be able to designate these top 1 or 2 percent of these huge fires be treated like as a natural disaster, similar to hurricanes or tornados and be funded through a FEMA account in combating it. He continues
Vilsack: “To once and for all finally fix the fire budget. This is a circumstances we’ve had conversations and discussions for a number of years and each year we continue borrow money and each year we continue to see declining resources and declining personnel dedicated to manage our forests. And each and every year we see an increase in the risk of destruction as a result of intense and significant fires — the risk of property damage and most important of all the risk to life.”
For the first time in its 111-year history, over half of the Forest Service's 2015 budget was designated to fight wildfires, compared to just 16 percent in 1995.
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