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| MANAGING DISASTER | |
| August 23,
2000 |
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More than 5.5 million acres of land have burned in the U.S. this year. A report from firefighting efforts on the grounds, followed by a discussion on forest management policy and its role in this year's devastating fire season.
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MARGARET WARNER: 1.4 million acres are burning across the western United States today, the most land on fire at any one time in this country since 1910. Federal officials have identified 77 major fires burning in nine western states. The largest blaze has already consumed 170,000 acres in the Salmon-Challis National Forest in central Idaho.
In one of the hardest-hit areas, Montana's Bitterroot National Forest, firefighters rescued a black bear cub on Sunday, but residents were continuing to clear out of the adjoining valley.
MONTANA RESIDENT: They haven't been able to stop it. It looks like to me it's going to take my home and my barn and the whole works. |
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MARGARET WARNER: And Babbitt warned that resources were so overextended that realistically, little could be done to stop the fires' progress. Critics, including the logging industry and the governor of Montana, say Babbitt and the Clinton administration are partly to blame. Logging in national forests has declined by nearly 75 percent in the Clinton years, and critics say the dense forests have fueled the explosive fires. But environmentalists note that the biggest fires in Montana and Idaho this year are burning not in wilderness areas, where logging is banned, but in areas that have been logged in the past. The administration has been reassessing its approach to fire management, however. For 90 years, forest managers have tried to stamp out virtually every wildfire on public lands, even low-intensity fires that would otherwise clean out small trees and underbrush.
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Though
some wildfires have been contained, new ones are continually being ignited,
often by lightning. All told this season, the voracious fires have devoured
5.8 million acres, destroyed hundreds of buildings, and killed eight
firefighters. 
MONTANA
RESIDENT: We're evacuating. We were told to get our livestock out. We
have already taken them to the fairgrounds and we are packing away.
MARGARET
WARNER: Preliminary evacuations are also underway in California, where
a major wildfire rages in the Plumas National Forest north of Sacramento.
And in Oregon, authorities enlisted members of the National Guard to
help battle the flames. Firefighters are stretched so thin, that more
than 2,000 active-duty Army and Marine troops have been deployed to
help in Idaho and Montana. But the fires are likely to grow even worse
in the next month, says Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.
BRUCE
BABBITT: We've got to accept one fact, and that is infrastructure and
fire fighting is in place for the next 30 days. And our job is to assist
and help them and listen very carefully to what they say they need.
In
the latest sign of that reassessment, the New York Times reported
yesterday that the administration is considering a proposal to mechanically
remove the smaller trees and underbrush from the national forests, while
leaving the largest, most fire resistant trees behind. That kind of
experimental thinning-out program is currently underway in the Ponderosa
pine forests outside Flagstaff, Arizona. The draft proposal would extend
that program over 15 years to the 40 million acres of national forest
now deemed at high risk of catastrophic fire.