2016 Rocky Mount Fire, Shenandoah National Park/NPS

Editor's note: In part two of this series, Tom Nichols, who was Chief, Division of Fire and Aviation Management for the National Park Service until his retirement in 2014, examines the challenges facing the agency's guiding fire management plan.

In Part 1 of this story, Tom Nichols presented a brief history of the National Park Service’s fire management program, with reference to an article by Kyle Dickman, Fighting Fire with Fire. Dickman stated that Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ wildland fire management program is: “America’s most progressive forest management program,” and then asked: “why isn’t it being replicated elsewhere?”

The experiences of Ben Jacobs, the prescribed burn boss in Kyle Dickman’s story, provide a good illustration of what happened to the prescribed fire component of the NPS fire program in the years following the funding and staffing boost in 2001. Ben is an excellent, highly dedicated employee attempting to translate NPS fire policy into practice via the restoration and maintenance of fire dependent ecosystems. Factors cited in Dickman’s article as hampering this effort include subsequent budget and staffing cuts, risk aversion, and air quality constraints. The result, as Ben puts it, is “five years of planning for five days of lighting.” Despite a policy that calls for restoring and maintaining fire-dependent park resources, in many areas the work is simply not being done at a significant rate.

How widespread is this difficulty in matching policy with results? In 2014, the NPS treated 83,105 acres with prescribed fire, the lowest number of acres since 2003. In contrast, in 2009 the agency treated 225,961 acres. Big Cypress National Reserve in the Southeast Region accounted for almost 30,000 acres of the 2014 total, the Midwest Region accounted for over 25,000 acres, the Intermountain Region (which includes Yellowstone and other large parks) accomplished only about 3,000 acres, and the Pacific West Region (home to Yosemite and Sequoia and Kings Canyon) accomplished approximately 2,600 acres. Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks only treated 405 acres that year, about 2-3% of what scientific studies indicate is necessary each year to restore fire on a landscape scale.

To be fair, long duration natural fires also promote ecosystem management objectives, and park managers must often choose between allocating staff to the management of such fires or to conducting prescribed fires. This has often occurred in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, affecting annual prescribed fire acreage. Long duration natural fires can require a commitment to months of operations. It is important to note that natural fire management is ongoing. In 2016, Shenandoah, Grand Teton, Grand Canyon, and Yellowstone national parks all did exceptionally well in managing multi-thousand-acre natural fires.

The data do show, however, that parks in Western states, where wildfire danger is most acute, have consistently anemic prescribed fire programs when compared to Midwest and Southeast parks. One reason is the grassy fuels found in the latter areas are quicker to burn and easier to control. Prescribed fires in Western forests take more time, require long-range weather forecasts of uncertain accuracy, and may persist into more stagnant smoke dispersion conditions, or blow smoke towards smoke sensitive areas. Staff needed to implement natural and prescribed fire projects may be diverted as new wildfires that threaten communities and other values occur throughout the fire season.

Contrary to Dickman’s suggestion in his article, the solution is not necessarily more funding, at least not as it has been allocated and managed in the past. It is true that in 2016, NPS fuels management funding was down 30 percent to about $23 million from a high of around $33 million in the mid-2000s. Nonetheless, even with higher funding levels in years prior to 2010, the east/west pattern in prescribed fire activity was evident, with Southeast and Midwest parks treating significantly more acres than Western parks. While fuels budgets have fallen, in 2016 NPS preparedness funding (which also supports suppression actions) has actually risen about 20 percent, from $33 million to approximately $40 million.

Even under a reduced fuels budget, prescribed fire projects continue to be funded, but often they are not accomplished due to a variety of factors, as noted in the article. In 2015, approximately a million dollars of unspent fuels funding was returned by the Pacific West Region alone to the national office, further undermining the argument that the limiting factor is funding.

The Rim Fire that burned into Yosemite National Park/USFS

There are many factors besides funding levels that contribute to the problem of the “postage stamp size” prescribed fire program mentioned in Dickman’s article. First, with regard to funding, it is important to note that since the early 1980s the NPS fire program has not been funded by the NPS, but rather via a Bureau of Land Management or Department of the Interior (DOI) appropriation. This worked well until 2000, when the bureaus were largely left alone to use the funds split out from this allocation in their individual budget models. The NPS used a model called FIREPRO.

After 2000, Congress, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and the DOI began to direct how and where fire funds were spent. OMB, for example, not only cut fuels management funds starting around 2010, but also directed that they be used for protection of communities threatened by wildfire (referred to as “WUI,” or wildland urban interface), which was not advantageous to many NPS units given their remote locations. Recent directions from DOI concerning the importance of protection of sage grouse habitat from wildfire is another example of a factor than can affect the portion of the DOI allocation the NPS fire budget will receive.

Unless the NPS itself commits to funding at least part of its own fuels program, it will continue to be destabilized and weakened as various external factors affect the formulation and allocation of DOI fire budgets. This is a different issue than merely the amount of fuels funds available. The issue is empowering the NPS to set its own priorities about where such work is done, and for purposes beyond wildfire hazard reduction or protection of WUI communities.

Some parks have already done this, particularly in the Midwest Region, by stepping up and providing fuels funds. Not surprisingly, the fuels programs in the Midwest Region were hit especially hard by the direction to put the majority of DOI fuels funding near WUI communities at risk, which tend to be concentrated in the Western states. Ironically, the Midwest Region had the greatest growth in prescribed fire activity following the influx of funds from the National Fire Plan of any NPS region.

Second, as the NPS fire program became better staffed and funded, splits between it and the resource management community occurred. The strong ties between resource management, science, and fire staffs, which were the hallmarks of the program’s origins, have largely eroded. Resource managers are baffled by NPS and interagency fire governance, funding allocation strategies, priorities (e.g., WUI vs. ecosystem management) and terminology. The resource management attitude has too often become “that’s a fire thing, let fire pay for it,” even regarding fire programs in support of resource management objectives. On the other side, some fire managers have become less welcoming of resource and science staff ‘meddling’ in ‘their’ fire programs. Much of the energy and innovation of the NPS fire program has foundered.

One way to restore the tie is to place fire management under resource management. This runs counter to the tradition that fire management is an emergency response activity, and therefore should be managed by visitor protection staff. But in many NPS units, wildfire emergencies are an infrequent occurrence, and it can be argued that the fire program is more appropriately considered a resource management, not a visitor protection and emergency services, function.

In any case, while actual supervision of the fire program may vary, the use of fire to achieve resource management objectives is fundamentally the responsibility of resource managers. Their failure to support and provide direction to fire managers in the pursuit of these objectives results in the further drift of the NPS fire program away from the NPS mission and back towards an interagency program dominated by fire suppression.

Third, the current fire program lacks any real accountability. The original NPS allocation tool, FIREPRO, was unplugged around 2005 with the expectation that another tool, the interagency Fire Program Analysis (FPA), would replace it. This replacement did not happen, and although the NPS fire staff, as well as DOI fire staff, are evaluating replacement models, for nearly a decade the NPS fire budget has been, and still is, allocated without objective metrics relating workload and achievement to budget allocation, as FIREPRO did. Without such metrics, accountability is difficult to achieve.

Without accountability, budget and staff can’t be focused on the parks which are the most productive, and have the willingness to do more prescribed fire projects (i.e., parks with more staff available to facilitate the process). Without accountability, parks often continue to receive the same funding and staff, even if wildfire and prescribed fire activity declines. There is little incentive to be more productive without accountability and metrics to measure success or to relate budget allocation to workload performance.

Also, without accountability, it becomes too easy to measure the success of the NPS fire program only by its initial attack success rate for suppression and by its participation in interagency suppression operations, rather than also including its success in restoring and maintaining fire dependent ecosystems, as well as defining what this success should look like. Regardless of budgets, unless metrics are developed which define this mission-driven work, and then park managers and fire staff are held accountable to achieve it, little will change from the current low levels of results.

Fourth, the NPS needs to develop a method by which superintendents who assessed the risks and embarked upon the management of long duration natural or prescribed fires are given feedback, or perhaps even rewarded, for this undertaking. Similar to the issue of accountability discussed above, fire management decisions made by superintendents need to be evaluated and shared so they and their peers can learn from the experience.

Many superintendents are coming up through the ranks with little or no fire management experience, yet they are being asked to sign fire management decision documents. The lack of a process to share experiences and to gauge success is problematic for program performance and even employee safety. Without feedback, superintendents have a difficult time learning what constitutes success, as well as what constitutes risk and how risks can or cannot be mitigated.

The emphasis here on the training and support of superintendents is deliberate. The scale and duration of prescribed and natural fires required for landscape-scale ecosystem restoration and maintenance, and therefore to support the NPS mission, is largely incompatible with the orientation of local, state, and federal fire organizations towards emergency operations. The pressure on a superintendent to postpone prescribed fires and to suppress natural fires can be intense, even when local conditions are favorable.

Given this, it’s not surprising that the apparently low risk decision to make is often suppression. This pattern will continue unless superintendents are provided with opportunities to develop hands-on fire management decision-making experience, to feel more comfortable in approving prescribed and natural fire decision documents, to gain experience in explaining such decisions to stakeholders, and to believe they have the support of the agency in making these decisions as they follow policies and protocols.

Fundamental changes in the NPS fire program such as those outlined here must be made if the process to plan and execute long duration natural and prescribed fires is to be made more efficient. These programs must be implemented at a larger scale than is occurring currently to effectively mitigate the risk of catastrophic megafire, and to restore and maintain fire dependent ecosystems in unimpaired conditions on a landscape scale. Otherwise, the evolution of the NPS fire program will increasingly tilt towards the interagency common denominator of full fire suppression with a return to the devastating conditions that resulted from the first 100 years of fire suppression.

This is not to say that the prescribed fire program is without significant success stories. The 2013 Rim Fire that affected Yosemite and the 2015 Rough Fire that burned into Kings Canyon National Park were very large wildfires that burned from U.S. Forest Service jurisdictions into the parks. The conditions created by the long history of prescribed and natural fires managed in the parks mitigated and helped to control these wildfires--proving their effectiveness. But it is also true that if similar wildfires burned into other areas of these parks which had not been treated, the damage would have been just as severe in the national parks as it was in the national forests.

The NPS community may elect to adopt none of these suggestions, and to be content with the continuing impairment attendant with the exclusion of fire in areas where it is needed. The irony in this case will be that the story that began with the Leopold Report detailing the effects of fire exclusion and which changed fire policy and actions 50 years ago will be where the story ends. The parks will have come full circle back to a program dominated by fire suppression and degraded ecosystems, regardless of what may be accomplished with an enlightened fire policy.

The best hope for the shrinking NPS prescribed fire program, which relates to the natural fire program as well, is for the NPS to actively manage it. It’s time to refocus both fire and non-fire staffs on the need for fire, and the consequences of the loss of fire’s influences. Prescribed and natural fires, especially at a landscape level of several hundred to a few thousand acres, require a significant dedication of time, funding, staffing, and even acceptance of the risk of escape or smoke episodes.

Merely hoping that the next fire season will somehow yield more productive prescribed and natural fire programs is not a strategy. It becomes entirely too easy for park and fire mangers to find reasons why burns can’t be done ‘this year’ and to defer them. This clearly is the root of Ben’s frustration, and that of many others like him who are deeply committed to this work. The programs will continue to stall without broad agreement within the agency on their critical importance to fire-dependent ecosystems, and on the need to mitigate a cause of resource impairment perhaps even greater than climate change.

Tom Nichols retired in 2014 as Chief, Division of Fire and Aviation Management for the National Park Service after a 37-year career. Prior to his position in the national office, he was the Prescribed Fire Specialist for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, Fire Management Officer for Yosemite National Park, and Fire Management Officer for the NPS Pacific West Region. Mr. Nichols has a B.S. in chemistry and earth science from the University of California at San Diego, and a M.S. in ecology from San Diego State University. He is married to Barbara Moritsch and lives in Eagle, Idaho.