Budget cuts are flying fast and furious around Alaska right now, though the jury's still out on how many of them will actually stick. Some, however, are looking rather like they might happen. And some of those are so incredibly shortsighted, it makes one's head spin.
An example of this is the proposed cuts to the McGrath wildland office. This station sits in the center of a region that sees a tremendous number of fires each year, though a good portion of those are in uninhabited areas where firefighters do little but monitor the fire's progress. But with a region spanning from Bristol Bay to Galena, often peppered with lightning, there is no doubt that firefighters assigned to this 66-million-acre region work hard each year protecting land and property, not only of the state, but of those who call this region home.
Some years, like last year, are quiet fire years. There's an amazing phenomenon in the wildfire world that anyone following it for any length of time can observe. People have short memories. For a couple years after a large fire burns through a region, everyone is very, very careful. And then they forget. And people start doing stupid things, like picking a hot, windy day to light off their burn pile. And so the cycle continues.
It seems that the same can be said for lawmakers and regional planners who have offered up the McGrath Division of Forestry office as the sacrificial lamb of the state wildfire budget, because the impacts to the firefighting program of cutting a station as critical as McGrath are obvious.
Here's how it works with wildfires. Depending on the conditions, once a wildfire starts, you have a couple of hours to keep it from getting out of hand. The only way you can do that with any certainty is to have resources ready to perform an initial attack on the fire quickly. Give it an hour too long, and you have yourself a blaze that grows pretty much as it wishes. From that point on, the only thing firefighters can really do is play a defensive roll as the fire wanders at the will of the wind.
By cutting McGrath and other programs in the state, the Division of Forestry is saving some $1.2 million, theoretically. But what do you think will happen if and when we have another year like 2009, when 2.9 million acres burned across the state? That year, McGrath station alone responded to 42 fires, half of which were in critical, full or modified response regions -- places where there are resources, like homes, that the state has deemed it necessary to protect.
Here's what will happen -- firefighters will respond just like they did before. Only this time, they will be responding from Palmer, or Southcentral Alaska or even Fairbanks. Helicopters that used to be stationed in the center of the state will be elsewhere, and hours will be spent getting to the fire. In the fire world, time is definitely money. If the response is slow, the cost will be large, as in millions of dollars large.
As a refresher, let's note last year's Funny River Fire on the Kenai Peninsula cost the state some $10 million to fight, drawing 700 firefighters from around the nation. The fire burned some 190,000 acres and it took a truly heroic effort to keep it from burning homes as it danced along the well-populated Funny River Road and along other residential areas.
While the state's $3.5 billion deficit won't be cut without some pain, this is one of those cuts that looks really good on paper, but probably won't pencil out that way in the long run.
The state can cut a fire office staff, but that doesn't mean there won't be any fires to put out. Cut the capacity to stop a fire cheaply when it's small, and you pay big later. Maybe it will be a year or two before the state has a big fire season. But a look out the window in Dillingham at the dry grasses and minimal snow cover will tell you the potential for a very early fire season is there. Extreme weather leads to extreme fire seasons, and any Alaskan can tell you right now that the weather is very strange. If one were a betting person, this would not be the year to bet that the weather will follow any predictable pattern.
Legislators can push papers around and cut staff, but one way or another, the state will still have to pay for its fires. Protecting homes and lives throughout the state is a priority no one can avoid. And cutting the very resources that could put those fires out quickly for a fraction of the cost is incredibly shortsighted. It's just one example of many cuts being proposed in the state right now -- to education programs, to public safety, to state ferry service -- that will likely cost more in the long run than they save.
Carey Restino is the editor of The Arctic Sounder and Bristol Bay Times-Dutch Harbor Fisherman, where this commentary first appeared.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.