Additional Federal Funds will Help USDA Reduce Wildfire Risks

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced Thursday expanded efforts to reduce wildfire risk across the western United States. 

These investments, made possible through the Biden Administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), will directly protect at-risk communities and critical infrastructure across 11 additional landscapes in Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Washington, he said. 

In April 2022, USDA and the Forest Service announced the initial funding and identified the initial 10 landscape projects in support of the recently released strategy “Confronting the Wildfire Crisis: A Strategy for Protecting Communities and Improving Resilience in America’s Forests.” 

Officials explained a priority treatment: "High-risk firesheds are large forested landscapes and rangelands where there is a high likelihood that an ignition could expose homes, communities, and infrastructure to destructive wildfire. Firesheds, typically about 250,000 acres in size, are mapped to match the scale of community exposure to wildfire." 

The statistics are alarming.  "Wildfires have been growing in size, duration, and destructivity over the past 30 years. The Nation has more than 460 million acres at moderate to very high risk from wildfire. Many western landscapes are at grave and growing risk from wildfire due to a combination of accumulating fuels, a warming climate, and expanding development in fire-prone landscapes. At the Forest Service, we are taking decisive action to confront this crisis." 

Issues with climate-driven wildfires was one of the topics addressed last year at the U.S. Fire Administrator's Summit on Fire Prevention and Control.

"...More fire departments are responding to an increasing number of wildland-urban interface fires," Duck, NC Chief Donna Black told the panel in 2022.

Wildland-urban interface is where suburban and urban areas merge with the wildland, she explained.

The fires are not limited to western states. "Nor are these fires limited to a season...Colorado's Marshall Fire burned 6.000 acres, destroyed more than 1,000 homes and businesses and caused over $500 million in December, well outside the traditional wildland fire season," Black said.

She noted that firefighters across the country need additional training and equipment to meet the challenges.