“Conditions can change quickly and drastically in Florida, so the Florida Forest Service has made it a priority to take advantage of these favorable conditions whenever they are present”, said Jim Karels, Florida State Forester.
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The fire was started July 29 by lightning but was dampened by storms.
Rain is predicted Friday afternoon and evening, which “should help control the fire”, Schewel said.
The fire is burning brush and grass and is not threatening any structures, according to authorities. There has also been a 39 percent loss of non-fire personnel, from approximately 18,000 in 1998 to fewer than 11,000 in 2015, while the fire staff has doubled.
If the Forest Service’s budgeting process stays the same, Vilsack fears that funding for projects that demonstrably reduce both wildfire and climate risks, such as forest restoration, will dry up.
At first blush, the question of which federal agency’s budget should be the source of paying for fighting wildfires might seem an esoteric bureaucratic scuffle with little meaning to anyone outside of Washington, D.C.
Fire seasons today are 78 days longer than in the 1970s.
The U.S. Forest Service released a report on Wednesday that provided one very tangible example of what those costs will be. He recommended that Congress begin treating fires more like hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters that typically attract far more government resources. “It is important to keep the focus on this problem, ensure the discussion continues and a solution to the funding problem be found”.
“It’s a distressing trend”, said lead economist and climate policy manager Rachel Cletus of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group that issued a similar report last year, but was not involved in the Forest Service report.
The Forest Service, which oversees more than 190 million acres (77 million hectares) of federal forests and grasslands, will spend about $1.2 billion in the current fiscal year on firefighting efforts, or 52 percent of its budget, the report said. The funding solution must address runaway growth of firefighting costs and transferring funds from other forest programs to fire suppression, it concludes.
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“We must treat catastrophic wildfire not like a routine expense”, says Mr. Vilsack, “but as the natural disasters they truly are”. The agency manages 193 million acres of public land, provides assistance to State and private landowners, and maintains the largest forestry research organization in the world. More than 46 million homes and more than 70,000 communities are at risk from U.S. wildfires, the report said.
