After 11 years, U.S. Fire Program Analysis system still isn't ready

Eleven years ago, federal agencies announced a bold strategy to battle the growing threat of catastrophic wildfires. Across the West, vast expanses of forests had grown dangerously thick from decades of all-out fire suppression. At their edges, an army of urban refugees bored deeper and deeper into the woods, building dream homes in the trees. The government's planned response: a sophisticated new computer system — called Fire Program Analysis, or FPA — that would enable firefighting agencies to coordinate their efforts and maximize their resources. It would help them weigh the benefits of fire suppression versus forest thinning, evaluate where to station people and equipment and decide how many planes to buy. It would be up and running by 2007, a powerful new tool in the yearly battle to save homes from the flames. In 2012 — while tens of thousands of Colorado residents have fled their homes from an alarming eruption of June wildfires — the program is still incomplete. Federal agencies, led by the U.S. Forest Service, are still working on it. A peer review of the latest prototype called it the only alternative "to reduce risk and control costs at the national level" — but concluded it isn't ready to use as intended. And the former team leader on the project said it is a shadow of what it was supposed to be, the victim of forces opposed to a process that would take decisions about where to put resources out of their hands.