Audit: Forest Service wildfire reduction poorly planned

As wildfires continue to burn large swaths of California, an audit faults the U.S. Forest Service’s hazardous fuels reduction program for failing to prioritize or accurately account for efforts aimed at minimizing fire intensity. The report, released last week by the inspector general for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, says priorities for reducing ground fuel aren’t being made based on risk. The report was based on visits to three of nine regional offices and conversations with officials in Redding, Vallejo and San Bernardino, among others. The National Forest Service has identified just under 100 million acres of agency land with at least moderate potential to burn, including 58 million acres at high risk in areas known as the wildland-urban interface where population and forests overlap. Because the Forest Service has limited funding – more than half its money goes for preparing for or fighting fires – the agency can treat only about 2.9 million acres a year. About 1.5 million of those acres are in the urban interfaces. The inspector general’s office also found that some projects’ acreage was counted twice or three times, depending on what procedures were used to mitigate fuel loads on the same land. “The overall objective of the hazardous fuels reduction project is to reduce the risk of wildfire to the landscape and surrounding communities by removing hazardous fuels,” the report said. “This inaccurate reporting caused (the Forest Service) to over-report its hazardous fuels reduction accomplishments in … 2012-2014 by 103,459 acres out of 3,703,848, or a difference of 2.8 percent.” The 34-page audit said the Forest Service overstated the number of acres it treated for hazardous fuels reduction within “high-priority (wildland-urban interface) areas.” It said the inaccurate figures found their way into annual reports to Congress that are used to make funding decisions...more