A federal government plan to slow rangeland wildfires in the western U.S. by digging, mowing and spraying herbicides to create fuel breaks took another step forward on Friday.
The proposal would streamline the environmental review process for the Bureau of Land Management to create a network of fuel breaks over as many as 11,000 miles of Great Basin terrain.
That amount of fuel breaks laid end-to-end would be enough to stretch from Reno to Madagascar.
BLM officials say the ambitious proposal is necessary to stop the wildfire plague that’s burned more than 13.5 million acres of delicate sagebrush ecosystems since 2009. Already, roughly 45 percent of historic sagebrush habitat is gone and suppression costs to the BLM alone have cost $373 million.
“Fuel breaks are one of the most important tools we have to give wildland firefighters a chance to safely and effectively contain rapidly moving wildfires and potentially reduce wildfire size,” said William Perry Pendley, deputy director of policy and programs for the BLM.
But critics of the proposal say it’s financially wasteful, threatens to disrupt wildlife habitat, is unlikely to stop large, wind-driven fires and could make the fire problem worse by aiding the spread of invasive cheatgrass that’s fueling the unnatural fire cycle officials would like to control.
“It is this huge experiment for hundreds of millions of dollars but the wildlife hangs in the balance,” said Patrick Donnelly, Nevada director of the Center for Biological Diversity.
The BLM didn’t estimate the cost to implement such an expansive network of fuel breaks. But the per-mile costs of the methods covered in the plan suggest it could cost as much $275 million to create and another $50 to $100 million annually to maintain.
It’s money that could be better spent using more reliable and less destructive methods of restoring damaged ecosystems acre-by-acre to revive the landscape as it existed before white settlement when it could endure smaller, less intense natural fires and better support hundreds of native wildlife species, Donnelly said.
“That is going to take a lot of effort and a lot of money,” he said, describing what he called, “habitat restoration at a scale we have not yet been able to envision.”
Nevada is home to more than 17 million acres covered by the programmatic environmental impact statement released Friday, more than double the acreage of any of the other five states under the plan.
The state is at the center of the nation’s rangeland fire crisis with massive fires that can burn hundreds of thousands of acres in a few days.
In recent summers in northeastern Nevada, the Martin and South Sugarloaf fires combined burned nearly 700,000 acres, double the size of Los Angeles. Throughout the 2018 season, more than 1 million of the 8.8 million acres that burned nationwide were in Nevada.
Although forest fires in California tend to make more headlines, nearly three-fourths of all the acreage burned throughout the West on Department of Interior land since 2000 has been rangeland.
In Nevada alone since 2000 there have been more than 20 fires greater than 100,000 acres.
“The Great Basin is naturally a fire adapted ecosystem, but the fires are usually much less frequent than they are now,” said BLM project lead Ammon Wilhelm. “For a lot of our areas we have the skills to restore the habitat, what we can’t seem to do is get ahead of the fires.”
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The BLM’s document analyzes the environmental ramifications of using hand, chemical and mechanical methods to create fuel breaks.
The mix of methods includes prescribed burns, spraying herbicides, using tractors to dig breaks, planting “green strips” that could slow fires, targeted cattle grazing and mowing or cutting.
The fuel breaks would mostly go along roads or already disturbed areas in order to minimize habitat disruption and maximize firefighter access.
According to the agency, of the 1,200 fuel breaks and other types of fuel treatments assessed since 2002, 78 percent helped control fires and 84 percent changed fire behavior.
The document released Friday could help make creating new fuel breaks more efficient by analyzing the environmental effects in advance which could, potentially, allow local BLM field offices to bypass regulatory steps required by the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA.
“They are trying to do these things right now, it’s just the NEPA workloads can overwhelm them,” Wilhelm said of local field offices.
But Donnelly characterized it as an attempt by the administration to use wildfire problems to undermine NEPA regulations that require the government and project proponents to analyze and consider environmental objections to their plans.
Environmental groups, people in native communities and others who object to potential environmental damage from project proposals have used NEPA to ensure their voices are heard and considered.
The publication of the plan on Friday starts a 30-day window for public review before the agency issues a Final Record of Decision.
Donnelly said the Center for Biological Diversity would continue to fight the proposal.
“This plan is the wrong approach and we feel pretty confident science and the law backs that up,” he said.
Benjamin Spillman covers the outdoors and environment in Northern Nevada, from backcountry skiing in the Sierra to the latest from Lake Tahoe's ecosystem. Support his work by subscribing to RGJ.com right here.
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BLM advances plan for 11,000 miles of fire fuel breaks over six states; critics say it would be wasteful and damaging - Reno Gazette-Journal
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