Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics will file suit against the U.S. Forest Service this week, demanding that the agency formally and publicly evaluate the environmental and social effects of wildland firefighting.
"Too many firefighters die each year in a fruitless and self-defeating war against fire," said Andy Stahl, executive director of the Oregon-based group of 12,000 former and current Forest Service employees and agency watchdogs.
"The Forest Service has never, not once in its history, weighed the pros and cons of firefighting," said Marc Fink, the Western Environmental Law Center attorney representing FSEE in the lawsuit.
And yet, firefighters die every year, "trying to fight an act of nature," Stahl said.
Twenty-six people have died in firefighting-related incidents so far this year; more than 900 wildland firefighters have died since 1910, the year the federal government declared war on wildfire.
Stahl said FSEE's board of directors decided to expand its mission to include "ending the war on fire" about two years ago, shortly after four central Washington firefighters died in the Thirtymile fire.
An investigation eventually concluded that fire bosses broke all 10 of the agency's standard safety rules, and their mistakes left firefighters cut off from the only escape route out of a dead-end canyon.
All four of the firefighters died in their emergency fire shelters.
"We can't think of a more appropriate organization to come to the defense of wildland firefighters or to hold our agency accountable for the unwarranted risk it places on its employees," Stahl said. "Who better to question this unjustified loss of life and squandering of almost a billion dollars a year?"
Fighting wildfires is analogous to "putting fans on the coast of Florida to blow the hurricanes away," Stahl said, "or trying to prevent earthquakes.
"Fighting wildfires doesn't work either. It just creates bigger fires later and a forest health problem."
In the complaint to be filed with U.S. District Judge Don Molloy, FSEE attorneys recount the history of wildland firefighting and the changes brought to Western forests by fire suppression.
"As a result of the all-out effort to suppress fires, the annual acreage consumed by wildfires in the lower 48 states dropped from 40 million to 50 million acres a year in the early 1930s to about 5 million acres in the 1970s," says the complaint.
"Decades of aggressive firefighting and fire suppression have drastically changed the structure, characteristics and fire behavior of Western forests," it continues. "Decades of aggressive firefighting on national forests has resulted in thousands of injuries and hundreds of deaths for employees of the Forest Service and other federal agencies."
At $1 billion a year, fighting fires is now one of the agency's most expensive undertakings.
As its entree into a full-blown examination of firefighting practices and impacts, the suit questions the use of chemical fire retardants in wildland firefighting.
The Forest Service uses an average of 15 million gallons of fire retardant each year, with up to 40 million gallons dropped in some years.
And while the chemicals are known to have adverse effects on water quality and fish, the Forest Service has never prepared an environmental impact statement on the use of chemical fire retardants, the lawsuit says. Nor has the agency formally considered alternatives to that use.
The complaint lists several instances where fire retardants were blamed for fish kills, including the Bircher fire in southwestern Colorado in July 2000.
The fertilizer in fire retardant can cause nitrate poisoning in animals, the suit continues, and may cause impacts to human health.
By insisting that an EIS be prepared evaluating the pros and cons of chemical fire retardants, the lawsuit would force the Forest Service to rethink its entire firefighting program, Stahl said.
"It is time to evaluate which fires should be fought and which should not be fought," he said. "It's time to focus on making communities and homes more fire resistant. We know how to do that. We know how that works.
"And we should simply stop fighting particular classes of fires - for instance, those that burn in the early spring or late fall, when conditions are conducive to low-intensity fire."
Some wildfires should be suppressed, Stahl said. "But many fewer and with much more sensitivity to the pros and cons of doing so."
Under the National Environmental Policy Act, federal agencies must write an EIS for "any proposed federal action that may significantly affect the quality of the human environment."
And every EIS must include not only an analysis of the proposed action, but of alternatives to that action and any "irreversible and irretrievable commitment of resources which would be involved if implemented."
Certainly, Stahl said, wildland firefighting is a major federal action. Certainly, he said, it significantly affects the environment.
"NEPA is the mechanism by which the Forest Service can engage with the public in deciding how and where and when to fight fires," he said. "That's what NEPA is supposed to do - to help federal agencies make better-informed decisions, to insist on a balancing of the pros and cons."
FSEE's membership is wholeheartedly behind the lawsuit's call for scrutiny, according to Stahl. Everyone involved, though, knows they are seeking "a complete paradigm shift in the Forest Service."
"But it is possible," he said. "Everyone knows the system is broken and that bureaucratic inertia favors the status quo."
"The first step is to shine a light and take the hard look that NEPA requires," Stahl said. "Let's expose the benefits and the costs of firefighting, including the human lives lost."
Reporter Sherry Devlin can be reached at 523-5268 or at sdevlin@missoulian.com
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