In 2008, TX Forest Service Built $20M Plan To Cut Fire Risk - Still Only Half-Funded Today

[hatrack]

SAN ANTONIO (AP) — Long before this month's historic wildfires in Texas, the state's forest service came up with a $20.4 million plan to stop the flames from starting or tamp them out before small blazes grew deadly and destructive. Three years later, the plan is still only half-funded — a result of the weak economy, a strained state budget and what one former lawmaker calls a "dereliction of duty" by legislators who almost always prefer to spend money only after a crisis has unfolded.

In 2008, the Texas Forest Service made an insistent sales pitch for an ambitious wildfire protection plan that called for adding more than 200 firefighters, creating rapid-response teams to quash small flare-ups, building advanced automated weather stations and establishing two training academies for wildfire crews. "We cannot over-emphasize the protection aspects of this plan," officials wrote in their request for money. When fully funded and implemented, the program was "guaranteed to protect lives and properties."

The idea for the plan dated to 1999. But over nearly a decade of steadily worsening fires, the budget request acquired a sense of urgency. By 2008, it declared: "This is the final straw! Bigger fires call for bigger state resources!" The Forest Service concedes that even the full fire-protection system would not have completely spared Texas from last week's catastrophic fires, which incinerated more than 1,700 homes, blackened tens of thousands of acres and killed four people.

"There's no way we'll ever be staffed to handle the worst-case, catastrophic events like you've seen recently," said Robbie DeWitt, chief financial officer of the Forest Service. But the plan was designed to limit exactly those types of widespread losses — and at a fraction of the price of fighting full-blown fires.

EDIT

http://content.usatoday.net/dist/custom/gci/InsidePage.aspx?cId=cincinnati&sParam=50403132.story

[jwirr]

1. It seems they are not alone in waiting too long to prepare - there has

been little real planning regarding either oil depletion or climate change by either the feds or states. Texas just got there before the rest of us. Welcome to the future.