Forest Fire Costs: a Sample for Wild Fires and Prescribed Burns

An exploration of fire costs by J. Zimmerman, with the help of ecologist Tim Hyland.

Redwood prescribed burn (2006 Big Basin S.P.): Report. Pictures by David Auerbach Forest fire costs. Forest fire. Notes on: Robert J. Whelan's The Ecology of Fire. Fire in Sierra Nevada Forests: A Photographic Interpretation of Ecological Change Since 1849 by George E. Gruell.

The Ecology of Fire by Robert J. Whelan. Fire as an ecological agent. Fire in California's Ecosystems edited by Neil G. Sugihara and others. The science, ecology, and management of fire in California. Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (2008) by Mark Lynas. Increases in forest fires will be one of the many disastrous consequences of global warming.

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Prescribed burn: Purpose Prescription Report of what we saw Safety aspects Fire Glossary

Costs per acre of wildfires compared with prescribed burns

Prescribed burns reduce fuel load. They are used so that if a wildfire threatens a pre-burned area, the resulting fires could be less virulent and therefore more controllable.

While radically different in nature (particularly in temperature reached and difficulty of control) wildfires and prescribed burns each place a burden on taxpayers. Here we explore those costs, with the help of ecologist Tim Hyland.

This preliminary data shows that cost-per-acre of prescribed burns appears to be less than 20% and sometimes as little as 3% of the cost-per-acre of wild fires.

See below for the costs of wildfires and compare those with the costs of prescribed burns on comparable terrain.

Estimated costs per acre of some 2009 California Wildfires

This subset of wildfires burned near the central and southern California coast in August and September 2009 give this subset of data as of September 11, 2009. They are listed in increasing size of area burned, as shown at http://cdfdata.fire.ca.gov. Cost for the Gloria and Lockheed fires are from the same source. As of this September 14, the Station Fire was growing minimally and 87% contained; crews are working for full containment September 19.

FIRE	Approximate end date	Acres burned (thousands)	Estimated cost (millions USD)	$/acre	Sq. mi	Comment
Loma	28-Oct-09	0.485	$2.7	$5,567	0.76	Santa Clara to Santa Cruz (above Aptos) forest fire (inciweb.org)
Gloria	1-Sep-09	6.4	$4	$621	10.1	Near Pinnacles S.P. Initially a grass fire.
Lockheed	23-Aug-09	7.8	$26.6	$3,403	12.2	Near Big Basin S.P. Mountain forest fire.
Station	mid Sep-09	161	$100	$623	250.9	Near L.A.: Angeles National Forest. Mountain forest fire. Sep 14, 2009 http://inciweb.org/incident/article/9527/: "Cost to Date: $92,637,805." Sep 12, 2009 on FireLink.Monster.com: "The cost of fighting the Station fire ... $88 million." and "Total Cost of Station Fire Could Hit $100M"

Estimated costs (2009 dollars) per acre of California prescribed burns in comparable territory

Big Basin S.P. and Wilder S.P. are within miles of the area burned by the Lockheed Fire listed above. Their terrain ranges from forest as handled in the redwood prescribed burns to grassland. Their burn expert is ecologist Tim Hyland.

Tim Hyland reports [personal emails Wednesday, August 26, 2009 11:49 AM to Wednesday, September 09, 2009 1:17 PM]:

Our costs vary considerably depending on fuel type, with the Redwood burns at Big Basin being far and away the most expensive, and grassland burns at Wilder Ranch costing the least.

He made informal, back-of-the-napkin numbers for "burns at Big Basin over the last 20 years", resulting in a cost estimate (in 2009 dollars) of:

$100/acre This number is a rough average for prescribed burns at Big Basin S.P. for the last 20 years ... individual burns can cost considerably less or more depending on fuel type complexity or duration. Because of the long hours worked, the above total includes overtime (roughly 20% of the total).

His stated assumptions are:

These burns are roughly 300 acres. Preparing the plot requires roughly 3 days of CDC crew time. Typically our burns take about 10 days to complete. Typical staffing included 1 CDC crew, 3 State Parks overhead, 8 crew members all working 10 hour days. These burns are then typically patrolled for a month, by a crew member. Planning takes an ecologist roughly two weeks.

CDF cost claims

While CDF (vegetation management program) reports that it performs prescribed burns for $3.5 million per year, it states that cost to CDF is $25 to $30 per acre.

However, this is a significant underestimate of actual costs: the CDF projects tend to be done in conjunction with other property owners, whose expenses for equipment, time, and materials are not included.

California's 20 largest wildfires
(the Big Twenty) before 2009

The State of California Fire sheet at www.fire.ca.gov [Retrieved Sunday, August 23, 2009] shows that California's 20 largest wildfires (here after called the Big Twenty) in 2008 and before ranged in size :

• from 93,600 acres (the June 1966 Wellman fire in Santa Barbara County)
• to 273,246 acres (the October 2003 Cedar fire in San Diego County.

Other information gleaned from the sheet suggest that larger fires are most frequent in recent years. Data include:

• Average year of a fire was 1992.
  • For the smaller ten fires it was 1993.
  • For the larger ten fires (the Big Ten) it was 1990.
  • But for a realistic comparison we need to omit the 3rd largest fire (the 1933 220,000-acre Matilija Fire of Ventura County) because that was an outlier: no other fires in this set occurred in the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1050s, or before 1966, so that fire has disproportionate weight. Looking at the largest eleven fires and omitting Matilija gives us an effective set of the largest ten for which the average year is 1997, 4 years more recent than the smaller 10 fires.
• Average fire size was 150,000 acres.
• The oldest fire reported was in 1933.
• For 2008, three new fires entered the Big Twenty (one of those entered the Big Ten).
• For 2009, at least one new fire (the Station fire above) will enter the Big Twenty.
• For 2002 to 2008 (the last 7 years), ten new fires entered the Big Twenty (six of those entered the Big Ten).
• One structure burned for every 404 acres burned by wildfire.
• One death for every 75,260 acres burned by wildfire.
• 35% of these fires were caused by lightning; 10% were of unknown cause; the remainder (55%) were human caused, directly or indirectly:
  • Arson: 5%.
  • Equipment use: 5%.
  • "Human" (camp fires out of control, etc): 20%. All are in the Big Ten and there they are 40% of the total.
  • Power lines: 20%.
  • Vehicle: 5%.
• San Diego county had three of the largest six fires on record: two were caused by power lines and one had a "human" cause. [Maybe San Diego needs to pay more attention to this link with power lines.]

More books

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet by Mark Lynas.

• Biswell, Harold: Prescribed Burning In California Wildlands Vegetation Management, University of California Press (1989).
• Carle, David: Burning Questions: America's Fight with Nature's Fire, Praeger Trade (2002).
• Gruell, George E. Fire in Sierra Nevada Forests: A Photographic Interpretation of Ecological Change Since 1849.
• Whelan, Robert J. The Ecology of Fire.
• The Jepson Manual: Higher Plants of California , by James C. Hickman (Editor), Willis Linn Jepson.
• The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter by Colin Tudge.

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Copyright © 2009 by J. Zimmerman,