Living in wildfire-prone areas requires responsibility, Norton says

By SCOTT McMILLION, Chronicle Staff Writer

People who live in areas prone to wildfire need to take responsibility for their own property, Interior Secretary Gale Norton said Tuesday. And yet the government spends the largest portion of its growing fire protection budget protecting those very homes.

Norton spoke to reporters from around the country in a telephone press conference, touting President Bush's Healthy Forests Initiative as Congress took up debate on that measure.

The Bush administration is already moving ahead with many measures included in that bill and has increased the number of acres being treated through fuel-reduction programs.

Living in fire-prone areas means "we have to recognize the risks that come with that," Norton said, adding that she is happy to see the insurance industry beginning to take steps to reduce threats to isolated homes.

State Farm announced this week that it will begin inspecting homes in fire-prone areas and will give people up to two years to remove brush and other hazards or risk losing their insurance coverage.

The State Farm policy applies to six Western states, the Associated Press reported Tuesday. Montana is not among them.

"We are pleased to see the private sector responding and realizing the problem," Norton said. "People need to take personal responsibility for their homes."

Still, deciding where people can build homes should remain a local issue, Norton said.

She noted that 60 percent of the federal government's fuel-reduction budget is spent protecting homes in the wildland/urban interface.

This year, the federal government plans to spend $400 million removing fuels on 2.85 million acres.

In 2000, that budget was $117 million to treat 1.25 million acres, according to Interior's Web site.

Still, even the larger figure is only a tiny portion of the 190 million acres Norton maintains are at risk. She touted the Healthy Forests Initiative as a way to make that work go faster.

The bill would authorize hiring private loggers to remove brush, paying for their labors with forest products like lumber, or fuel for biomass energy projects. It also would expedite appeals and judicial review.

Protecting urbanized areas is the top priority, Norton said, followed by protecting watersheds and restoring remote wildlife habitat.

Many environmental groups maintain the bill is geared mostly toward supplying logging companies with trees, and when Bush touted the bill in a speech Tuesday he noted that 47,000 logging jobs in the Northwest have disappeared and 400 mills have closed.

Critics on the left aren't the only skeptics.

The bill is "doomed to fail," according to an analysis by the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think tank.

"The president's plan to thin 25 million acres in the next 10 years will cost as much as $4 billion yet leave nearly 90 percent of those (at risk) acres untreated," said Jerry Taylor, Cato's director of natural resources. "That will leave forest homes almost as defenseless as they are today."

Blaming environmental delays for fire dangers is "the wrong lesson," Taylor said. "The real lesson is, unless you thin every acre, you might as well not thin at all."

Reader Comments