WASHINGTON (AP) -- Areas at risk for major wildfire may not be getting the attention they deserve because government agencies have not provided a comprehensive, uniform risk assessment that would enable projects to be prioritized, said a congressional study released Monday.
The Forest Service and the Interior Department are not sure how much land is at risk for a major wildfire, what areas are in the most immediate danger or how much it will cost to reduce the risks by cutting down excess trees, said the report by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress.
The Bush administration estimates that there are 190 million acres -- an area the size of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming combined -- at an elevated risk for a major wildfire, although given the margin of error the true figure could range from 90 million to 200 million acres.
In a letter responding to the report, Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey and Assistant Interior Secretary Lynn Scarlett agreed that prioritizing projects is important, but said Congress has also directed the departments to collaborate with communities to identify treatment priorities on a local rather than national basis.
That makes it difficult to develop one-size-fits-all criteria , the two officials said.
The Forest Service and the Interior Department are nearing a decision on whether to fund a comprehensive study of fire risks, called LANDFIRE, that will produce computer models and risk forecasts. Even if the departments go ahead with the program, results are not expected to be available until 2008.
The Bush administration's ``Healthy Forest'' proposal, aimed at speeding forest treatments on 20 million acres by limiting environmental studies and appeals, remains bottled up in the Senate. Republicans remain several votes short of the 60 they would need to break a Democratic filibuster.
``This report further confirms that the Healthy Forest logging legislation will not help address wildfire because the administration is ill prepared for this task,'' said Andrew George, spokesman for the National Forest Protection Alliance. ``Instead, the Bush administration is using wildfires as a smoke screen to hide their real agenda of opening more public forests to corporate logging interests.''
Although several large fires continued to burn Monday, the 2003 fire season has been relatively mild. To date, 2.8 million acres have burned, less than half as many as had burned at this point last year and a million fewer acres than the 10-year average for this date.
On Friday, 40 Western representatives from both parties asked House leaders to make it a priority to move legislation giving additional money to the Forest Service, which has had to borrow money from other programs to pay more than $400 million worth of wildfire fighting costs.
``Unfortunately, the draconian reduction of non-firefighting accounts has caused serious harm to the continuity of programs that are central to the Forest Service's core mission -- everything from recreation to land stewardship and conservation, state and private forestry, capital maintenance and beyond,'' said the letter, led by House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo, R-Calif., and Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore.
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