WASHINGTON – The National Park Service is already planning celebrations for its 100-year anniversary in two years. But the anniversary bashes are threatened by the possibility of another summer of wildfires in the national parks that could burn up the money needed for construction projects.
“The fire suppression costs have to be absorbed and our accounts get swept,” Jonathan Jarvis, director of the National Park Service said in a budget hearing Thursday.
And it’s not just the August 2016 celebrations that are threatened.
As Jarvis told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies, the National Park Service budget does not allocate funds specifically for the suppression of fires within the parks. Therefore, should a fire happen, the funds to fight it come from construction and other special projects budgets.
“It really does curtail our ability to complete projects,” he said. “We line up a set of projects to complete, whether its accessibility or construction and these things just get swept up as a result of the current model for funding of fire.”
Jarvis said the cost of suppressing fires is increasing because of urban development in the areas surrounding the national parks. Those homes have to be protected. And the fires are burning more intensely.
“Homes are also a fuel for fire,” Roberta D’Amico, communications director for the National Park Service Fire and Aviation Management, said in an interview. D’Amico explained that more people are moving to forested areas around the parks. And with increased public safety concerns and massive droughts, fires are more expensive and more difficult to put out.
The cost of fighting fires in the parks falls to Wildland Fire, funded by the Department of the Interior, the National Park Service and other fire fighting partner groups, D’Amico said.
D’Amico said that there were 455 fires in national parks last summer, affecting about 265,755 acres of land.
C. Bruce Sheaffer, comptroller of the National Park Service, explained to the committee that there has been an instance when operating costs, not only construction and projects, suffered because of the expense of wildfires.
“We have demonstrated that the current model doesn’t work,” Sheaffer said. “It’s not the way, from our perspective, emergencies should be handled.”
Jarvis said some parks have already seen fires of the magnitude they do not usually see until summertime. And it is only April.
The committee members and Chairman Ken Calvert, R-Calif., agreed with Jarvis’s proposal. “I think there is a consensus growing that this has to be dealt with, and it can’t be dealt with the way we have done budgeting in the past,” Calvert said. Calvertalso spoke about his love for Yosemite National Park, a park plagued by forest fires last summer.
The National Park Service will celebrate its Centennial on Aug. 25, 2016.
Photo Credit: National Park Service