U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz honored first responders and firefighters, especially the three killed along the Utah-Colorado border during a speech in Park City Tuesday.
The firefighters – two women and one man – died in a burnover incident while battling the Snyder Fire, June 27.
“There is a role for fire on the landscape. There's also a time and a place for fire,” Schultz said at the Western Governors’ Association conference in Deer Valley’s Stein Eriksen Lodge. “And right now in the Great Basin, this is neither the time nor the place for fire.”
Forest service personnel are focused right now on firefighting, but Schultz indicated that “active management” strategies like prescribed burns are important to the agency’s overall mission.
They can help prevent the most severe wildfires, which he said fundamentally change forest landscapes and affect local communities and economies.
“To conserve, we need to actively manage the forest,” he said.
He cited grazing and timber harvesting as other examples of active management that support industry, too.
Done right, he thinks those activities can help turn unhealthy western forests around. Schultz said health forests grow at about 5% or 6% each year.
“Many of the forests in the West, including Utah, including Idaho, including Montana, including Colorado, have negative growth rates. That means we have more mortality than we have growth.” the Forest Service chief said.
The Forest Service itself has diminished in size since moving its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City this year.
PBS reports the Forest Service has shuttered three-quarters of its scientific research facilities under Schultz, and the USFS cut thousands of employees in the past year.
Schultz said he hired more firefighters than usual this year, almost 11,800. Many are seasonal workers.
As of July 1, the National Interagency Fire Center reported that more than 9,000 firefighters were working to extinguish 51 uncontained large fires across the country. Utah’s Cottonwood Fire near Beaver was the nation’s largest blaze.
