As wildfires explode in the West, Forest Service can’t afford prevention efforts

Smoke from a wildfire west of Sisters, Ore., blankets the Deschutes National Forest. WASHINGTON — Residents of the densely wooded hillsides near Bend, Ore., are serious about fire. They gather up fallen branches, prune trees and clear their gutters of pine needles. Their leaders in Deschutes County have banned wood-shake roofs and are considering adopting tougher building codes to make homes more fire-resistant. Every square mile of this growing county has been declared a wildfire hazard zone.

Yet for all of that effort, spurred by devastating wildfires that tore through central Oregon in the 1990s, Deschutes still has to worry about its neighbor — the U.S. Forest Service. The county is nestled against Deschutes National Forest, where the federal agency has more than 250,000 acres’ worth of unfinished projects aimed at preventing catastrophic wildfire that are on hold because it doesn’t have enough funding. “Each year we have literally hundreds of fires that start in the forest, and any one of those, on a bad day, could have a disastrous result,” said Ed Keith, county forester for Deschutes. “It boggles my mind to look at the fires in Oregon this year and how many millions we’ve spent and how […]

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