Madison Aument
For 91.9 KVCR News, I'm Madison Aument. This is Economics IE. The Line, Airport and Bridge Fires have burned more than 100,000 acres in and around the Inland Empire this month. As firefighters continue to build containment, efforts are turning to clean up. I spoke with Bob Roper with the Western Fire Chiefs Association about how we determine the cost of wildfires. I'm curious who's in charge of determining how much a wildfire costs a community?
Bob Roper
The cost that a lot of the media is after and what's reported during a fire is the cost of fire suppression, okay, and depending upon the size of the incident. You know, the incident varies. Rather, they are having a staffing of several 1000 firefighters, or it's only a couple of 100, okay, but that's a number that's usually carried in the newspaper. The other part of the story is, what is the true cost of the wildfire, and that's when you look into the dynamics of the fire. If they've had to stop railroad trains, freeways, transit issues, did evacuation routes prevent businesses from operating air quality, water quality issues and so forth. And depending on the fire a lot of time, your suppression cost is, may only be about 40% of what would they call the true cost of a wildfire is both of those things are all not including damage after a wildfire either. Usually what you know when you're looking at true cost that will take the damages too, but in the regular newspaper article that will list the cost of the fire, it's the suppression cost. So say it costs $2 million a day or something, okay, but they don't necessarily roll up the damage numbers, and that's done because a lot of the incident costs are done daily. The damage assessment may take weeks to get all the data in to be able to start releasing what those numbers are the actual numbers during the early part of a fire you may hear. And FEMA requires it when you apply for federal declarations, they want to know what are the values at risk. And so it is an estimate by the incident based on the number of structures in the area and where they project the fire could affect. They will estimate what the values at risk are, and that's used in the presidential declaration applications, but the true damage assessment takes time.
Madison Aument
I'm sure this answer is going to be many things, but who's responsible for the costs incurred by wildfires?
Bob Roper
Every fire starts in a jurisdiction. It could be a local city, it could be a local county, a special district, say, for instance, it's on federal, national forest lands, then the US Forest Service or Department of Interior is responsible for all of those costs. Sometimes it gets very complex because it's on state, local federal lands, and it involves a complicated cost share agreement. And then, if it is a human caused type of fire where there's liability associated with it, then the fire is dealt with. It's done through a cost share agreement, but then they go for restitution, depending upon the preponderance of evidence, and they will seek restitution and recovery of the cost of suppression, and depending on the size of the incident, they may get full recovery, or they may only get partial.
Madison Aument
That was Bob Roper with the Western Fire Chiefs Association. Join us again next Monday for economics. IE, you can find this segment and others on our website, at kvcrnews.org/econie. Support for this segment comes from the Nowak family for KVCR News, I'm Madison Aument.