If FEMA - the Federal Emergency Management Agency - can help states fend off the threat of floods, tornadoes, earthquakes and hurricanes, why not wildfires? Idaho Republican Senator Mike Crapo thinks the agency should treat wildfires like any other natural disaster.
He's written a new bill to require the agency to divert some of its allocations to wildfire mitigation programs - about $20-30 million a year, and to require state and local governments to match those dollars.
The key, according to Crapo, is mitigation programs. He calls them "pre-disaster mitigation programs" to reduce the risk and severity of large-scale wildfires.
The senator said that a Congressional Budget Office study conducted eight years ago found that a wildfire mitigation pilot program saved more than 5 dollars in future losses for every dollar spent.
He and co-sponsor Democratic Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado want the new mitigation mandate to run at least five years.
Introduction of the bill comes on the heels of a new US Forest Service report warning that more than half its current budget will be spent on fighting wildfires. Within the next ten years, that proportion will jump to more than two-thirds of Forest Service spending.
