Western National Forests: Status of Forest Service's Efforts to Reduce Catastrophic Wildfire Threats Page: 3 of 10
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Madam Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee: We are here today
to discuss the status of efforts by the Department of Agriculture's Forest
Service to develop a cohesive strategy to reduce the threat of catastrophic
wildfires on national forests in the interior West. Our comments are based
primarily on the report and two testimonies that we prepared for this
Subcommittee over the last year and the agency's actions to date in
response to our findings and recommendation.
In summary, the Forest Service has begun to develop a strategy to address
the growing threat that catastrophic wildfires pose to forest resources and
nearby communities. Developing and implementing such a strategy
presents a difficult challenge to the agency because the wildfire issue
transcends the boundaries of both its regions and forests and its
resource-specific programs. Confronted with other issues that transcend
these boundaries-such as protecting the habitat of the threatened
northern spotted owl-the Forest Service has, on occasion, shown that it
can develop and implement a cohesive strategy expeditiously and at a
relatively low cost. At other times, it has begun to develop a strategy but
has either studied and restudied the issue without ever doing so or
developed a strategy but left its implementation to the discretion of its
independent and highly autonomous field offices with mixed results. A key
factor that separates the strategies that are effectively implemented from
those that are not is whether the agency treats the issue as an agencywide
priority. Those issues that are treated as priorities (1) benefit from a sense
of urgency and strong leadership by top-level management in developing
and implementing a strategy, (2) are addressed through a strategy that
provides the agency's managers with adequate direction and sets
standards for holding them accountable, and (3) are allocated the
resources necessary to implement the strategy. To date, we have not seen
the strong leadership or the marshalling of funds and resources within the
agency that would indicate to us that the Forest Service feels a sense of
urgency and assigns a high priority to reducing the threat of catastrophic
wildfires.
'Western National Forests: Catastrophic Wildfires Threaten Resources and Communities
(GAO/T-RCED-98-273, Sept. 28, 1998); Western National Forests: Nearby Communities Are
Increasingly Threatened by Catastrophic Wildfires (GAO/T-RCED-99-79, Feb. 9, 1999); and Western
National Forests: A Cohesive Strategy Is Needed to Address Catastrophic Wildfire Threats
(GAO/RCED-99-65, Apr. 2, 1999).GAO/T-RCED-99-241
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United States. General Accounting Office. Western National Forests: Status of Forest Service's Efforts to Reduce Catastrophic Wildfire Threats, text, June 29, 1999; Washington D.C.. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc290362/m1/3/: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.