Response Readiness Critique

Response Readiness Critique

Introduction

The study is related to the California wildfire for which emergency response plan is developed. The emergency plan is developed in accordance with the wildfire of 1970 which concentrates on various measures that should be taken by the authorities.

The Issue

Is strategic logging in federally owned forests an effective approach to prevent wildfire damage? Or is wildfire control a guise for easing restrictions on commercial logging in U.S. national forests?

Strategic logging performed by the timber industry will allow federal agencies to gain better control on the magnitude of wildfire damage that has afflicted the western United States in recent years. As a result, communities bordering woodlands will be safer and national forests will be healthier.

Plan Critical Analysis

The plan's amplified logging is motivated primarily by private interests, rather than a genuine desire to safeguard communities from wildfire and rejuvenate national forests. Allowing timber operations in federally owned forests will have an irreparable effect on the long-term health of U.S. woodlands.

Wildfires have a historically documented ecological role in natural forest management worldwide. However, in recent years, wildfires have been increasingly identified as major threats to residential neighborhoods, which are built, on the edge of urban and suburban areas in the western United States. Subsequent to fire seasons from 1970 to 2003, predominantly characterized as destructive, the Bush Administration proposed a new environmental legislation (Broder, 2003).

New environmental policy agenda was introduced in December 2002. The initiative called for the systematic reduction of fuel--dead wood and excess underbrush--that has accumulated in U.S. national forests over the past several decades. The administration believed that the build-up of natural fuels in the nation's woodlands had been a crucial factor in recent years' uncontrollable wildfires, in the western United States.

One of the central, and most controversial, facet of the Healthy Forests Initiative are the implementation of "Hazardous Fuel Reduction Projects" in national forests. Those projects, more commonly known as "forest-thinning" operations, involve calculated burning of underbrush and strategic logging of dead wood, to alleviate the buildup of natural fuel in federally owned woodlands. The Bush administration has called upon logging companies, the traditional enemy of environmental preservation groups, to carry out those fuel reduction projects. The possibility of increased presence of logging companies in federal forests has led some to contend that the new reforms embodied by Bush's initiative are motivated by private interests, rather than out of genuine concern for federal woodlands.

Another controversial aspect of the administration's proposed forest management reforms involves the judicial appeal process. Over the years, logging companies have been subject to lengthy lawsuits filed by environmental groups, who frequently seek to delay or stop individual logging operations through the use of court injunctions. In an effort to stem, public criticism of individual forest thinning operations, the administration's new plans limit the use of court injunctions in cases involving the timber industry, effectively making hazardous fuel reduction projects easier to implement with a reduced amount of input from the public ...