- Author
- Kent, B. | Gebert, K. | McCaffrey, S. | Martin, W. | Calkin, D. | Schuster, E. | Martin, I. | Bender, H. W. | Alward, G. | Kumagai, Y. | Cohn, P. J. | Carroll, M. | Williams, D. | Ekarius, C.
- Title
- Social and Economic Issues of the Hayman Fire.
- Coporate
- USDA Forest Service, Fort Collins, CO
- Report
- RMRS-GTR-114, 2003, 84 p.
- Keywords
- wildland fires | forest fires | ecology | urban/wildland fires | management systems | fire suppression | fire fighters | fire fighting
- Abstract
- On June 26, 2002, U.S. Representative Mark Udall wrote the US Forest Service Chief, requesting that the Forest Service conduct an analysis of the Hayman Fire. In response to the Congressman's letter, five teams were established in August, 2002 to analyze various aspects of the Hayman Fire experience. This report describes the Hayman Fire analysis work conducted by the social/economic team and presents our findings. When a fire the size and intensity of the Hayman Fire occurs largely in an urban/wildland area as highly developed as the Colorado Front Range, the social and economic effects or consequences will be extensive, complex, and long lasting. Any attempt to comprehensively catalog these impacts will be difficult, in part because it has never been attempted, especially for a fire as large and complex as the Hayman. Typically, social and economic or human dimensions consequences of wildfires have not received the attention that ecological issues have, especially on the part of the Federal agencies directly involved with firefighting, such as the USDA Forest Service and the USDI Bureau of Land Management. As an example, Butry and others note that they are unaware of the existence of any "organization in the United States that systematically and empirically quantifies economic impacts of wildfires." The situation is perhaps even worse for the assessment of wildfire-related social impacts, with research having been limited to such key areas as public health and safety impacts, and social and community impacts. In fact, an understanding of the nature of these impacts is only now beginning to appear in the relevant literature.