GUY McCARTHY
City News Service

LOS ANGELES - The cost of fighting the 245-square-mile Station Fire approached and passed $50 million today, but the true, overall costs of the largest blaze in Los Angeles County recorded history will be far greater, a Forest Service spokesman at Hansen Dam incident command said.

"We won't know the true costs until the fire's out, the heavy rains come and the roads are fixed," Forest Service information officer Nathan Judy told City News Service. "We won't know those costs for some time."

The estimated cost of fighting the Station Fire as of 8 a.m. today was $49.5 million.

Closely monitoring the costs of fighting a monstrous blaze like the Station Fire is vital, but those costs are only a fraction of the final tab shared by individuals and taxpayers, according to authors of an April 2009 report by the Western Forestry Leadership Coalition in Colorado.

"The millions of dollars spent to extinguish large wildfires are widely reported and used to underscore the severity of these events," the authors said in their report. "Extinguishing a large wildfire, however, accounts for only a fraction of the total costs associated with a wildfire event.

"Residents in the wildland-urban interface are generally seen as the most vulnerable to fire, but a fuller accounting of the costs of fire also reveals impacts to all Americans and gives a better picture of the losses incurred when our forests burn."

The study's lead author is Lisa Dale, PhD, University of Denver.

Full accounting of wildfire costs includes impacts to watersheds, ecosystems, infrastructure, businesses, individuals, and local and national economies, according to the coalition's 17-page report, "The True Cost of Wildfire in the Western U.S."

The authors examined six large fires between 2000 and 2003 in Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Southern California.

The Southland example is the Old, Grand Prix, Padua complex of fires that burned in San Bernardino and Los Angeles counties in October 2003. The fires contributed to six civilian deaths, destroyed more than 1,000 homes, and burned over 125,000 acres in the mountainous Santa Ana River watershed.

Citing a Forest Service report which asked "How Much Do These Fires Really Cost?", the Colorado authors concluded the estimated true cost of the Old, Grand Prix and Padua fires was $1.2 billion. Researchers concluded that suppression and emergency response costs accounted for only 5 percent of the total eventual cost of the fires.

By looking at that series of fires, as well as five other big western firefights, the researchers estimated that the final tabs exceeded the early suppression costs by as much as 30 times.

Among the report's conclusions, the authors note that full accounting for total costs of massive wildfires could provide "better understanding of the value of investing in hazardous fuels reduction and other forest management activities before a fire occurs."

As of 8 a.m. today, the arson-ignited Station Fire had contributed to the deaths of two firefighters, destroyed 78 homes and two commercial properties, and burned 157,220 acres, according to the Forest Service.

The Station Fire was considered 56 percent contained today, with full containment hoped for on Sept. 15.

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September 8, 2009