Fire Starters Burned Up When They Get Bills from Government

California rancher Richard Donovan was burning brush one afternoon when the Santa Ana winds picked up and blew his fire out of control. Firefighters labored for two days in the dry hills, hauling water and scratching out fire lines.

Then they lit another fire under Donovan by handing him a bill for $73,000--the government’s cost of dousing the blaze.

“Who pays their wages? We do, the taxpayers do,” Donovan said recently, still sputtering over his bill for the November, 1989, fire. “It doesn’t matter whether they’re out here or sitting in the fire station, they’re still on that payroll. They just came in here, threw a bunch of overtime on me, and thought they were going to collect.”

Collect is just what they did. After several costly drought-baked fire seasons--and this summer promises to be no exception--firefighting agencies throughout the West are increasingly forcing people who cause wildfires to pay for putting them out.

Officials say the collections help defray the rising cost of fighting fires, send a no-nonsense fire prevention message, and place responsibility for fires where it belongs.

“We don’t feel the general taxpayer should be responsible for other people’s screw-ups,” said Steve Jorgenson, fire investigator for the Montana Department of State Lands.

The backpacker who leaves a campfire unattended, the logger whose chain saw sparks a blaze, the homeowner burning brush without a permit--all may be held liable for the cost of fighting a wildfire.

Washington state recouped $1.2 million of its firefighting costs last year. Oregon collected $2.3 million. California’s 1990 collections will likely reach $1 million when final figures are tallied, a fire official said.

The expense of fighting fires can be staggering:

* A 7,000-acre wildfire last July in Southern California’s Chino Hills State Park cost more than $500,000 to quell. Officials are drawing up a bill for the parents of a 15-year-old boy whose model rocket started the blaze.

* Oregon officials sent a $3.5-million bill in 1988 to a California couple after a bulldozer on their southern Oregon property sparked a nine-day fire that killed two people and charred 10,300 acres. In a settlement reached later with the couple’s insurance company, the state accepted “substantially less,” but the exact amount was not disclosed, an official said.

* In Washington state, a federal judge last summer agreed with the U.S. Forest Service that a backpacker negligently started a 450-acre blaze in 1985 by burning his used toilet paper. The bill: $132,700.

Fire officials say cost recovery programs have made people more cautious in the woods and have reduced the number of negligence-caused fires.

“When somebody gets a bill for a fire, it doesn’t take very long for the news to travel around the neighborhood,” said Loren Poore, fire prevention and law enforcement chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The Forest Service has long billed people for its firefighting costs, but only in recent years have many Western states and local governments stepped up their own cost recovery efforts. Annual collections in Washington, for example, have jumped 46 times since the state hired its first full-time investigator in 1984. Oregon has boosted its collections by computerizing records and billings.

The push for recouping expenses comes as the West has been reeling under the effect of several fiery drought years. Last year, California wildfires destroyed a record 862 structures and charred nearly 350,000 acres.

Fire officials say this summer could be another record fire season, despite a brief respite caused by spring rains. Drought persists in California, eastern Washington and Oregon, and the Great Basin in Nevada, Utah and southern Idaho.

“Every week a few more fires start, a few more acres burn. As summer gets going and things dry up, we’ll see a real explosive fire season,” said Lisa Boyd, spokeswoman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Though big fires make the headlines, the bill collectors usually work on a smaller scale. Eighty percent of California’s bills are for less than $5,000, and most are paid without dispute, said Dan Nichols, a cost recovery official for the state forestry department.

“People usually know they’ve caused a fire. When our people arrive at the scene, the guy’s saying, ‘I didn’t mean to do it.’ He’s pretty well committed then,” Nichols said.

The few cases that go to trial cause agencies the most headaches. A court case can take years--Nichols just finished a trial involving a 1982 fire--and can yield much smaller judgments than expected.

To collect, officials must prove a fire was set deliberately or was the result of negligence, not just an accident.

Rancher Donovan, whose fire near Santa Maria, 150 miles north of Los Angeles, damaged about 125 acres, was charged with violating conditions of his burn permit. But when Donovan argued that he had taken precautions and that firefighters overreacted to the blaze, the judge cut his bill to $22,530.

In Washington’s toilet paper fire, camper Mark Wenneker said he had read that the most ecologically sound way to dispose of toilet paper in the woods was to burn it. The judge said he should have buried it but laid some of the blame on the Forest Service, saying the agency was negligent in not posting warnings of dry, windy conditions. Wenneker’s $132,700 bill was just 28% of what the Forest Service wanted.

Despite fire officials’ best efforts, most fires never get billed to anyone, especially in sparsely populated areas. Idaho has plenty of forest fires, yet the state’s Department of Lands sent out only $46,212 in bills last year. Likewise, Montana’s Department of State Lands billed only $108,792.

The reason? Lightning is the No. 1 cause of forest fires in rural areas, and in such cases, even the most persistent bill collectors yield to a higher authority.

“There’s no way I could collect on that,” said Ken Hoover, a Washington fire official. “I don’t think even the governor could pull that one off.”