More Roads, More Fires:  Rolling Back Roadless Area Protections Puts Firefighters at Greater Risk

Since its 2001 implementation, The Roadless Area Conservation Rule has protected over 45 million acres of national forest land from having new roads bulldozed into their remote wildlands. This includes nearly two million acres in Oregon cherished for their outdoor recreation opportunities ranging from hiking and mountain biking to fishing and hunting. These inventoried roadless areas provide crucial contiguous habitat that benefit wildlife including deer and elk herds and threatened and endangered species such as bull trout. They are also the ancestral homelands of Indigenous peoples who value them for harvesting and hunting their cultural resources and conducting religious ceremonies. With the Trump Administration’s proposal to rescind the Roadless Rule, we are anxiously waiting for the U.S. Forest Service to publicly release an environmental impact statement.

The Trump Administration claims that the lack of roads hinders firefighting and building new roads will improve firefighter safety and efficiency. However, the Western Fire Chiefs Association reports that nearly 85 percent of all wildfires in the U.S are started by people, and numerous scientific studies reveal that the vast majority of these human-caused wildfires ignite within 50 yards of a road. Therefore, more roads will result in more fires which will add more burden and risk for firefighting crews. Additionally, the push to build new roads in the name of firefighter safety ignores the thousands of existing miles of roads in need of repair. According to 2024 data, there is a maintenance backlog totaling roughly $6.4 billion that logically should take priority if safety and efficiency is truly the goal.

Abolishing the Roadless Rule will not produce paved roads for engines to race toward flames and hook up hoses into fire hydrants. The 380,000 miles of existing Forest Service logging roads reveal what new roads will be like: one-lane gravel roads with narrow shoulders, a few scattered turnouts, and a small turnaround at each road’s dead end. Given these conditions, a single stalled vehicle can trap everyone else behind it.   Additionally, fire engines filled with several tons of water have tumbled over the side of these crumbly road edges. Traffic has to crawl along these dusty, winding, washboard-rutted roads, littered with fallen rocks and logs. Fire managers routinely worry if a wildfire suddenly blows up and forces an emergency retreat of all crews, they might not be able to evacuate everyone quickly. It is no coincidence that motor vehicle accidents are one of the leading causes of firefighter fatalities.

People might believe that logging roads make good fire lines, but many of those roads are steep, mid-slope roads with sharp switchbacks. This makes them unsafe and ineffective for firefighters to try to stop wildfire spread. The best places for crews to safely and effectively control fire spread is along rivers and ridges, two places where roads are enormously expensive or environmentally destructive to build. Constructing a network of helispots, spike camp sites, and fire trails along ridgelines or rivers would be far less expensive to taxpayers, far less damaging to the landscape, and much more safe and effective for crews working to manage fires.

Given that the majority of wildfires are ignited by people near roads, far more wildfires will be started than stopped if the Administration or Congress nullifies the Roadless Rule. Increasing the burden and hazards for wildland firefighters who are already facing unprecedented danger from wildfires turbocharged by climate change is morally unacceptable. Let’s end the Orwellian false advertising that eliminating the Roadless Rule is about improving firefighter safety or efficiency: the Administration’s real desire for carving new roads into remote public wildlands is to haul timber, not halt wildfires. It’s about getting the cut out, not putting fires out. More wildland firefighters with their future safety at stake are saying, “Not in our name, you don’t” to ending the Roadless Rule.

Timothy Ingalsbee is Executive Director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology (FUSEE) in Eugene.