However, these bills simply don't provide the necessary additional and improved suppression resources. If all that was at issue were the number of new crews to be trained and the tankers, tenders and engines available for deployment, there would be nothing to debate. Instead policy-makers are discussing where and how forest and fire professionals do their jobs. In many cases, this top-down direction runs counter to local wisdom.

It's difficult to separate the condition of forest health from its symptoms — fires, bugs and disease — but this distinction is absolutely critical in identifying where controversy departs from consensus. Firefighter and homeowner safety lies in the balance.

Forest restoration and fire risk mitigation are not the same. Forest types, locations and prescriptions can vary widely with one or the other. Unfortunately, when a fuel-reduction solution is offered that purports to address both fire risk to communities and forest health, often neither forest nor community needs are addressed. Each of the bills now being debated in the Senate attempts to tackle the complexity of both goals — restoring natural fire regimes and protecting communities with the stroke of a pen. In the end, fire risk to firefighters and communities is not likely to be reduced, and effective and efficient forest restoration strategies will not be implemented.

Is the goal of the legislation to reduce the risk of wildfire to communities in the wildland-urban interface and increase firefighter safety? If so, then we know that fuel reduction is but one tool in the box. Creating safety zones for firefighters to fall back to is virtually meaningless if emergency access is poor and adequate water is not readily available.

Through the successes of the Firewise program, more and more homeowners are beginning to understand their individual and collective risks and are taking steps to create safer communities. Yet to date, these folks, with the help of their rural fire districts, are largely on their own. Local agency staff, sincerely wanting to help, don't have the resources they need to be good neighbors.

As the wildland-urban interface continues to grow and drought persists across much of the West, the risk that wildfires pose to humans and their homes will continue to increase dramatically. Every fire racing toward a community that hasn't taken comprehensive steps to protect itself is a disaster waiting to happen. Not only are homes in danger of being lost, residents' lives and the lives of the firefighters seeking to protect them are put in jeopardy. To ignore this knowable and avoidable situation is the real tragedy.

Direct and consistent resources focused on helping communities help themselves need to be the number-one priority of any bill that tackles wildfire risk to communities. This obvious-as-the-nose-on-your-face local consensus is being lost in the front country versus back country streamlining process and policy morass.

Or is the goal of legislation more specifically forest restoration, addressing fire risk along the way? If so, then we necessarily admit that firefighter safety and community risk reduction are not the number-one priorities. We simply can't afford to immediately reduce fuel loads on the number of acres necessary across the landscape to honestly reduce fire risk to communities.

Recent research has shown that the cost of such treatment generally runs from $500 to $1,500 per acre for mechanical thinning. Forest Service researchers have estimated that there may be as many as 650 million acres that could benefit from some form of fuel treatment. Averaging $1,000 per acre, that amounts to $650 billion in treatment costs. Even restricting treatment to only the 10 to 20 million acres estimated to make up the wildland-urban interface of federal “communities at risk” would still cost up to $20 billion. We simply aren't in a position to have our cake and eat it, too.

All of this begs the question of how we can tackle the enormity of the restoration task before us. Here, the consensus is that mechanical thinning is but one type of a fuel reduction tool. At some point we need to acknowledge that only the judicious use of fire itself, either as prescribed burns or through wildland fire use, can begin to address the work of restoring the natural condition of some forest types in a socially, economically, ecologically and politically acceptable manner.

Yet as we all know, fire never can be used as it should until people feel safe around it. As long as direct risk to homes and communities remains a factor, we will continue in the vicious circle of suppression exacerbating the need for restoration.

So it would seem that we are back to where we began. Responsible wildfire legislation addresses community safety first and foremost. It recognizes that this work, critical in and of itself, is also the foundation from which we can tackle in earnest forest restoration across the landscape — making fire work for us, not against us.

Unfortunately, this message is in danger of being lost in the Senate, perhaps for want of messengers. Increases in suppression funding are meaningless if the need for across-the-board suppression continues.

Communities-at-risk are simply communities-in-need. Legislation that ignores this need by directing priorities and resources elsewhere ignores the safety of those that respond, from the air or the ground, to save unprotected homes and lives from the inevitable wildfire.

Tom Fry is a former U.S. Forest Service employee and volunteer firefighter working as the wildfire program coordinator with Four Corners Regional Office of the Wilderness Society in Denver. He can be reached at 303-650-5818, ext. 110, or tom_fry@tws.org.