No walk in the park; rangers' ranks dwindling as system grows
 |
|
||||||||||
WAHWEAP, Ariz. — Eric Scott was under the gun. It was the Thursday before the Fourth of July, and visitors were streaming through the fee booths at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area for a weekend of sun, fun, boating and beer on Lake Powell.
Scott, chief ranger of the park's busiest subdistrict, had worked just three hours and already handled a trash-bin fire, a car accident, a report of a suspicious person and a fishhook through a visitor's thumb.
"This is probably the lull before the storm," he predicted. At the north end of the lake, divers searched for an 18-year-old man who was overcome by carbon-monoxide fumes while body surfing behind a ski boat. Within a week, four more would be dead: a toddler who drowned, a man who died cliff-jumping and two other men who suffered heart attacks.
Those were among more than 500 incidents at the park that holiday week, including dozens of drug and alcohol violations, thefts, domestic disputes, a propane leak and medical cases ranging from broken legs to a snake bite.
And all were handled by just 34 park rangers.
Thirty-four rangers to patrol 1.2 million acres and a 135-mile-long lake, which draws more than 400,000 visitors a month in the summer.
Thirty-four rangers to patch wounds, fight fires, rescue hikers, control boaters, protect resources, arrest criminals, help motorists — even recommend eateries for inquiring tourists — across an area about the size of Delaware.
Glen Canyon is representative of a problem pervading the parks, recreation areas, seashores and monuments that make up the National Park Service. Over the past two decades, as visitation increased and acreage expanded, the number of rangers charged with protecting our national treasures — and the people who visit them — dwindled.
The figures speak
In 1981, the Park Service had 2,000 full-time enforcement rangers and about 1,000 seasonal rangers patrolling 329 units and 79 million acres. Visitation was around 210 million.
In 2001, about 1,500 full-time and 500 seasonal rangers patrol 384 units and 84 million acres. Visitation has risen to 286 million.
The Park Service grew by 55 units, 5 million acres and 76 million visits; its ranger force fell by 1,000.
Many facilities have been forced to scale back operations. Some have no enforcement rangers, while others have only one — resulting in no backup and no coverage for the parks several days a week, according to a study last year by the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP).
Some parks are experiencing crime problems similar to those in big cities: rapes, aggravated assaults, body dumping. In parks on the U.S.-Mexico border, drug smuggling and illegal immigrant activity are on the rise. Arizona's Organ Pipe National Monument was called the most dangerous national park in the country by a ranger organization. Some 80,000 pounds of marijuana were seized last year in the 330,000-acre park, which fewer than 10 rangers patrol.
Yosemite's situation
Even the large, more popular facilities have suffered. Yosemite National Park in California had more than 200 rangers in 1974, when annual visitation was 1.5 million. Today, with 3.5 million visitors, fewer than 60 rangers patrol the park, which has among the highest amount of crime in the park system.
"When a ranger's responding to a more serious call, the less serious may be waiting or they're not dealt with at all," said Don Coelho, the park's assistant chief ranger. "We're the EMS, the fire responders, the city police, county sheriff and highway patrol all mixed together.
"We're stretched too thin."
As the job grows more challenging, it also becomes more dangerous. Last year's IACP report found that park rangers have the highest assault rate of all federal law-enforcement officers. Three rangers were fatally shot in the 1990s, and 65 were assaulted last year alone.
"They don't really advertise that to you when you apply for the job, that you're more likely to be assaulted than a DEA agent," said Greg Jackson, a 14-year veteran and district ranger at Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.
What does this mean for park visitors? Most rangers agree the general public is still safer at a Park Service facility than walking down the street in most cities, and the rate of serious crimes has actually decreased slightly.
Injuries and fatalities stemming from park-related activities, such as hiking, swimming and skiing, fluctuate. Last year, park rangers responded to nearly 5,000 search-and-rescue calls and handled more than 17,000 emergency medical cases, while 244 visitors died in incidents not related to crimes.
Yet some rangers say reporting of accidents and crimes has slipped because rangers are too busy responding to incidents to record them. Others, like Coelho, say the impact on public safety is harder to quantify. He notes that his rangers are so reactive, jumping from crisis to crisis, that they have little time to conduct patrols to warn visitors of dangers inherent to the park.
"We might be able to prevent injuries," Coelho said, "maybe even save lives."
Dennis Burnett, acting chief of ranger activities for the Park Service, blames the ranger shortage on competing priorities and stagnant budgets.
"Congress designates new park areas pretty much annually, and when that happens it doesn't come with any additional manpower," he said.
The law-enforcement/protection budget is drawn from Park Service operations, meaning a pot of money goes to each superintendent who then decides which divisions get how much. Lately, other priorities have taken precedence, including a $5 billion maintenance backlog and more money for resource protection — among President Bush's budget initiatives for the agency.
Public safety has never been cited as a budget initiative, according to Burnett.
Others question the Park Service's overall commitment to safety, from protecting visitors to its own employees. Dick Powell, manager of the agency's risk-management program, notes the Park Service has one of the worst employee-safety records in the federal government. Among the nine divisions of the Department of Interior, the Park Service far exceeds all others in occupational accidents, with 2,367 cases in fiscal year 2000. The next-highest number was 705 for the Bureau of Land Management.
Powell points to a lack of oversight from headquarters and regional offices.
"It depends quite honestly on the personal commitment of the individual superintendents," he said. "A few have taken this on, but there's a lot of ambivalence among others."
Accidents and fatalities
Powell also criticizes the agency's efforts to prevent visitor accidents and fatalities, such as a string of carbon-monoxide deaths on Lake Powell. Ten people have died of boat-related carbon-monoxide poisoning on the lake since 1994, seven of them on houseboats. The houseboat deaths occurred in 1994, 1996, 1998 and another in 1999, but Powell's office didn't learn of the problem and issue an alert to the entire park system until after the deaths of two boys last summer.
"We're doing very little to not only identify a lot of the different causal factors but to share those with the other parks," Powell said.
In 1999, in response to a congressional directive, the Park Service completed a study of its law-enforcement program that found the ability of the agency to protect people, property and resources had been "eroded" by the growth of the park system and the cost of doing business.
The report recommended increasing the ranger protection staff by 1,295 full-time employees and converting 500 seasonals to permanent positions.
The following year, the IACP report concluded the Park Service's law-enforcement program was "undervalued, under-resourced and under-managed." It recommended increased training and better equipment, as well as 615 new full-time rangers.
To date, none of the recommendations has been implemented, although Burnett said a task force is preparing to send the IACP recommendations to Park Service officials for consideration.
Until then, rangers continue to juggle their myriad duties, plagued by long hours, increased risk and burnout. They readily admit some responsibilities are being neglected, particularly resource protection — one of the agency's own priorities, one of the main reasons the ranger force was founded.
"The parks are always, somehow, going to respond to the big emergencies," said Cindy Ott-Jones, chief ranger at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. "What is falling down is the specific resource protection — the backcountry areas, the archaeological sites."
Jackson, the Santa Monica Mountains ranger, added: "It's taking care of the urgent at the expense of the important."
Patrolling Glen Canyon
On that Thursday before the Fourth of July at Glen Canyon, there were only Eric Scott and one other ranger to patrol 275,000 square miles of the park for much of the day. Three of his 17-member patrol had been dispatched to help search for the drowning victim up north.
He had no one to put out on the lake, dotted with dozens of houseboats and pand swimmers.
He had no one to help reroute traffic when an entrance station was closed because of insects.
Eventually, he had to call someone in on overtime.
Scott, a 14-year veteran whose father also was a park ranger, is among those who believe the parks remain safe for visitors — for now. When asked about next year and the years after that, he thought for a moment.
"I couldn't even speculate," he said finally.
Besides, he didn't have time to. The radio in his truck was crackling with more calls.