Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

A losing battle

The U.S. is spending billions to fight ‘catastrophic’ forest fires. But the big blowups will continue, like it or not. For the forests, this may be good news. Part 1

By Ray Ring

High Country News

BOISE, IDAHO The campus of the National Interagency Fire Center, headquarters of the world’s largest wildfire-fighting empire, fills 23 buildings sprawled across 55 acres here on a bluff beside the city airport. Stan Legg leads me on a hike through one of the buildings, a big-box warehouse where the federal government has all kinds of gear ready for the coming fire season.

The warehouse makes Home Depot look like the corner market. On our right, Legg points out, we have 4,000 shovels. And over here, 10,000 pairs of flame-resistant jeans, and 8,000 flame-resistant shirts. We pass shelves filled with saws, hand tools, hoses, tents, canisters of fire foam, generators, boots, gloves, hard hats, goggles, sleeping bags, fire shelters, pumps, chain-saw kits (including chaps) and backpackable toilets (for wilderness fires).

"This cache can equip 8,000 people in the field," says Legg, the beefy former firefighter in charge of this inventory, worth $20 million.

In the other buildings, high-level fire managers and "fire intelligence" experts set the national tactics for attacking wildfires. Meteorologists receive satellite signals from more than 1,100 robot weather stations placed throughout the forests nationwide, and make predictions about where fires will break out and how they will behave.

When a call comes, the Interagency Fire Center can mount an attack to rival the U.S. Marines. Orders flash out to dozens of regional bases to mobilize air and ground forces — a fleet that includes hundreds of helicopters and planes, thousands of fire engines, bulldozers, graders, boats and a workforce of about 17,000 people, not counting all the temps, contractors, regular military forces, and firefighters from as far away as Australia, who get enlisted during the hottest times.

The empire is flush with manpower and equipment, due to a spectacular sixfold increase in federal wildfire spending since 1991. Roughly half that increase has come with the National Fire Plan, a behemoth created three years ago, which pumps billions into firefighting, and hundreds of millions into "fuels reduction" — the most ambitious effort ever to do vegetation thinning, prescribed burns and other treatments on millions of acres, in the name of fire control.

Driving it all is a powerful alliance of Republicans, Democrats, Old West and New West — all the people who have homes in the woods, the recreation and tourism businesses that don’t want smoky skies and shut-down forests, cities that don’t want reservoirs dirtied with fire runoff, loggers who don’t want trees to go to waste, ranchers who don’t want livestock forage to burn, the private firefighting industry that taps the cash flow, the politicians who serve all of them, and the agencies that want funding, chiefly the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service.

Yet despite their sheer size and momentum — and the good intentions behind it all — the firefighting empire and the National Fire Plan amount to a massive case of denial. The painful truth is that wildfires — arguably, even the recent so-called "catastrophic" fires that turn vast acreage into smoking ruins — are a natural force that belongs on the land. The strongest evidence of that, ironically, is emerging right in the forest above the Fire Center headquarters, in the work of a lone researcher, who wears turquoise earrings and Carhartt overalls as she digs in the dirt. When word of her discovery spreads, the long denial may finally end, and there may be little left of our current wildfire policy that you’ll recognize.

 

Shaped by fire

Once you get obsessed with wildfires, as all Westerners should be, you pass through a kind of looking glass and begin to see all the land in terms of fire. As you travel around, you see that all the forests, as well as sagebrush and grassland, divide into two simple categories: that which is poised to burn, and that which is recovering from burning.

Fire’s prominence in shaping the landscape was recognized by the early 1900s, even as the Forest Service and the other land managers declared war on fire, trying to save the public timber supply and an increasing number of forest settlements. Even as the battles raged, a thread of heretical science explored fire’s beneficial effects, eventually proving that fire sweeps aside conifers to create aspen groves and meadows and berry patches. And that fire is the best recycler of nutrients. And that fire hardens the trees it kills so they last long enough for birds to nest in their hollowed trunks. And that many hundreds of species of plants and animals have evolved to depend on fires.

This science was long ignored, but the benefits of fire were finally acknowledged in the West in 1968, when the National Park Service began to allow a few lightning-sparked blazes to burn. Four years later, the Forest Service began to allow lightning-caused fires some room in wilderness areas. Prescribed burns — using drip torches to ignite fires — came into fashion. The "let it burn" policy seemed to be an awakening, and Yellowstone National Park became the showcase for it in 1988.

The park superintendent allowed lightning-sparked fires to grow and, encouraged by drought and winds, the fires blew up spectacularly, burning 800,000 acres — 36 per cent of the park. Eventually, it became clear that, as the heretics had predicted, the fires rejuvenated the park’s ecosystem. But the war machine hardly missed a drumbeat. Nationwide news coverage emphasized the immediate effects — volcanic smoke, dead trees and scorched earth.

The same year, another "let it burn" lightning-sparked fire blew up on unexpected winds, this one in the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana. The Canyon Creek Fire escaped the wilderness boundary and roared through ranch property, burning a couple hundred cows, long fencelines, tons of hay, and six buildings.

Quietly, within the agencies, the Yellowstone and Canyon Creek fires combined to knock back the "let it burn" policy. For several years after 1988, fires no longer burned without a fight. Even today, land managers are cautious.

"’Let it burn’ fires that escape and cause problems for people can be ‘career-ending events’," says Bob Clark, who runs the Joint Fire Science Program within the National Interagency Fire Center. "Managers are very reluctant to go out on a limb — they are risk-averse."

And wildfires are becoming more risky all the time, as they increasingly come up against the West’s explosive population growth, especially in the "wildland-urban interface," or Red Zone — neighborhoods that edge against wild land. Southern California brushfires in 1991, 1993 and 1996 destroyed a total of more than 3,100 homes and apartments. In 2000, a prescribed burn that blew out of control took more than 200 homes in Los Alamos, N.M., and fires in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley burned 70 homes. Last year, wildfires in Colorado and Arizona destroyed at least 550 homes.

Each time homes have burned, the political atmosphere has gotten more heated. And more and more, the homes — in the Red Zone and the cities — have cast their shadow over the forests, even deep into the backcountry. These days, we demand protection not only of houses and yards, but also the extended municipal watersheds, viewsheds, trail systems, air quality, and all the jobs based on tourism, logging and recreation.

As a result, this is our national wildfire policy today: If lightning strikes, we allow the wildfire to burn only if we have a detailed local fire plan in place that allows fire in that particular spot. The weather must be not too hot, dry or windy, the fuels situation must be right, the smoke must not be too thick in towns hundreds of miles away. We must have fire monitors and firefighters tending it, to make sure it doesn’t escape whatever boundaries we have set. And as soon as a major wildfire burns out of control elsewhere and strains the overall firefighting resources, or the moment that lives are lost anywhere on the front lines, the word goes out around the West to quell all fires until things quiet down.

In other words, our policy is "let it burn, except for almost everything." We snuff out more than 99 per cent of wildfires.

Even with the National Fire Plan increasing the use of prescribed fires, the rules keep each of those fires small and polite. In a good year, in the entire West outside of Alaska, only 600,000 to 700,000 acres are allowed to burn — a small fraction of what is aching to ignite.

In general, even deep in wilderness, "the fires that are allowed to burn are the high-elevation ones that go nowhere," says Anne Black, with the federal Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute in Missoula, Mont. "The ecologically important fires are the ones that get put out, because of the fear of them breaking the wilderness boundary. Right now, it’s only the most hard-core, passionate managers who really want fires, and they only burn under the most conservative conditions."

Case in point: the Green Knoll Fire of July 2001, ignited by a stray campfire ember in the Bridger-Teton National Forest near Jackson, Wyo., in lodgepole pine and subalpine fir. It’s a forest type that thrives on "stand-replacement" fires — high-intensity crown fires that take all the trees. Lodgepole seed cones crack open after fires, the seeds sprout on exposed soil, and the seedlings love full sunlight. But the Green Knoll Fire threatened more than 150 expensive homes, so it was declared the nation’s top firefighting priority. The attack force included helicopters, planes, dozers, fire engines, and ultimately, about 1,400 people. Firefighters wrapped many of the houses in gigantic sheets of heat-deflecting aluminum foil. The fire was contained at 4,400 acres, and no houses were lost. The cost to taxpayers: about $13 million.

And the Broad Fire in Yellowstone, in June 2002: Lightning struck in remote, rugged terrain, where the lodgepole pines had grown to dense old growth. "This area does need to burn," says Phil Perkins, the park’s fire management officer. In recent years, the park has let a few thousand acres burn, but in 2002, fires elsewhere in the West strained the system, and computer modeling showed that, in the worst case, the Broad Fire might blow up and burn a park village (which was six miles away, across the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River) or a gateway town (30 miles away). The attack was led by a Type 1 crew — 50 fire specialists that flew in, including fire managers, fire spokesmen and experts in safety, planning and finance. They called in more than 300 firefighters and 12 helicopters, containing the fire at 9,140 acres, at a cost of at least $3.5 million.

Wildfires still don’t co-operate with our policy and our plans, of course. And that rebellion is getting more pronounced. The big fire year of 1988 has been followed by more big years — 1994, 1996, and then 2000, which set the modern record for the most acres burned in the West since accurate record-keeping began in 1916. Then, in 2002, Colorado, Arizona and Oregon had their biggest individual fires on record.

"Catastrophic," exhibiting "extreme fire behaviour" — a fearful new vocabulary describes the fires that escape our grasp these days. The monster fires can charge across tens of thousands of acres in a single day, shooting flame fronts hundreds of feet tall, burning more fiercely than the fires to which we’re accustomed.

Many of our best fire scientists sound the alarm, and they claim to know the cause of the monster fires: us. They say a century of fire suppression, combined with overgrazing and logging, has caused an "unnatural" buildup of trees and brush. As a result, they say, today’s fires are so extensive and hot that they ravage ecosystems.

Alarmed scientists get more attention than those who are not alarmed, so it can seem that the science aligns with homeowners and businesses, championing the firefighting and forest thinning. But actually, the science is not so clear. No two fires are alike, and every forest type reacts differently, but all forests evolved with fire. Many reports of fire damage are overblown.

In their reported size alone, the monster fires are exaggerated. Within a fire’s boundaries, much of the land is burned only moderately, or not at all, leaving a mosaic of vegetation. Where all vegetation is burned off, typically an invisible mosaic of roots, seeds and microbes survives in the soil. Soil damage is another of the exaggerations. Often we are told that the hottest fires ruin the soil by forming water-repellent "hydrophobic" layers under the surface. Not mentioned is the fact that such hydrophobic layers typically break down within two or three years.

The biggest monster last year? Oregon’s 500,000-acre Biscuit Fire left most of the tree canopies surviving on nearly 40 per cent of the land it burned. Even in the most severely burned areas, fire-adapted plants, such as oaks, ferns, beargrass and kalmiopsis bushes, resprouted. The fire also opened habitat for a rare insect-eating pitcher plant, Darlingtonia californica, by killing Jeffrey pines and invading cedars.

"It was a large fire — it covered a lot of acres. But it was not remarkable in its physical effects," says Jon Brazier, a Forest Service hydrologist who studied the Biscuit fire. "The watersheds were not destroyed. The water quality is still good, the streams are in good shape — they are changed, but they are still functioning."

The second-biggest monster last year? Arizona’s 460,000-acre Rodeo-Chediski Fire destroyed 465 homes and 300 million board-feet of commercial timber, and left more than 100,000 acres burned so hot that they looked like a smoldering parking lot. But the fire also cleared away ponderosa pines and junipers that had invaded meadows and riparian areas. Studies predict a "long-term increase in watershed health."

The third-biggest monster last year? Colorado’s 137,000-acre Hayman Fire included "mass ignition of whole drainages," destroying 132 homes and threatening to soot up a reservoir of Denver’s drinking water. But 17 per cent of the acreage was not burned, and another 51 per cent burned at only "low intensity" or "moderate intensity," according to studies. Most of the burn was a mosaic, and is expected to recover rapidly. Long-term, the Hayman Fire should improve habitats for numerous rare species, including three-toed woodpeckers, Mexican spotted owls, northern goshawks, and a butterfly called the Pawnee montane skipper. The blanketflower, which thrives after fire, will likely create habitat for the rare Colorado firemoth.

This is not to say those fires were not catastrophes. They opened raw ground, forced the vegetation back to early successional stages, generated erosion, and invited potential invasions of weeds. They were magnificent catastrophes — the kind that can shake up an ecosystem.

"Stress is hard on individuals, but it’s good for ecosystems," says Tom Atzet, a Forest Service ecologist in Oregon. "People look at fire as an event, but it’s really a process. The important thing about fire is that it drives change, and stress, and evolution. These processes — fires, floods, drought — are what cause diversity.

"Will (an ecosystem) come back the same? Hell, no. But it will come back."

 

This article originally appeared in High Country News (www.hcn.org), which covers the West's communities and natural-resource issues from Paonia, Colorado. Ray Ring, HCN’s editor in the field, writes from Bozeman, Montana. He can be reached at rayring@hcn.org.



Comments