I apologize for the delay in writing. I have been experiencing some Internet difficulties.
I have been writing for a month and only mentioned fire tangentially, which is a huge oversight. Fire management, as anyone who works with the Forest Service knows, increasingly dominates the time, energy and resources of the agency. According to Randall O’Toole (http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=12596), the Forest Service’s budget for firefighting, adjusted for inflation, increased by 253% between 1980 and 2002. At the same time, the National Forest System budget (which funds everything from timber sales to trail maintenance) declined by 37%. O’Toole claims the Forest Service is becoming the Fire Service.
(Only of the dozens of employee I’ve mentioned these seemed to be aware of this vast differential. That guy, a senior regional planner, told me he was convinced that increased purchasing costs and overhead meant that the real budget of the NFS had declined by more than 50%).
Fire was on everyone’s minds when I visited with the Caribou-Targhee National Forest and Curlew National Grassland two days ago. The office had just gotten news of the helicopter crash on a fire in the Shasta Trinity NF in northern California. Several CTNF employees were on that fire and everyone was very nervous that they might have been killed or injured. Thankfully, no one from the CT was hurt. But the latest news I’ve heard, which I can’t confirm, is that nine firefighters and air crew were killed, including two from an Oregon company I used to work with.
I am trying to rely entirely on my own thinking when it comes to this blog, but as is often the case, everything that I could say about fire fighting already got said much better in this news article, a must read for everyone: http://www.idahostatesman.com/387/story/447061.html.
I really have to insist that people read this piece. Half the Forest Service’s fire fighting budget—more than a half billion dollars or so—is spent protecting structures, but this effort is profoundly ineffective at protecting structures compared to simple actions that homeowners take to “fire wise” their property.
I have visited four completed and two planned fuel reduction projects in the Wildland Urban Interface. I made a point of checking out nearby houses. Not one of them (in Colorado and Utah) had so much as cleared brush around their houses. About a third of the houses I looked at had wooden roofs.
Is thinning in the wildland urban interface a waste of time? I have spent a considerable amount of time studying this issue. The bottom line is that carefully planned thinning can moderate fire behavior. More moderate fire should, in theory, better protect homes if for no other reason than it allows for deployment of fire fighting resources that might otherwise be drawn back in the face of big fast moving flame fronts.
(A Forest Service study, the 2002 “Interim Hayman Fire Case Study Analysis,” looked at the 21,000 acres of modified fuels including previous wildfires, prescribed burning, thinning, logging, etc. that were encountered by the 2002 Hayman fire southeast of Denver. Forest Service researchers and university scientists found that the fire’s response to these fuel modifications “was complex and does not lend itself to any one conclusion or summary.”)
But it’s equally clear that all the time and energy reducing fuels—and defending structures during a fire—is Sisyphean task if homeowners aren’t compelled to firewise their homes.
The conventional wisdom among the silviculturists and planners that I’ve talked to in R2 and R4 holds that the region’s massive mountain pine beetle outbreak has significantly increased fire risk and that beetle killed trees around homes need to be salvaged as quickly as possible. But the researchers at Colorado State and the Rocky Mountain Research Station I’ve talked to take a considerably more nuanced view. They say it’s theoretically possible, as I’ve suggested earlier, that fires in beetle killed stands might badly damage soils 20-50 years down the road when all that fuel’s on the ground. But in the short term, the pine beetle has actually reduced the risk of fast running crown fire by defoliating the tree (it’s the needles that fuel crown fires).
I tried to flesh out these intricacies in a conversation with one senior resource planner at the Rocky Mountain Region in Denver, but didn’t get very far. “Science has nothing to do with this,” he said. “If a fire gets started in there, it’s going to go through their like a banshee. This is about a massive amount of dead woody debris around houses—there’s no science to that.”
No science to fire. A nearby public information officer winced as I furiously scribbled notes. I feel bad relating it—I am here to learn and not try and make people look bad. But I really can’t keep that one to myself.
By the way, I am a supporter of a strong Forest Service silvicultural program, and I’ll take up the subject in more detail soon.
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