FUSEE

Firebombs in the Forest: Untreated Slash Piles Fueled Angora Fire Destruction

2007-08-14T00:39:00.000-07:00

The Angora Fire near Lake Tahoe destroyed hundreds of homes and other structures in the community of Meyers, California. There have been several post mortem analyses of the cause and effects of the wildfire disaster, yet there remains a grossly understated issue that has so far failed to generate the attention from journalists or policymakers it deserves: the presence of hundreds of unburned slash piles left over from thinning operations nearly three years ago that helped fuel the wildfire’s destructive power.

Photo Caption: The biggest cluster of destroyed homes was located next to the fuels reduction unit that had untreated slash piles left over from thinning operations completed nearly three years ago. The intense heat from the flaming slash piles lofted large burning embers that were carried by the wind and fell into the residential zone, igniting and destroying homes. Photo by FUSEE.
[For a larger image click here]

What is “Slash”?

“Slash” is the slang term for the needles, limbs, and small-diameter tree trunks left over from commercial logging or non-commercial thinning operations. As it dries out and cures in the sun, slash can be one of the most flammable fuels in the forest because it is easily ignited and burns intensely. So-called fuels reduction treatments that remove large-diameter tree trunks but leave the slash strewn across the ground are more aptly called fuels relocation rather than fuels “reduction” treatments, for they have merely relocated the fuel hazard from the tops of the trees where only the rarest and most extreme kinds of fire behavior—crownfire--can ignite them, down to the ground surface where they immediately become available fuel for the most common form of fire behavior: surface fire.

There are several methods agencies like the Forest Service use to “treat” slash. Some of the most popular methods like “compaction” (e.g. crushing the slash by running it over with bulldozers and log-skidding machines) and “lop and scatter” (e.g. cutting it up with chainsaws into smaller pieces and spreading it all over the forest floor) have been thoroughly discredited by fire scientists as increasing fire risks and fuel hazards, not decreasing them. Another popular method is to pile the slash either by handcrews or by machines. This decreases the horizontal continuity of fuel across the forest floor, but unless the slash piles are burned or otherwise physically removed, they can actually increase the rate of spread, intensity, and severity of a wildfire.

Anyone who has ever burned slash piles knows the kind of intense heat that is emitted—enough to burn the flesh of your face through radiant heat alone. Slash can burn for hours, and embers can smolder for days. Slash piles that are burned too close to standing trees can kill them through “cooking” the roots or “heat girdling” the trees, and ember-filled smoke columns can severely scorch or even ignite the canopy of overstory trees even if the flames from the slash piles do not come close to reaching the tree canopy.

Photo Caption: White ash-covered soil indicates extreme intensity and high severity. Black-topped stumps show that this stand had been thinned before the fire, but this did not prevent high fire severity. Blue paint on the largest remaining trees indicates this stand is a potential salvage timber sale. Photo by FUSEE.
[For a larger image click here]

Slash Caused Spotfires That Ignited Homes

This is precisely what happened on the Angora Fire: several hundred untreated slash piles ignited by the wildfire created such intense heat that it killed nearly all of the remaining overstory trees in the thinned units. In fact, according to the Forest Service’s analysis, the severity of the wildfire burning through the slashpiles matched the severity of nearby untreated stands, calling into question whether the thinning treatments was a complete waste of money and labor. Additionally, large burning embers were sent aloft from the slash piles and were transported by the wind into the nearby residential area where they ignited dozens of homes.

The biggest cluster of destroyed homes was located next to fuels reduction unit number 20 that had contained hundreds of untreated slash piles. The Forest Service claims that the thinning operations successfully reduced the amount of spotfires that occurred in the residential area because the reduction of trees reduced the number of tree crowns that could have sent aloft burning embers. However, the agency failed to acknowledge at all that the slash piles produced embers and spotfires.

Photo Caption: Each white dot is an ash mound that marks the spot where an untreated slash pile was left from thinning operations. There were hundreds of 10 x 10 foot slash piles spread approximately 20 feet apart in fuels reduction unit number 20 that were set ablaze by the Angora Fire. Photo by FUSEE.
[For a larger image click here]

Embers created by burning tree crowns can be picked up by the wind and carried relatively long distances. However, these embers also tend to be smaller in size, and therefore, have a shorter “residence time” (i.e. the time they are combusting before they burn out). If the ember burns out before it reaches the ground, it falls as ash and cannot ignite a spotfire.

Embers produced by slash piles generally have less chance to be picked up by winds because they start off at the ground surface, however, this does not apply during high wind speeds, and fuels reduction units that have excessively thinned trees enable high winds to blow right through to the ground surface. The intense and prolonged heat output from a burning slash pile can produce a convective column of hot air and smoke that can readily send embers high aloft. Additionally, embers produced by slash piles tend to have larger particle size with a much longer residence time, thereby increasing the probability that a burning ember can reach the ground and ignite a spotfire.

This appears to be exactly what happened when the winds shifted and pushed the Angora Fire into the residential neighborhood in Meyers. The intense heat and ember wash from hundreds of well-cured slash piles ignited homes located downwind, and killed all the trees in the thinned units. The Forest Service determined that the fire severity was identical between the treated stand full of slash in Unit 20 and adjacent untreated stands that had not been thinned.

Photo Caption: Another view shows the size of Unit 20 and the scale of untreated slash piles that sent the wildfire spotting into the tree-covered residential zone where the large white spots reveal the sites of completely destroyed homes. Photo by FUSEE.
[For a larger image click here]

Thinning Without Treating Slash is Not a "Completed Fuels Reduction Treatment”

The Forest Service has some legitimate reasons why it failed to effectively treat the slash in fuels reduction units burned by the Angora Fire, namely, the opposition by air quality regulators and local residents to the smoke that would be produced by slash burning. However, in its report on the effects of fuels treatments, the agency made an illegitimate excuse that claimed the piles were left untreated because they needed a minimum of one to two years to dry out prior to burning. This is simply not true—slash piles can be ready for burning in just a couple months after cutting, especially in the warm-dry climate around Lake Tahoe. And even a “green” pile of slash can burn if you pour enough burning fuel from your driptorch on it!

[September 25, 2007 Update: In response to the statement above, Forest Service managers have disclosed that the slashpiles contained larger logs that required one to two years to cure before burning. This would be a legitimate excuse for delaying up to two years to burn the piles, however, it has yet to be explained why these piles remained unburned after that two year curing time had passed. A September 5, 2007 story in the local newspaper, the Tahoe Bonanza, revealed that over 3,000 acres within the Tahoe basin have untreated slashpiles from past thinning projects, and local residents are concerned about the fire hazard presented by these piles. To the best of our knowledge, the Forest Service has not publicly disclosed a timetable for treating these unburned slashpiles.]

In reporting its accomplishments to Congress, the Forest Service regularly counts as “fuels reduction completed” the number of acres where it has thinned trees, and then can count these same acres again as accomplishments in fuels reduction if and when it later treats the slash created by thinning operations. Thus, for example, the agency claims a total of 80 acres of fuels reduction completed when it thins trees and later burns the slash on a 40 acre unit. In any other accounting system, this would be rightfully condemned as “double dipping” to cook the books. No fuels reduction treatment or forest restoration project should be considered properly “completed” unless and until it has BOTH effectively reduced the slash fuel AND completed understory broadcast prescribed burning to deal with remaining surface fuels.

The presence of unburned slash piles, their role in spreading the Angora Fire, and their location next to the biggest cluster of destroyed homes is worthy of more thorough examination by the press, but what is even more critical is for policymakers to deal with the wider, generalized issue of unburned slash piles—because thousands of slash piles are currently littering the forest floor throughout the Lake Tahoe Basin and hundreds of others areas across the West where logging and thinning operations have occurred.

From the evidence on the ground it is clear that in the Lake Tahoe Basin the pace of tree thinning is far outracing the ability of land management agencies to effectively deal with the slash left behind. The slash piles are so numerous around Lake Tahoe communities that in some areas there is barely any horizontal separation between piles. Slash piles are located right next to busy highways were a single carelessly discarded cigarette butt could set them ablaze. In many cases, piles are located dangerously close to remaining trees such that if and when the piles are burned by managers or by wildfire, they will likely damage or kill the trees. Thinning units littered with slash piles offer as much fire hazard reduction as covering up oil spills with a bunch of rags.

The Angora Fire offers a wake up call: untreated slash piles function like “firebombs” in the forest, increasing the spread, intensity, and severity of wildfires, and can be a major agent of home ignitions. The number, location, and extent of unburned slash piles scattered throughout the Lake Tahoe Basin and elsewhere across the West constitutes a real and present danger to residents living near similar so-called “fuels reduction” units.

--FUSEE Staff

Where The Heck Is Yellowpine? - Part I

2007-08-16T23:30:00.000-07:00

Photo Caption: This is the bumper sticker that is making the rounds of fire camps on the Cascade Complex Fire in Idaho.

Where The Heck Is Yellowpine?

"Where The Heck Is Yellowpine, and why am I risking my ass to save it?" For the past month, the several hundred people that I am working with have been asking this question.

As I write this, dozens of giant wildfires spread across wide swaths of the Northern Rockies. This is nothing out of the ordinary, of course - these forests rely on fire for regeneration and cleansing, and lightning has drilled dry Western forests regularly for thousands of years - everyone knows this.

But political cowardice drives a fire suppression policy that defies all measures of common sense.

For the gypsy crew of wildfire managers and FireWar Profiteers that we roll with, our 2007 fire carnival is a four ring circus set in Central Idaho - with each ring representing a huge fire. These landscape-scale burns are in an apparent race to consume the collection of cabins, mobile homes, and junker snowmobiles that comprise the 'historic' burg of Yellowpine. 'Historic' as in "something happened here once..."

Map of 4 fires threatening Yellowpine - active fire in red, completed line in black.
From: http://www.fs.fed.us/idahofires/news/closures/maps/0816/area-closures-0816.pdf

There is an outside chance that all four fires will converge upon the town in one tornadic afternoon: wings of flame sweeping together, clanging like giant anvils colliding, cleansing Yellowpine in yet another natural purge.

Everyone tasked with fighting these fires reaches three basic conclusions:

1. Once these big fires become established, no amount of firefighting will stop them 'until the snows fly'.
2. We are fighting these fires because some people live in these woods, and nobody wants to be the person who burned them out, and,
3. After 50 years of saving Yellowpine, we could have paid Big Sur land prices to buy out each and every hermit between Yellowstone and Oregon, and still come out ahead.

How might one column-driven fire steer another? Will one monster fire roasting an entire drainage in an afternoon create indraft winds which are strong enough to suck another huge fire - five miles away and across a canyon - into itself? If we set a backfire on one fire, will it suck or be sucked? These are the questions that fire managers must consider as they game-out tactics to steer landscape-scale fires. And that's what we are trying to do out here, to steer these monster fires away from a 'ranch' here, or a hillbilly commune there; just doing something, anything, to save the day.

The 'ranches' that we are protecting are a few dude ranches that wealthy outsiders can fly into for a weekend - a couple of horses and funky cabins grandfathered into National Forest land covered with thickets of lodgepole and fir (the natural cover here). The 'communities' are the Lower-48's equivalent of Fairbanks, Alaska - the end of the paved road, an oddball collection of heavy drinkers that have no use for society or government until their roads need plowing or a wildfire threatens.

Most of the characters that I met in Yellowpine look like they would be happy living in the 19th century. That's fine with me, but we should recall that the West of the 1800s had no organized wildland fire suppression, and that frontier towns burned to the ground on a fairly regular basis. As much as I would hate to deprive Yellowpine's residents of an authentic historic experience (wildfire burning their town), I am even less excited about putting wildland firefighters in there to chase spotfires through hazmat shacks, ammo caches, and tire fires as the big one rolls in. [for photos of Yellowpine, click here]

Now don't get me wrong: I have nothing against people living in the hills, being off-the-grid, or collecting a personal treasure-trove of 'might-come-in-handy-someday' car parts, old trucks, snowmachines, old barrels of acid, or junk lumber. The personal junkyard is a Western Institution, and I would be a hypocrite to advocate for its abolition; just don't expect me to put my ass between your junkpile and a running wildfire.

In the last several decades, great progress has been made in restoring fire to its natural role in the Great American Backwoods. Large expanses of roadless and wilderness land in remote areas of America's Interior West now have Fire Management Plans that designate large areas as "Fire Use" areas. Here, naturally-ignited fires burning may be allowed to fulfill their natural ecological role. Yet we allow one burg here, and a hamlet there to influence land management on the scale of millions of acres. In the case of Yellowpine, the hundreds of thousands of acres on the surrounding Payette and Boise National Forests that would benefit from a 'let-burn' policy are off limits to Fire Use, as natural fire represents a threat to the cabins, dude ranches, and bible camps scattered there.

Why are we risking our asses and squandering our fortunes on a few cabins in the sticks? We are here because America's politicians and land managers don't have the political backbone to ask:

"Who really gives a damn where Yellowpine is!"

--- Fire Hobo

NEXT POST - Fire burns our circus tents

Where the Heck is Yellowpine - Part II

2007-08-31T22:13:00.000-07:00

In Part I of this dispatch, I asked "Where The Heck Is Yellowpine, and why am I risking my ass to save it?" Since I wrote that post, we have had a busy few weeks in the wildlands of Idaho.

By now, many of you have heard about or seen video of an incident on August 13th during which the Knox Ranch Incident Command Post (ICP or 'firecamp') on the Cascade Complex - in Central Idaho - was burned into by a wildfire. Backfires set to protect the camp from the fire's advance spotted across the road between the fires and the camp, and despite heavy helicopter work for much of the afternoon, at about 4:30 p.m., the fire burned up to the edge of the camp, melted some porta-potties, burned a yurt, destroyed several historic cabins, and ignited a dumpster in the middle of camp. Nobody in camp was seriously injured, and many non line-qualified personnel got a chance to experience group torching in lodgepole and subalpine fir up close and personal. An old Alaska Smokejumper friend who knows a thing or two about crown fire said simply "It was fu*#ing hot!"

Video of fire burning into Cascade Complex ICP by Alex Park.

After a few days off, many of us turned on the computer, caught up on some email, and browsed to the "Theysaid" blog on wildlandfire.com - the unofficial gossip column of American wildland fire. Here, the debate about the incident has centered mainly on language: Was this incident an "entrapment," a "burnover," or "close-call"? The USFS has coined a new phrase for such an event, they are calling it, a “burn-by.” None of these terms are casual - all have specific definitions and are usually associated with investigations, finger-pointing, and maybe a bit of new policy, e.g. "Though shalt not burn up thy firecamp."

Some have minimized the incident, pointing out that the camp (a mountain meadow) was essentially a large safety zone in which the camp's occupants were able to weather the firestorm without fire-shelters.

Much of the discussion about the ICP fire seems to blame Incident Commander Paul Broyles (in charge of the Cascade Complex when the incident occurred) for letting fire burn into his camp. This oversimplifies the case. Paul Broyles was the third IC to work out of the Knox Ranch ICP, and as the fire approached his camp, his Team had barely gotten their feet on the ground on an assignment with a myriad of political, tactical, and leadership challenges. None of the posts that I have read so far have talked about the bigger picture of the Incident - operations controlled by the Knox Ranch ICP were only one part of a huge operation involving several large fire complexes, hundreds of square miles of uncontrolled fire, thousands of firefighters, and hundreds of overhead personnel.

I have been working on the Cascade Complex for most of the time that it has been burning, and was in the ICP up until about 4 days before it burned. I think that the events leading up to the Incident are worth sharing because they raise wider issues that need to be discussed by the wildland fire community. The ICP burn didn't unfold overnight - like most wildfire accidents, this one was the result of a series of multiple oversights and miscommunications, and occurred during a major transition, which is a common cause of firefighter accidents. While the story below is mine, most of us who were involved think that the ICP fire merits further discussion, and begs larger questions regarding Federal Fire Policy in general.

Some Key Questions:

What direction was the Area Command Team providing the IMTs as the IMTs defined objectives for their respective fires?

At what point did the IMTs receive the direction to shift priorities from 'perimeter-control' to 'point-protection.'?

What were the dynamics between the IMTs working on the Cascade vs. East Zone Complexes?

Did having an Area Command Team overseeing operations help or hinder communication between the Incident Management Teams that they were charged to support?

At an early juncture, it was clear that the Central Idaho Fires were beyond control. Why did it take over a month for the fire organization to officially change their tactics to emphasize 'point-protection'?

The Central Idaho Fires of 2007.

Maps of Cascade Complex Fires from Inciweb

The Cascade Complex was born out of a large lightning storm that swept fire ignitions across large portions of the Boise, Payette, and Salmon-Challis National Forests of Central Idaho on July 17, 2007. This storm started the fires that would become the 'East Zone,' 'Cascade,' 'Middle Fork,' and 'Krassel WFU (Wildland Fire Use)' Complexes. Each of these complexes has required their own Overhead Teams, and to date, have cost taxpayers over $85 million.

When Tom Suwyn's Central Utah Type II Team arrived at Knox Ranch on July 20th to manage the Cascade Complex fires, 5 fires were burning across about 650 acres - of steep, thicketed, backcountry land. Even though these fires had plenty of potential for growth, the Cascade Complex was 15th in priority for resources in the Eastern Great Basin Area. Other fires competing for resources in the region included the Murphy's Complex, which started on 7/16/2007 near Twin Falls and had burnt over 500,000 acres by 7/21. By July 26th, 1,420 personnel were assigned to the Murphy’s Complex alone.

By the 22nd, the incoming Team had three Type II crews to work with and no engines, and the fires had grown to over 8,000 acres. This is not an uncommon occurrence - most large fires get started when other large fires in a region draw down firefighting resources. The incoming Team did what they could with the resources they had on hand; they set up a firecamp, ordered 11 hotshot crews, 6 helicopters, and 25 engines, and focused on their mission "do what we can with what we've got, don't get anybody hurt".

Originally, the Cascade Complex was made up of 3 fires on the Northern End of the Boise National Forest - the 'Monumental,', 'Riordan,', and 'Whiskey' Fires. In Tom Suwyn's Team's short tenure, new lightning starts established the 'Sandy' and 'Yellow' Fires, and Suwyn's Team was able to successfully contain the 'Whiskey' Fire. Smoking on the backside of a ridge West of the Knox Ranch ICP was the North Fork Fire. This fire was one of the closest to firecamp, but it had started on the Payette National Forest, and operations on it were being run out of the East Zone Complex ICP in McCall - about 55 miles away. This created a disconnect where the intel (mapping, planning, and analysis of fire behavior) on the North Fork Fire was basically unavailable to the Overhead at Knox Ranch - even though they were camped only 4-5 miles from the fire.

Around July 22nd, Rocky Oplinger's California Type I Team arrived on at Knox Ranch and Tom Suwyn's Team went home. Simultaneously, Jeanne Pincha-Tully's California Type I Team arrived in McCall to take over the East Zone Complex. With the arrival of the Type I Teams, resources poured in from across the West. By 7/26 the Cascade Complex had 2 Type I helicopters and 17 engines assigned, but it was too late. August brought hot dry days and high winds, and within a few days, the fires on all of the Central Idaho Complexes blew up. On August 1st, the Monumental Fire covered over 7 square miles, the North Fork Fire was at 1,582 acres, and the week-old Sandy Fire had already blown up to over 10,000 acres. By August 4th, the Monumental Fire covered 12 square miles, the North Fork Fire had grown to 4,186 acres.

As early as August 1st, both Oplinger's and Pincha-Tully's Teams had taken note of the potential threat that the North Fork Fire posed to the Cascade Complex ICP. A Draft camp evacuation plan was developed for the ICP, and firecamp contractors with shower and catering trailers were being asked to consider mobilizing drivers in case the camp needed to be moved. The general feeling at this time, though, was that prevailing winds would carry the North Fork fire to the Northeast, bypassing the ICP. As days went by and the North Fork Fire began to blow up, Rocky Oplinger's Team sent a field observer over to take a look at what was happening there. Pincha-Tully's Team took offense at this action, feeling that their toes were being stepped on. Heated phone calls between the ICs may or may not have improved communication between these two Teams.

Cascade ICP - 8-7-2007

By the end of Oplinger's Team's two-week assignment on the Cascade Complex (8/8), the fires had burned over 69,000 acres, and the Area Command Team in Cascade made the decision to add the North Fork Fire (now over 7,000 acres) to the Cascade Complex, and to split the two Easternmost fires in the complex (Sandy and Riordan) into their own Complex - the Landmark Complex, which was to be managed by Tom Suwyn's Type II Team.

Splitting the Cascade Complex in two pieces meant that Paul Broyle's Incoming Type I Team had to inbrief with two separate outgoing Teams, and also had to coordinate with Tom Suwyn's Team to reassign/split resources from two Complexes into three. It goes without saying that this period of time (8/5 thru 8/8) redefined the term clusterf*&k -- at a time when the fires continued to blow up daily. Also, Joe Ribar's Area Command Team transitioned with James Loach's Team between 8/7 and 8/9. As the IMT transition finished its third day, the North Fork Fire crested the last ridge between it and the Knox Ranch ICP, and the biggest mob of blue-polo-shirted Overhead folks ever seen by this firefighter faced a wild sunset: a smoked-salmon disk sliding across ridgeline sillhouettes of torching Subalpine Fir.

Regardless of whether anyone in the Knox Ranch ICP got hurt in the fire, many people were placed in harm's way fighting fires that we all knew were going to burn "until the snows fly." While the North Fork Fire was threatening the Knox Ranch, Tom Suwyn's Type II Team was forced to relocate their Landmark Complex ICP twice within a week, as first the Monumental, and then the North Fork Fires threatened their camps. Both of these moves involved hundreds of people and long convoys of support vehicles (crew buses, porta-potties, personal rigs, clerical, catering, and shower trailers) moving across over 20 miles of washboarded, narrow, dust-spewing backcountry dirt road.

Crashed garbage truck burned by wildfire.

When Suwyn's Team moved out of their second camp -- at Cox Ranch, in the Johnson Creek drainage -- the convoy drove over Warm Lake Summit thru an area that had experienced thousands of acres of crown fire the day before, had not yet been 'snagged' (hazard trees felled), and was still actively burning. At this point, this was the only road leading out of the area -- the other egress had been closed by the Loon/Zena Fire's advance. The day before this second move, a skateboard-sized piece of bark launched by explosive growth on the North Fork Fire (over ten miles upwind) fell from the sky onto the firecamp! Smoke from this blowup drifted across the entire continent, and out over the Atlantic Ocean.

Smoke from Central Idaho Fires on 8/12/07

Map of Monumental and North Fork Fires - the Convoy passed right thru the middle of these two fires.

So, "Where The Heck Is Yellowpine, and why am I risking my ass to save it?"

The first "Yellowpine" post asked why were we fighting backcountry fires that were clearly beyond human control. That post leads directly to this one: if it were not for the presence of a few cabins (one owned by a Senator), or private ranches in this area, it would likely be "Fire Use" ground -- where lightning fires are allowed to burn naturally as they have done so since the dawn of time. Hundreds of firefighters and support personnel were placed out in front of wildfires that were running as much as seven miles a day in order to do some politically-motivated structure protection, and to try to hold onto the heel of huge fires that were heading for the wilderness. Idaho's Salmon River Watershed is Fire Country. The land needs fire, and any fires that we suppress there only delay the next big one -- and everyone knows this.

I applaud the decision to quit trying to contain and attempt perimeter control of these fires, and to concentrate instead on 'point-protection' of a few historic cabins, old guard stations, or pack-bridges. My biggest hope is that we can learn to make these sorts of calls earlier in the game -- not after the fires have kicked our asses around the woods for five weeks. Why did it take so long for the order to come to disengage from 'confine and control' tactics?

The firefighters on the Cascade Complex have had excellent leadership in their camps, but have been let down by those at higher levels. Jerking hundreds of people around (including Overhead, camp crews, cooks, and garbage haulers) in front of running crownfires is unacceptable. Wildland firefighters deserve a clearer mission.

- fire hobo

Reflections on the SoCal Fire Siege of '07

2007-11-19T10:37:00.000-08:00

by Mike

Prologue

In late October of this year, the Santa Anna winds began to howl through the mountain passes around San Diego, and along with the wind came the long-predicted wildfires. I try to resist calling it a “natural disaster.” Since the wildfires were the work of arsonists, snapped power lines, and the archetypical child playing with matches, the fires were hardly natural. And without the unwise housing development and overpopulation down there, the fires would not have been a disaster.

My story is not one of the half-million refugees who hastily packed (if they were lucky), fled their homes, and stayed in the unfamiliar environments of distant friends and family, the Oceanside Wal-Mart parking lot, or evacuation centers like Qualcom Stadium. My story is only one out of the ten thousand firefighters who were mobilized for this epic event. Though many brothers and sisters in the Fire Service were genuine heroes in those initial hectic days before the wind subsided, I was not a "hero." But my experience as a wildland firefighter on the SoCal Fire Siege of '07 did rekindle in me a sense of duty and honor to serve, and for that reason it is worth telling.

To begin this story in the proper context, I have to go back to the beginning of this fire season. Once again, in what seems to be happening with greater frequency, a drought in Southern California at the beginning of the summer marched relentlessly northward up into the Northern Rockies where over 3 million acres burned in Idaho this season, more than during the Big Blowup of 1910. Earlier this spring, a half million acres burned in a “fifty-year event” in the Southeast, with the Okeefenokee Swamp as its epicenter. Atlanta’s water supply remains threatened by continuing drought in that region, and large wildfires have ignited again in the Southeast.

The Southern Sierra was also showing record low fuel moistures early in the season, and parallels with past catastrophic fire seasons were frequent fare for shop talk among fire crews. Early in the season, large fires like the Angora Fire near Lake Tahoe showed alarming fire behavior. Managers were so wound uptight that an excellent candidate for wildland fire use was suppressed after it grew to three hundred acres in early September, based on fear that the fire would grow to thousands of acres before its season-ending event.

By October, Yosemite had received two to three shots of precipitation of less than one inch each, and the days had shortened. The aspen trees were showing their fall colors as firefighters completed a prescribed fire project of nearly 900 acres adjacent to the community of Yosemite West. As usual, complaints were received about the smoke, especially one day when some smoke moved towards the polluted San Joaquin Valley. Though we have the same objective of improving community fire protection as those firefighters putting out wildfires, our prescribed fire lighters get far less praise and much more nuisance complaints about smoke and negative reactions by those whose sense of aesthetics is offended by black trees. Air quality managers were urging us to end our prescribed fire quickly as they feared the east winds forecasted for southern California would blow Yosemite’s residual smoke down into the San Joaquin Valley. Fortunately, the prescribed burn was finished on a Friday and placed in patrol status. The Santa Ana winds began to blow in San Diego the very next day.

Caption: Aspen showing fall colors in Elevenmile Meadow in Yosemite National Park after prescribed fire is completed.

The Firestorm

Resource orders began to stream into Yosemite’s dispatch center as fires burned wildly out of control around the San Diego area. It looked like 2003 all over again. Overall, Yosemite would send over forty firefighters out individually in overhead assignments, as part of a twenty-person handcrew, and to staff the Park’s helicopter, fire engine, and even the Park dozer. I waited until all the other Park crews had been assigned before I took a Division Group Supervisor assignment on the Rice Canyon Fire. I didn’t leave until Wednesday morning, after the winds had subsided and things began to move towards mop-up and overhaul. Yosemite did have another Division Group Supervisor who spent a hectic night on a twelve mile long division where homes were lost in the howling wind. That experience should prove very valuable as the inexorable march of new housing development into flammable wildlands continues throughout the Sierras. I heard another story about the wind being so fierce that it was hard to open one’s vehicle door, then upon opening it, embers would come flying in and ignite any important papers that might be lying around, like shift plans, fire maps, etc. Scary stuff, to be sure!

My first eerie experience was driving into the completely deserted town of Fallbrook, California. This is a mid-sized bedroom community on the eastern edge of Camp Pendelton. It was odd seeing an American city empty except for firefighters, police, and Marines patrolling in Humvees. As I began to get oriented to the area I was assigned, I was shocked that many folks in the area seemed to have more money than common sense, with homes built on knobs and in draws that just defied logic. How one could live in such a place, and not expect to have it reduced to ashes is beyond me!

Caption: This homesite in the foreground and the homesite on the knoll in the background were located in a natural pathway for wildfire and were totally destroyed by the flames.

I was also shocked at the amount of damage to the avocado crop. Unlike the citrus plantations, the avocado groves were not very effective as fuel breaks because there were many places where deep, dry avocado litter carried the fire well under the extremely windy conditions. The 60 to 80 mph Santa Ana winds blew all of the ripe avocados to the ground where they were ground into guacamole by fire truck tires. It was very sad to see so much wasted produce!

Also, my Division was a favorite spot for press photo opportunities, especially the Valley Oaks mobile home park. The tightly packed mobile homes were too close together, and over a hundred mobile homes—over half of all the homes in the trailer park--were completely destroyed by fire. A week after the fires began Governor Arnold Schwarzeneger showed up at the trailer park for a photo op. This was after most of the mainstream newsmedia coverage had initially focused on the burned mansions of Malibu.

Caption: A fire engine watches over destroyed mobile homes in the Valley Oaks trailer park.

Throughout my firefighting experience in SoCal, I was consistently struck by the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Most of the Valley Oaks residents probably didn’t have insurance and had few places to go, unlike the residents of muti-million dollar homes. The mansions will likely be rebuilt in the same spots, setting up the same split-second life-or-death decision for firefighters again, attempting to protect those structures for a future wildfire. Wealth certainly provides more options, like the utilization of proper fire-resistant homebuilding materials. Many homes built with stucco roofs and other less flammable components had fire race right up to and around the home with little impact.

Caption: This home built with fireproof construction materials survived the wildfire.

In Idaho this year we also saw for the first time what wealth can bring in the way of a high-end home insurance policy. I saw firsthand a piece of equipment, probably a truck with a compressed air foam system (CAFS) or some other gel-like application apparatus, roaming the streets of Fallbrook tending to their rich clients home. Like Blackwater in the military area, these resources are not linked in any way to the ongoing suppression operation’s organization, and probably have no way to communicate on the incident’s radio frequencies. Nonetheless, they are there, free to roam at will beyond the barricades that bar all others including local residents and journalists, looking out for their clients’ investments.

In another case of class inequity in feeling the fires’ heat, one can turn to the Witch Fire that devastated a Native American community around Rincon, California. As the Santa Anna winds swept the fire down off the hill, it was fueled by the junk and debris scattered between the poorly-built and highly flammable dwellings north and east of the sprawling Harrah’s casino. I’m not sure if the casino missed a spin of the wheel or roll of the dice for even one day while the wildfire was causing mayhem all around it. It must have been quite a sight up on the top floor of the casino sipping cocktails while watching the fire burn it’s way through the squalor below.

I did notice that the camp for many of the utility company trucks was located right next to the casino. Camp for the firefighters was prudently located much farther away, although I did notice some overhead from the CalFire team were staying at the hotel. I’m sure that since they were being paid 24 hours per day they did not partake in any gambling opportunities! The utility repair folks moved quickly back into the evacuated burned-over areas, patching powerlines and getting their product flowing again into consumers’ homes.

I listened intently to the morning talk show radio, and it was interesting to sort through the self-congratulatory tone of the politicians and fire chiefs, in contrast to the anger and frustration of those who could not get back through the barricades to assess their losses. I felt sorry for the cops at the roadblocks. They were harassed mercilessly. On thing I did pick up on was the unwillingness of the newsmedia to follow the money trail. It seems a foregone conclusion on sun- and money-drenched sunny Southern California that politicians will act in collusion with the developers, homebuilders, road-builders, and utility companies to continue putting homes and people in the pathway of wildfire. No looking back, is the motto. I seldom heard anyone spending much time blaming those that created this mess of humanity at the doorstep of one of the country’s most fire-prone landscapes.

Occasionally, you would hear a call for better zoning, but this was usually squelched in a land known for the loathing of taxes and regulatory restrictions. In fact, a bond had recently been voted down that would have increased firefighting staff in San Diego County. Now, of course, an increase in suppression resources will be the likely outcome of this event. The preferred solution to most folks living next to Camp Pendleton was “shock and awe.” Unlike Idaho’s experiment this summer with point protection, it looks like Southern California will maintain and reinforce its “fire as enemy” mentality, foolishly believing that with enough “heavy metal” aircraft, engines, firefighters, and equipment, the wildfire “beast” can be brought to its knees. That was the refrain heard on local talk radio time and again, rather than the need for more thoughtful housing development.

Caption: a fleet of "heavy metal" staged on the Poomacha Fire.

The remainder of my assignment was spent as a Field Observer on the Poomacha Fire atop Palomar Mountain. As the eyes and consul to another Division Group Supervisor, with no firefighters working directly beneath me, this couldn’t have been a better assignment. There I met up with a strike team of structural engines from Los Angeles and a mixed squad of engines and firefighters from the Prescott National Forest who had teamed up in the early days of this blaze to protect many homes on top of Palomar Mountain, and conducted a successful burnout around a church camp. There, with a small organization, two fire cultures worked together with their respective expertise to do the unheralded and unimaginable. Both groups will have many stories to tell their children.

At one point I was able to make it over to the Palomar Observatory, where somebody in their hasty evacuation had left the door wide open on their way out. I was able to roam around the interior of this fabled place along with some other firefighters while a bored contingent of Marine Engineers was cutting dozer line around the nicely-manicured grounds around the observatory. I wondered how much environmental compliance that would normally have required and if it was really necessary since the fire was five miles away and going out quickly.

Eventually, even the Poomacha Fire began to wind down. The pressure was on the CalFire team to get the fire contained before a Forest Service team was slated to take over at the end of the weekend, a date I had hoped would end my personal contribution to the SoCal Siege of ’07. However, my respite at the church camp atop Palomar Mountain was jarred for my last two days on the fire. Always eager to be of help, I kept making my way to the last open, unlined section of the fire. As it turned out, hotshot crews had refused to go cut fireline into some of these areas, much of which was inside a tiny wilderness area on the San Bernardino National Forest. Unwilling to be patient and watch as fuels burned down in a northeast-facing canyon with lot of unburned fuels and scabby burn, the last effort before I left was to saturate the area with inmate crews. Over a dozen strike teams were flown in on my last shift, digging line around innumerable fire fingers in sketchy steep terrain, all to put a black “Line Completed” mark on a map.

With the Poomacha Fire being one of the last few fires still uncontained, I can believe that the political pressure on fire managers to wrap it up must have been intense. None of that really justifies the unnecessary resource damage to wilderness, though. I was stunned the day before when an unnamed Branch Chief, for whom I was working, kicked a Type II mixed federal/contract crew off of the fire because, for safety’s sake, they demanded to scout the fire area more thoroughly, before sending in their crews. Inmate crews had been unable to get to this site before because their crew carriers could not get up the rough roads. The Branch Chief simply ordered helispots be built immediately adjacent to wilderness so that a massive helicopter troop shuttle could be orchestrated to bring in these crews, with no turn-down protocol. Fortunately, all of the many dozen flights went off safely as planned.

Caption: Looking south from the Poomacha Fire towards the Witch Fire.

All of this gives a policy wonk quite a bit to chew on with its stark contrasts to the shift in suppression strategy that occurred in the Northern Rockies this year (In a curious side note, a couple of subdivisions marketed as ‘shelter-in-place’ communities in the San Diego area, with strict building and fuel reduction codes, emerged largely unscathed from fires burning around them). An overwhelming response of firefighters and “heavy metal” remain the preferred strategy in SoCal. It is impractical to believe that much prescribed burning will ever be conducted near such a dense population center, and apparently housing development can’t or won’t be restricted, so be prepared for more mayhem in this part of the country.

I’m glad that our prescribed fire crews were able to get down to SoCal and help out. They deserve some of the same gushing appreciation for firefighters displayed in all the home-made banners and home-cooked cupcakes that were delivered to the Incident Command Posts. In the real world, the job of making communities fire-safe remains a job of proactively planning and prescribing fires to protect communities from wildfires remains a largely unseen and unheralded job without much outpouring of public support.

Given the insane housing development that is already planning to rebuild homes atop charred foundations and locate new homes in the very footprint of the recent wildfires, I'm sure that this prescribed burner will soon get another chance at firefighting heroics on the next SoCal conflagration.

--Mike

You can be a wildfire monitor!

2008-08-24T22:46:00.000-07:00

We're excited here at FUSEE about the release of our new Fire Watch: A Citizen's Guide to Wildfire Monitoring. This publication is full of great information to help you learn to become an effective wildfire monitor.

Wildfire management policies are changing dramatically. Appropriate Management Response (AMR), a new federal policy for wildfire management, is being tested this fire season. This policy allows fire managers to manage wildfires for both community protection and ecosystem restoration. Consequently, citizens need to become informed about these changes to assure wildfire will be managed effectively.

The guide is available right on the homepage . We hope you find it useful.

FUSEE Airs Out AMR Policy Debate at AFE Fire Conference

2008-02-08T10:55:00.000-08:00

The Association for Fire Ecology’s annual regional conference just concluded. It’s conference on “Fire in the Southwest: Integrating Fire into Management of Changing Ecosystems” brought together over 350 fire scientists, managers, and other interested persons to share the latest research findings and scientific knowledge of wildland fire. Over 125 oral presentations and 60 poster displays were offered, and Leon Neueschwander, emeritus professor from the University of Idaho’s excellent fire science program, was presented with AFE’s lifetime achievement award.

FUSEE members were out in force at the conference. We had our poster display and literature table strategically placed next to the bar where we recruited several new members and made lots of great new contacts. FUSEE’s executive director, Dr. Timothy Ingalsbee, gave an oral presentation on the concept of Appropriate Management Response. His talk was titled, “Begging the Question: Appropriate Management Response as a Toolbox vs. Tautology: Integrating Safety, Ethical, and Ecological Sideboards into AMR.”

Here is the abstract for his talk:

The Appropriate Management Response (AMR) to wildland fires is a core concept integral to implementing the Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy. AMR expands the strategic and tactical options for fire managers so they can choose from a full spectrum of potential actions--everything from aerial monitoring to aggressive suppression can be used to manage wildland fires. Moreover, all of these tactics can be combined on the same incident, and can change according to the time, place, and conditions of a fire. In short, any action taken on a wildland fire could be AMR.

The AMR concept provides managers with maximum flexibility and discretion, offering new opportunities to improve firefighter safety, control costs, and reduce the environmental impacts of traditional wildfire suppression responses. However, AMR as currently articulated suffers from a kind of circular reasoning: the AMR is any response that managers deem appropriate. As such, AMR could make tactical decision-making more complex for managers, and their actions less accountable to the public.

Much confusion about AMR currently exists within the fire management community: Is it an alternative, “kinder, gentler” form of fire suppression? Does it include or will it eliminate Wildland Fire Use? Does it require revising Forest Plans and Fire Management Plans? Is there no such a thing as an inappropriate management response? This paper will wade through some of the conceptual confusion over AMR, and advocate the need for rigorous pre-planning and predetermined “sideboards” to help ensure appropriately safe, ethical, ecological responses to wildland fire.

Immediately following his formal presentation a gap in the speaker schedule allowed a free-flowing 20 minute discussion among members of the audience. From this fascinating discussion, it seems clear that AMR policy is partly being driven from the “top-down” by progressive policymakers working primarily at the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), and partly from the “bottom-up” by progressive managers working in regions like the Northern Rockies who have been applying innovative tactics in the field to manage the recent “megafires.” In the huge void between the progressive policymakers at the top and the managers in the field, there is plenty of confusion over the concept of AMR—not helped by contradictory and occasionally incorrect language about AMR coming from the Washington Office of the U.S. Forest Service.

Among many fascinating discussions we had with folks in the hallways at the AFE conference, we learned from informed sources that the AMR policy is going to be finalized and approved in a matter of weeks so that it is in place for the coming wildfire season in the West. We had originally believed that the policy would not come on-line until next year, after the next Administration has taken office, and after the integrated Wildland Fire Decision Support System (WFDSS) was in place.

Follow-up discussions with members of the AMR Task Group (a small group of folks working on the AMR policy—more on that later!) confirmed that the policy will be put in place very soon. Then, everything from the documentation forms (e.g. the ICS-209s) to agency Handbooks and Manuals to firefighter training curriculum will undergo changes to reflect the new policy. Some policies will be approved within the next few months (e.g. all wildland fires will receive the Appropriate Management Response), while other policies will be rolled out over the next three years (e.g. managing human-caused fires for resource benefits).

It seems clear that the new AMR policy will certainly be approved, although until the last day that the Bush Administration is in office one can never be clear or certain about much. The new AMR policy has the potential to revolutionize the way we think about and manage wildland fire—just as the letter and spirit of the Federal Wildland Fire Policy envisioned. The Bush Administration’s Orwellian “Implementation Strategy” in 2003 functioned as another Presidential “signing statement” that negated implementation of the Federal Wildland Fire Policy, and neutered the Fire Policy’s concept of AMR. This raises the question, why the sudden turnaround in the Administration’s attitude toward AMR?

From our best guess, it seems that the Bush Administration is supportive of the AMR concept because it conforms to their notion of the “Unitary Executive” whereby top officials can do just about any damn thing they want without any legal constraint, public disclosure, or public accountability. Indeed, managers in the field will have immense discretionary power, courtesy of the new AMR policy, to do great good or great harm to the land in the operational strategies and tactics they choose to make. Once the AMR policy is finalized on paper, the struggle will just begin over how it will be applied on-the-ground, and that is going to require a massive cultural change not only within the fire management community, but in society at large.

After much debate and ongoing discussion within FUSEE, we have decided to weigh in and support the emerging AMR policy based on our hopes rather than fears. We are confident that, at least among our members working in the field, they will be able to do great things managing fire to protect communities and restore ecosystems, and reduce the risks, costs, and impacts of traditional suppression actions. But the coming changes with AMR policy must be discussed and debated among the whole fire management community—as soon as possible. In order to foster this wider discussion and debate, FUSEE is creating a new category in the “Current Issues” section of our website where we will post documents and essays on AMR. Feel free to send us responses, documents, information, and your own personal stories to info@fusee.org

Our biggest impression from talking with folks at the AFE conference is that the “Change” mandate that is driving all the Presidential campaigns from both parties is also inspiring federal fire management workers. After seven long years of the Bush Administration’s regressive policies, suppression of scientists, and utter contempt for the federal workforce, you could feel a new hope rippling through the folks at the AFE conference. We're going to need some hope dealing with all the immense challenges facing fire managers as climate change, urban sprawl, invasive weeds, shrinking budgets and workforce combine to set conditions for the "perfect firestorm" in the years ahead.

--FUSEE

The loss of colleagues

2008-08-07T10:21:00.000-07:00

We are saddened by the deaths this fire season of our wildland firefighter colleagues. Already this has been a long fire season and there is still hard work for wildland firefighters to do.

Please note the article in the Washington Post about the August 6 helicopter crash. Of the people the helicopter carried, nine are missing and presumed dead and the other four are severely burned.

This tragedy – added to the recent losses of Fire Chief Daniel Packer and firefighters Andrew Palmer, John Hermo, Josh Speigel, and Robert Roland – brings the total deaths in California to 15 this fire season, according to the Washington Post. The count is rounded out by the civilian found in a burned-out house in Paradise, California.

A great website to visit is the Wildland Firefighter Foundation. This site's focus "is to help families of firefighters killed in the line of duty and to assist injured firefighters and their families." It also lists firefighters who have lost their lives since 2002.

Our hearts go out to the families who have lost their loved ones.

And to those of you out on the fires, be careful, and come home safe.

"And there is no end in sight."

2008-07-26T22:23:00.000-07:00

Kudos to the Los Angeles Times for its first installment today (July 26) of a five-part series about wildfire. This installment discusses the increasing severity of the big fires, the rising costs of fighting the fires, and the industry that has developed to support the firefighters on the fireline.

From the article:

"A century after the government declared war on wildfire, fire is gaining the upper hand. From the canyons of California to the forests of the Rocky Mountains and the grasslands of Texas, fires are growing bigger, fiercer and costlier to put out. And there is no end in sight."

We encourage you to follow this series through to the final article. Here's the link to the first article in the series. Should you miss a day, head to the FUSEE website and we will have links to the articles in the "Fire News" portion of our website (www.fusee.org).

Happy reading.

Let It Burn

2008-07-19T14:02:00.000-07:00

The continuing fires in California are causing wildfire policy makers to take a hard look at fire management. One of those policies is "let it burn." The Sacramento Bee had an interesting article on this management technique.

Parts from the article:

"Federal land managers in California are retooling their firefighting strategies to capture more of the public safety, economic and environmental benefits of letting wildfires run their natural course without overwhelming the public with smoke and destroying homes.

"That's a tough balancing act in the nation's most populous state, which already endures the smoggiest and grittiest air in the country. But in a select few remote national forests, parks and wilderness areas, ecologists say, the federal government has been weaning itself off Smokey Bear's admonitions with measurable success.

"'We didn't have any injuries. We didn't burn any houses, and we cleared out 15,000 acres of dense vegetation that hasn't seen fire in decades and, in some places, a century – and that's a good thing,' said Brent Skaggs, a U.S. Forest Service fire management officer who let nature take its course under close watch – and tricky weather – in the Clover fire that was recently contained in the Sequoia and Inyo national forests."

The Australians have a good idea for wildfire protection

2007-09-12T13:39:00.000-07:00

One thing I want to relay to the people of Yellow Pine is that fire fighters will never question the worth of a small community like Yellow Pine when push comes to shove and there is a need to protect it from wildfire. The safety of people is always the first priority for fire fighting efforts. That is built in the analysis every fire team must go through during all fire suppression and fire use efforts. While helping to manage a fire hundreds of miles away from my home, I, too, have felt what it is like to know that a fire was threatening my community (population 1100) and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do but relay to friends where my most treasured possessions were so they could evacuate.

What I feel concerned about and I think the residents of Yellow Pine and every other small community in this country should be concerned about is an issue reported in a recent article in the Idaho Statesman that talked about crews hired by private insurance companies to protect the homes of the rich. I think we must be vigilant to make sure that the push that I have seen in the last ten years to privatize government services does not translate into fire protection only for those with the deepest pockets.

The best answer is for communities like Yellow Pine all over the country to take their fire protection into their own hands by continuing to FIREWISE their communities. I spent a month in Australia last winter, helping Australian fire teams fight their fires. Their sense of community around the fire issue is incredible—they have well developed systems to help everyone and their property survive a wildfire. They are now the canaries in the coal mine because global climate change is hitting them in their already drought stricken country very hard. The huge and numerous fires they are experiencing are what we have to look forward to in America—and are already experiencing this summer.

The Australians have a viable system that shares equal responsibility for fire protection between the government and the communities. Many of the firefighters in the communities are volunteers. They have dozens of small, mobile fire trucks that anyone with an hour of training can operate. Homeowners collect water from metal roofs in holding tanks and keep water sources on their property to fight fires. They can quote to the millileter, how much rainfall will yield in their storage tanks from each storm. They have highly organized phone trees so that neighbors can keep track of neighbors during an emergency.

The Australian government encourages people to either make the decision early in a wildfire situation to leave their home or stay and fight (something I applaud the people in Yellow Pine for doing, despite the government’s evacuation orders, according to another Idaho Statesman article). But the Australian method is very calculated—they are not just making a heroic “last stand at the Alamo”—they have prepared their properties to withstand the onslaught of fire through thinning and good building practices and have viable plans for protecting their properties that they have developed before the inevitable fire approaches. The Australians call it “Sheltering in Place”. If you are interested--check out their website : http://www.cfa.vic.gov.au/residents/living/litb-workbook.htm.

The truth behind protecting people and communities from wildfire damage is complex—it requires a partnership between the communities and agencies responsible for fire management months before the inevitable fire strikes and firefighters respond. Why can’t we harness our strong sense of independence as Americans and rise to this challenge?

--Fireweed

Angora Fire: Burning Homes, Not Crownfire, Fueled an Urban Conflagration

2007-07-18T23:43:00.000-07:00

Within the next two weeks, the California State Fire Marshall will release a final Building Damage Assessment Report of the 3,100 acre Angora Fire located near Lake Tahoe. Initial newsmedia accounts stated that over 250 homes were destroyed. Nearly all of the damage or destruction to buildings occurred within the first few hours after the wildfire started as the wind-whipped blaze spread through the small community of Meyers, California. See the North Tree Fire website for an excellent Google Earth tour of the Angora Fire and spatial analysis of destroyed homes. A detailed description of the actual fire behavior of the Angora Fire, an analysis of the way that the fire spread through both residential areas and undeveloped wildlands, and the process by which individual structures were ignited and consumed by fire will hopefully be revealed in the Damage Assessment report.

While flames were still spreading and smoke was spewing during the first days of the wildfire, many claims were made in the press about the role that wildland vegetation, particularly trees, played in causing wildfire destruction of houses, and alternately, the role that Forest Service fuels reduction projects and fuelbreaks played in saving homes from wildfire destruction. Based on eyewitness accounts of folks who live in or have recently visited the Angora Fire area, the following is our assessment of the facts about the Angora Fire as we currently understand them:

Surface Fire, Not Crown Fire, Entered and Ignited the Residential Area

Contrary to prevailing beliefs that a tsunami-like towering inferno rolled across the community of Meyers, in actuality, the headfire (the fastest-spreading and hottest part of a wildfire’s flame front) initially bypassed the community. A shift in wind direction then enhanced the flanks of the wildfire perimeter to spread into the residential area. At the places where the wildfire moved from undeveloped wildlands into the developed neighborhoods, with little exception the wildfire was a surface fire, not a crown fire.

This point is worth repeating: the Angora Fire was burning on the ground surface, not the tree tops, when it entered the residential area. Pro-logging interests are currently using the Angora Fire to argue that the lack of logging around Lake Tahoe communities created hazardous fuel conditions that allowed a crownfire to destroy those homes. The reality is that burning homes ignited surrounding tree tops and adjacent homes. Although there were a few instances when the tree canopies did not ignite even though nearby homes had burned, there were no instances where burning canopies alone minus burning structures had ignited other homes.

Fuels Reduction Treatments Did Not Stop the Wildfire

Also contrary to prevailing beliefs that fuels reduction treatments stop wildfire spread, the Angora Fire spread through areas that the Forest Service had completed fuels reduction projects within the last six years--in some places, fuels treatments had been completed as recently as three months ago.

This point, too, cannot be overstated: where the Angora Fire entered into the residential area, the wildfire had spread through a fuels treatment unit. Fuels treatments alone do not stop wildfire spread or protect communities from home ignitions.

The bottom line is that there are numerous tradeoffs involved in constructing and maintaining fuels reduction treatments. Depending on the amount and kind of tree thinning conducted, fireline intensity and the risk of crownfire may decrease, but the rate of surface fire spread may actually increase. The rate of spread is a critical factor in determining the number of homes that are simultaneously exposed to flames and the ability of firefighters to construct containment lines. Simply reducing the amount of trees or shrubs alone does not guarantee better wildfire protection for adjacent communities.

Recent statements to the media have acknowledged that under extreme fire weather conditions, fire suppression has limited success even with fuels treatments. But fire suppression has successfully contained 97-99% of all wildfires during initial attack during the last decade regardless of fuel loads. The 1-3% of the wildfires that defy successful containment typically occur during severe fire weather or extreme fire behavior conditions, and it is under these conditions that most Wildland/Urban Interface fire disasters occur. Thus, if fuels reduction treatments do not benefit suppression efforts during these extreme conditions, then they cannot provide protection for vulnerable homes, as evidenced on the Angora Fire. There may be other social or ecological benefits to reducing fuels in forested wildlands, but protecting homes during severe fire weather or extreme fire behavior conditions is not one of them, and they ought not to be “sold” to the public as being designed for community wildfire protection.

Untreated Thinning Slash Does Not Make for a "Completed" Fuel Treatment

Forest Service officials were quick to claim that recently completed fuels treatments prevented the wildfire from entering the tree canopies, and spared as many as 500 more homes from wildfire destruction. However, regardless of the fire behavior within fuels reduction units, there is a lingering question as to whether or not slash treatments had been fully completed inside the units. The Forest Service annually reports to Congress on the number of acres it has completed fuels reduction, and counts as “acres treated” units where it conducts a tree thinning operation, and then can count those same “acres treated” again when it finally treats the thinning slash, normally a year or more after the initial tree cutting. Thus, for a given 40 acre unit, the agency can report 80 acres of fuels reduction treatments “completed” by adding the tree cutting and slash burning treatment acres together.

Within some of the fuel treatment sections located near residential areas there remained large unburned slash piles mountainously high. Logging slash in general poses extreme fuel hazards that can create high fire intensity and loft embers that can ignite spotfires ahead of the flame front. It is unknown at this time what role if any the untreated slashpiles inside fuels reduction areas may have played in the spread or severity of the Angora Fire. Trees inside the fuels reduction units have been severely scorched and have browned canopies even though the crowns were not consumed. Heat generated from excessive surface fuels like logging slash is sometimes sufficient to kill large trees by "heat girdling" their trunks, baking their roots, or convectional heat cooking the canopy even though flames do not get anywhere near the tree tops.

A Wildland Fire Became an Urban Conflagration

Once the Angora Fire spread out of the fuels treatment units into the first line of houses along the outer edge of the residential area, it rapidly transitioned from a wildland fire to an urban conflagration. The residential portion of the Angora Fire spread as a chain reaction of burning homes igniting adjacent homes. The intense, prolonged heat output from flaming structures sent a sustained flow of radiant heat and burning embers that ignited vegetation and other homes located downwind. This intense heat output enhanced firebrand ignitions of homes and surrounding vegetation across paved streets that progressed downwind igniting houses from block to block.

The first homes to burn occurred barely one hour after the wildfire was first detected, but once this first line of homes ignited, the fire dramatically increased intensity so that many homes were simultaneously set aflame within a short time. Tragically, it appears that even homes that had prepared for wildfire by having flame-resistant roofs and defensible space were consumed by the flames spread from homes that had not taken these steps.

Observing the effects of the Angora Fire, it appears that the residential fire dynamics operated almost independently of the fire burning through the undeveloped wildland areas. While it is true that vegetation was much denser in the residential area than in the surrounding wildland, the principal fuel causing extreme fire intensities were burning structures rather than vegetation, although both fuel types were involved in the conflagration. There were hundreds of undeveloped lots interspersed within homes but the wildfire did not move through these densely-vegetated lots with the same intensity as it did through highly-developed residential areas. And again, in many cases burning homes ignited surrounding tree canopies, but in no case did crownfire without structural fire ignite homes. The final Damage Assessment report will hopefully provide more details on the actual fire behavior and effects of the Angora Fire.

Preventing Future Wildfire Disasters Means Reducing Home Ignitability

For policymakers trying to make sense of the Angora Fire and take steps to prevent similar future disasters, there are a number of important lessons to be learned. First, it is time to stop speaking in vague generalities about the spatially amorphous “Wildland/Urban Interface Zone,” and instead, focus attention on what Forest Service fire researcher Jack Cohen calls the Home Ignition Zone. Too often, when policymakers speak about the Wildland/Urban Interface Zone, they focus on the (publicly-owned) wildland part and tend to ignore the (privately-owned) urban portion of the problem. Management actions to reduce home losses to wildfire must be centered on reducing fuel hazards in the home ignition zone, an area 200 feet or less in radius around structures. Vegetation growing within developed suburban areas should not be considered “wildland” but rather residential vegetation, and it is the residential vegetation located within the home ignition zone that matters most in terms of reducing hazard potential. Where home ignition zones overlap, community cooperation will be necessary to reduce everyone’s vulnerability to igntion.

Second, it is time to stop thinking about creating defensible space around homes as a responsibility solely of individual homeowners. Instead, this is rightfully a social problem and a community-wide responsibility. Rugged individualism is not a viable strategy for protecting one’s home that is most threatened by ignitions coming from a neighbor’s property. Not everyone who lives in rural America has the wealth or legal or physical ability to deal with fuel hazards of their homes. There are lots of impoverished people, renters who do not own the homes they live in, and elderly or infirmed people who cannot do the necessary work themselves. In these cases, it is appropriate for governments and communities to facilitate hazard reduction work on these properties. A socially progressive policy to reduce home losses to wildfire would devise a set of grants, low-interest loans, and free labor sources like Americorps to get the work done for people who need assistance.

Ultimately, though, it is time for our aesthetic sensibilities to adapt to the fire-prone environments we live in. It is time for homes to be located, designed, built, and maintained so that they can survive the spread of wildland fires with minimal or no need for human intervention. Wildland fires are inevitable; consequently, wildfires during extreme fire behavior conditions are inevitable as well. The current strategy of protecting homes through attempts to prevent and/or suppress wildfires is simply not a viable strategy, especially given the fact that most ecosystems in North America are adapted to or dependent upon recurring fires to maintain their ecological integrity and biological diversity. Added to this is the fact that global warming and climate change will likely increase the frequency of large-scale high-intensity wildland fires that will simply overwhelm the capacity of the fire services to successfully fight every wildfire.

The FUSEE vision is to recreate fire-compatible communities capable of living safely and sustainably within fire-permeable landscapes and fire-adapted ecosystems. May the Angora Fire provide us all with a teachable moment to change public policies and personal lifestyles needed to move toward that vision.

--FUSEE Staff

New Strategy for Suppression Siege in Idaho's Fire Country

2007-08-19T23:33:00.000-07:00

The East Zone Fire Complex, Cascade Fire Complex, and other large wildfires in Idaho continue to grow unabated despite the efforts of thousands of wildland firefighters and millions of dollars in attempted suppression. These fires are burning in Idaho’s Fire Country: steep, rugged mountainous terrain thick with fire-dependent vegetation where wildland fire rightfully plays its natural role as the “keystone” ecosystem process. In an implicit statement of humility in the face of an awesome display of Nature’s power, fire managers have created a new strategy that essentially ends the long siege in the forests, and wisely implements protective actions at selective sites where human structures and infrastructure are threatened.

The Idaho Fires are becoming a landscape-scale phenomenon, with the rate, intensity, and scale of fire spread apparently taking fire managers by surprise. A case in point: the Incident Command Post (i.e. “Fire Camp”) for the Cascade Fire Complex was entrapped and nearly burned over last week. Instead of relocating fire camp--a time-consuming and expensive operation to move a convoy of vehicles and reconstruct a mini-city in a new location, not without its own hazards driving in smoky conditions--fire managers opted for a “stay in place” strategy. Their decision was finalized when the wildfire burned across all roads leading out of the Fire Camp and cut off all escape routes.

Firefighters rigged up sprinklers on the perimeter of the meadow that served as Fire Camp. Non-firefighting camp support personnel were herded to the center of the meadow where they huddled together with their backs to the smoke and flames. Helicopters dumped water on the headfire as it hit the perimeter of the meadow, but the fire sent waves of ember-filled smoke into Fire Camp, sparking over a hundred spotfires. Folks scrambled to stomp out the spotfires as best they could, nevertheless, a yurt, some tents, portapotties, and an historic cabin were all ignited and destroyed by flames.

The stay-in-place strategy worked in that no one was immediately injured by the wildfire and suppression operations continued on the rest of the fire despite the drama in fire camp, and given the circumstances this probably was the best option in terms of firefighter safety. However, a more questionable call was the decision by fire managers to remain in the burned site surrounded by charred, smoking trees, with a thousand-foot smoke layer hovering above it during every morning’s air inversion. The result: smoke inhalation has sickened most camp personnel with various forms of bronchitis, and a pall of depression has affected morale in the camp. Forest Service officials are spinning the incident by calling it a "burn-by" instead of a burnover, but it still was an entrapment by any other name.

From a cursory look at fire maps it looks like several fires, especially the East Zone Complex and Rattlesnake Fires, will soon merge together, perhaps eventually merging with the Cascade Complex. Comparing the perimeters of current fires and old fires that burned in the area over the last six years (these maps are available on the GeoMac website), today’s Idaho Fires are simply filling in the unburned gaps between these past fires. In most cases, the old burns are serving as the boundaries to check the spread and confine the new fires, but in some cases even these old wildfire areas are reburning. So, the Idaho Fires are doing exactly what Mother Nature intended to happen, burning the areas that could have, would have, should have burned before had we not foolishly attempted to exclude and suppress wildland fires burning in Idaho’s Fire Country.

Upwards of $50 million have been spent attempting to suppress the Idaho Fires, most of it in futility. Firefighters were able to secure the heel of fires, tinker around and burn out the flanks, and keep well out of the way of the headfires, but these fires continually spot over firelines and spread unabated. Recognizing that mortal human beings are not able to stop the spread of these large wildfires given the weather, fuel, and terrain conditions, fire managers are no longer attempting initial attack on new fires ignited in the land between the existing large fires. The thinking is that initial attack efforts will be unsuccessful and extremely unsafe given prevailing weather conditions, but even if firefighters were able to contain the new fires, these would eventually be engulfed and absorbed into the growing perimeters of the large fires. Fire managers are thus wisely opting not to attack new fire starts in the “free fire zones” between the existing large fires.

Fire managers have now prepared a “Super WFSA” (Wildland Fire Situation Analysis, pronounced “woof-suh”). The WFSA is the guiding strategic plan for fighting wildfires, and normally every single large wildfire gets its own WFSA, but these are not “normal” times. The new Super WFSA creates a single, uniform strategy for managing all of the wildfires on the Boise, Payette, and Salmon-Challis National Forests. This makes sense, since these fires are bound to merge together by the end of this fire season if the weather conditions do not change.

This new plan will cease most attempts to assert “perimeter control” (the attempt to completely encircle a wildfire with a fire containment line), and instead, shifts to a strategy of “point protection” (placing firefighters and equipment at specific sites, such as rural communities, where suppression actions are both necessary and more likely to succeed). As the experience with the Cascade Complex Fire Camp entrapment demonstrated, firefighters are able to focus their efforts and successfully protect a specific place--even from a raging headfire--while letting the wildfire burn around them and keep moving on unabated.

According to the WFSA, fire managers estimate that the eventual size of the Idaho Fires will reach 2,000,000 acres, and under a worst-case weather scenario could grow as large as 5,000,000 acres. The total costs of “suppressing” these fires will be a minimum of $120,000,000 and could be as high as $205,000,000, making this the most expensive wildfire suppression incident in world history! What exactly American taxpayers will get from that huge expense of money is hard to say.

Many of the large fires are burning towards the the Frank Church/River of No Return Wilderness Area that could use some fire for ecological benefits, which makes the new strategy of point protection both economically and ecologically rational since there’s not too many places in the wilderness that need protection from wildland fire. Instead, firefighters will be staged at the few isolated cabins, historic sites, and small rural communities that inhabit this remote region. Firefighters will be covering cabins with shelter-wrap (a kind of tin-foil blanket that resists flames), coating power poles with flame retardant gel, pruning and thinning brush around structures, and other simple but effective protective actions to prevent human-built structures from igniting.

Given the kind of extreme fire behavior that has been happening to date, and the fact that many rural communities in Idaho are sorely unprepared for wildfires and most homes have no defensible space, these new firefighting assignments will still be challenging, to put it mildly. Apparently, most protective actions will be applied to government-owned properties only. It is not clear yet what kinds of actions will be applied to private properties.

Rural Idaho contains small communities and isolated homes of both poor folk and the ultra rich. Defending communities is one thing, but assignments to protect upscale trophy cabins and hobby ranches are not what most wildland firefighters imagined they would be doing when they enlisted. These properties are the vacation and retirement homes largely owned by corporate elites who make more money in a single day's worth of their Bush tax cuts than the typical ground-pounding firefighter makes in a whole season of hard labor. Firefighters will need to keep wildfire from igniting these isolated properties of Idaho's rural rich and poor because when that stuff burns it’s bound to be a toxic smoke that fills the air.

Its stereotypical but true: many rural Idaho residents are rightwing anti-environmentalist/anti-government types who would much rather be left alone—until a wildfire ignites and then they expect Uncle Sam’s firefighting army to come to their rescue. Some firefighters are starting to question why they are risking their health and safety for the likes of people who may scribble “Thank You Firefighters” on a piece of cardboard but do little to defend their own properties or make firefighters’ jobs easier, and in many cases, make their jobs much more dangerous.

Idaho’s Fire Country is a natural location for implementing Wildland Fire Use, a safer, cheaper, more environmentally sound way to manage wildland fires burning in remote regions with fire-adapted ecosystems. This is not the same thing as "Let Burn," but instead, firefighters can apply management actions that can steer fires into areas that need fire for ecological benefits, while slowing and stopping the fires from spreading into vulnerable human communities. Managing wildland fires is much safer and smarter and more successful than making "war" on wildfire. So far, no one has been killed on the Idaho Fires, but there are thousands of firefighters toiling away under similar conditions on other fires all over the West. This begs the question: why we are putting people in danger to fight Nature under extreme conditions and at such huge expense in an utterly futile attempt to stop a natural process? Let’s hope that this year marks the last time firefighters are forced to pay the price and taxpayers foot the bill for futile suppression siege spectacles in Idaho’s Fire Country.

--Lookout Lex and the Fire Hobo

Idaho Burning, Pt. 2

2007-08-08T00:14:00.000-07:00

In mid-July a dense band of lightning, ahead of monsoonal moisture flowing up from the southwest, lit up Northern Nevada and Southern Idaho, sparking huge blazes in the cheatgrass and precious little remaining sagebrush. That same lightning extended into the mountains of “the Frank,” as the insiders call it. I headed for Idaho to assist in the management of four fires in and around the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness on July 15th. Passing through Reno, the Reno-Gazette-Journal headlines blared “Wildfire Alarm: 185,000 acres burned during the past two weeks.” In the article we read,

firefighters worry that the financial impact on local governments is only going to grow, as the federal government, battling budget issues of its own, cuts resources or passes more costs to local jurisdictions.

Our 1st shift was Monday, the 16th, and the National Preparedness Level (PL) was already at four, just shy of the top level. Idaho had a fair snowpack early in the winter, but virtually no spring rains, leaving them in a region of rapidly expanding drought. On July 19th the National Preparedness Level rose to five, where it has remained for weeks, now, as firefighting resources remain stretched thin. Going to PL 5 elicited the "Moses Memo" from land management agency heads to "let their people go" from their day jobs to fill various unique roles as their red cards allow. Meanwhile, back in California, on July 20th, Gov. Schwarzenegger proclaimed a state of emergency for Riverside County, citing the county's extreme drought conditions. The next day questions and accusations were being flung in a public meeting in Burns, Oregon, about a recent large rangeland fire in that state. The Burns Time Herald reported intense questioning by local ranchers.

Lee Wilson, one of the ranchers from Riley whose private and public grazing land was burned, asked the fire officials, "Why didn't you act on the initial strikes? Now we're talking about millions of dollars. The BLM showed up when it got hot, and we were told all the equipment was tied up."

Wilson pointed out that there were crews near one of the strikes on Bald Butte, but they were unwilling to fight the fire without direct orders. Wilson's point was echoed by other landowners. Rancher Betty Morgan said, "When the fires started, the fire crews were forewarned in the evening. They had to wait for a briefing at 9 the next morning before doing anything."

In response to what the landowners called bad policies and indecisions, Incident Commander Jeff Pendleton said, "There were more fires than resources."
Congressman Walden remarked that because incident commanders have, in the past, been held personally liable for loss of life, fear of future lawsuits is another obstacle to jump in fire suppression.

A letter to the editor in the same edition summed up the attitude of those unable to see past their own short human lifespan.

I will not see the forest come back to what it was in my lifetime. No, let's not overcut or overgraze our lands, let's just burn them into the dirt.

OK, so there's not a lot of nuanced thinking going on there. The thinking being, heck, back when we were raping the landscape fires didn't get so big, so it must have been the "active management" that kept things so wonderful. It's a lot like claiming success in the War on Terror, because you haven't had any attacks. Well, many lawmakers in Idaho think this is just what their whacko anti-environmentalist friends want to hear.

By July 23rd, five counties in Idaho were declared to be in a state of emergency. The next day Larry Craig, the Senator from Idaho, lost it on the Senate floor. First, he waxed poetic about the old full-suppression policy that allowed the build-up of natural fuels, going a step further by claiming it was actually the logging that kept the forests clear of fuel.

Almost 100 years ago, the Forest Service started something. They started with a commitment and a philosophy to full fire suppression. Now I take you to a little bit of history as to what may be producing the very dramatic fire season we experienced last year and the year before, and we are now experiencing today. During that time, the Forest Service's aim was to extinguish every fire, man-made or lightning caused. With the exception of the last 15 years, the timber industry, on our public lands, enjoyed booming success during the same period. So while Mother Nature was not allowed to burn the forest, man was allowed to come in over the last 100 years and thin and clean. We called it logging. That produced the timber for the home and building industries. As a result, it is arguable that wildfires were kept somewhat under control. Not only did we put the fires out, but we were taking the fuels off the land.

Then he went on to blame, who else, but Bill Clinton.

In the 1990s, during the Clinton years, as a result of the impact of a variety of public policies, from the Endangered Species Act to the New Forest Management Act to the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, and a lot of other combinations, we began to progressively reduce the overall cut of timber on public lands. In the 8 years of Bill Clinton, we reduced the allowable cut.

Going on to make a great case for global warming, Craig says,

So in part, the West is burning today because of public policy, because of attitude, not because of Mother Nature. Mother Nature has ebbed and flowed over time. But when Mother Nature is taken out of balance by man's practices and policies, dramatic results can occur.

That’s for sure, Larry! The specific policy and attitude that has most taken “Mother Nature” out of balance is the hubris of believing that we can burn fossil fuels to our heart's content. I’m not sure what Larry knows about the “ebb and flow” of nature, but he’s right in concluding,

The fires that are burning in the West today are not natural. They are hotter, they are more intense, they are more destructive than any forest fires we have seen in our forests literally within a century.

Hello!? They’re made hotter and more intense by a hotter, drier climate and an influx of non-native plants, especially cheat grass, making fires more frequent. Incredibly, Craig wants to take issue with those who are trying to put fire back on the landscape, where it can work to lessen the impacts of subsequent fires. He asserts

There is an alternative besides simply locking it up and letting it burn. Yes, the skies of Idaho and the Great Basin West are full of smoke at this moment. That smoke is our natural resources going up in smoke, literally.... somehow there are those who are willing to ignore it only in the reality that it is nature and uncontrollable. I would argue that is not true because 30 years ago we did not have these kinds of fires, and 20 years ago we did not have them, even though we had peaks of drought and dryness and heat.

Craig was on fire, so to speak, as he lamented that all the resources of Idaho were “disappearing in a ball of fire, and it should not be that way.” He missed the point, however, regarding climate change. Craig and the other wise-use wheeze-bags are still into that - man’s dominion over nature - thing, believing that if we had enough 747 air tankers and clearcuts, we could get a handle on all fires, in a time when the climate is creating greater flammability. Too late, Larry, the cat’s out of the bag! With the coming climate, things once considered rare, like floods and fires, will happen with increasing frequency, specifically because of poor energy policy that rewarded the use and exploitation of fossil fuels. Craig ignores the fact that many of the acres contributing smoke to the Idaho air come from fires inside the Frank Church Wilderness. Did the good Senator believe that the time had come to begin building roads into wilderness and roadless areas? Is the public supportive of that?

Give me a shovel, give me the tools, give me a better environment--a managed environment, if you will--and I can fight a wildfire. Do not allow Federal judges to be land managers.

Uh huh. We’ll be lookin’ for you out on the line, Larry. Or maybe you can just have Gonzo fire the offensive judges that support legal intervention by environmentalists. He seems to be able to operate with relative impunity from the pesky interference of Congress. Well, not everyone agrees that a managed environment is always better than an unmanaged one, but you get the point. This whole act before Senate served as a signal to everyone in the logging and ranching community to engage in name calling and the inevitable blame game of hostile locals towards federal land management regulation, like the landowners in Tahoe, at the recent Angora Fire.

The local McCall Star News on July 26th recounted the horror of landowners who lost homes during the Raines Fire. That was in a tiny enclave, in a remote and inaccessible site inside the Frank. Another tiny town, Secesh, was threatened, along with its residents, many of whom were known to be hostile to local authorities.

“We’re rebels, but we aren’t thieves,” said Karin Becker of Lake Fork, who has owned property in Secesh for 32 years.
Becker said she’s not terribly fond of the federal government but recognizes the hard work and dedication of the fire crews.

Vern Peterson, a 20-year full-time Secesh resident, said he is frustrated with the Forest Service over the management of local lands.
“As thick as the forest is, the Forest Service knows that if they don’t defuel it, we’re going to continue to have this problem,” said Peterson, a retired logger.

How, exactly, does one "defuel" the forest without the use of fire in remote, roadless areas? Sadly, the value of wild nature is lost to many, with only extracted resources being the measuring stick for a place's worth. The debate raged on for days in the Idaho Statesman, as their readers struggled to understand why you can't just control fires by throwing more equipment and young lives at them. The Statesman gave politicians a platform to pander unscientific conjecture to their emotionally aroused constituency.

July 27 -- Fire puts ranchers into an economic, emotional taiilspin

July 28 -- Fire officials: Let it burn

July 30 -- Global warming forces Forest Service to reconsider fire strategies

July 31 -- Idaho politicians blast federal fire management

By this time both Idaho Senators, Crapo and Craig, and Governor Butch Otter were in full accusatory mode, blaming the Endangered Species Act, insufficient grazing, and rules preventing unsupervised and untrained locals with dozers from having a go at the fires.

Calling rules regulating firefighting "the Don't Book," Otter said relaxed rules could have allowed crews to stop the fire much sooner, though he offered no specifics.

The Editorial Staff at the Statesman finally got it right on August 1st, when they concluded:

Timeout on the blame game. Time for tough reality.

• We're in the heart of another long, unrelenting and frightening fire season. This summer could match 2000, Idaho's worst fire season in recent history. The fall's first snowstorm is weeks away.

• The long term offers little relief as well. Global warming threatens to bring the West more of what we're seeing this year: More drought, more parched range and forest, more searing summer weather.

• Climate change corresponds with a long-overdue attitudinal change to firefighting. The feds are abandoning their decades-old practice of trying to suppress all fires as quickly as possible. This approach strains limited resources, puts firefighters at unneeded risk — and has left public lands choked with trees and underbrush and vulnerable to catastrophic fire, such as the Murphy Complex Fire. The feds need to change their ways, but in the meantime, millions of acres remain at risk.

Severe fire seasons? Get used to it.

During rush hour on August 1st, a primary bridge between Minneapolis and St. Paul, the “Twin Cities,” crashed to the ground with dozens of cars dropping off the collapsed roadway into the river below. Emergency rescue workers braved dangerous conditions to search for survivors amongst the wreckage. No matter how conservative, when disaster strikes, many believe that someone should step forward in an official capacity. How can one possibly expect for any kind of emergency service when we allow the government to be run by those who say they hate government. Naturally, if you let these folks play with it, they will break it, likely out of spite, just to prove their point. Or, like Bremer and the immediate post-invasion Iraq management, through outright negligence and ignorance. How many Katrinas and other natural disasters associated with the onset of dramatic climate change will it take for us to set our national priorities straight?

On August 17th, the Idaho Statesman headline in the Nation/World section read “U.S Generals: 2nd surge an option.” Throughout the time I was in Idaho assisting with the management of their fires, I routinely read Letters to the Editor from Republicans weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth about the need to finish the mission in Iraq so our deaths to date would not be in vain. One even suggested that

the president must pull our combat forces out of Baghdad, and pursue the unspoken goal of seizing and securing the oil reserves in western Iraq

I suppose filling up the ol' farm truck for a run into the Super Wal Mart is getting a wee bit pricey. Well, I guess we have our priorities. With the cost of the war in Iraq at $200 millon a day, the total annual cost of wildland firefighting in this era of increasingly costly mega-fires rarely exceeds $2 billion, a mere twenty days of business-as-usual in Iraq.

The Idaho Statesman continued its incendiary reporting on the wildfires yesterday by resurrecting the spectre of the Sagebrush Rebellion. Tomorrow they will tackle the issue of unprecedented fire behavior and the breakdown of many fire behavior models. Many of the tools to predict fire behavior depend on climatological statistics, which are meaningless in an era of unprecedented climate. It will grow increasingly obvious in the next few years that climate change is having a huge impact on wildfire extent and severity. Those fire behavior events, once thought to be "rare" are happening with an increasing frequency, often requiring a major recalibration of probabilities and fire behavior prognostication. All of the best models break down in the case of extreme, plume-dominated fire behavior. Firewhirls, mass area ignitions, and other disturbing anecdotal stories coming in from the fireline this year give veteran firefighters the chills. There will simply not be enough money, nor enough equipment to combat all fires in all places. Those who choose to live in fire prone areas will adapt or be burned out. This will be a slap to those delusional few, who still buy into human dominion over nature rap, but Mother Nature always bats last.

--dj greenfire

Senator Larry Craig Yells "Fire" in a Crowded Political Theatre

2007-07-25T23:57:00.000-07:00

I just read Senator Craig’s speech on the Senate floor July 24th, 2007. His speech was apparently emailed to every fire management employee of federal land management agencies, all without any substantive comments besides the word, “Interesting.”

I would like to remedy this lack of comment. I spent 10 years working for the US Forest Service. One of the reasons I left the US Forest Service was the constant pressure to lie within the NEPA process to say that timber sales had fewer and less deleterious effects than we, the various specialists working within the agency, knew that they had.

My job for ten years was providing analysis of the impacts of commercial logging on the forest fire environment within timber sale environmental documents. It was also my job to provide plans for cleaning up the copious amounts of vegetative debris or logging "slash" that timber sales create. I have a degree in forestry from Colorado State University, where I majored in fire management. I have fought fires, lit prescribed fires, and managed wildland fires for resource benefit for 30 years, including serving two years on an interagency hotshot firefighting crew. I have also been a US Forest Service District Assistant Fire Management Officer for two different National Forests in California.

Senator Craig stated that “[W]hile Mother Nature was not allowed to burn the forest, man was allowed to come in over the last 100 years and thin and clean.” Timber sales as practiced during this time did not "thin and clean." The largest trees were removed—the ones contributing the least to fire hazard in the forest. When loggers went into the woods, they would fell the large trees, cut the tops and limbs of the trees off (which were left on site), and then haul out the trunks of the trees. Incredible amounts of flammable logging debris were left behind.

Logging companies were supposed to pay for the elimination of this slash, either by mechanical piling and burning or broadcast burning. This was done very begrudgingly, with Forest Service timber managers always trying to minimize the amount of money that the loggers would have to pay to clean up the mess left by logging. Through underfunding and neglecting slash removal, coupled with the fast pace of logging, a huge backlog of timber sales could not be cleaned up. As a result, timber sales have greatly increased the fire hazard on our forests, not decreased them.

For years in the supposed heyday of timber sales, the customary way to “clean up” debris left from the loggers was to send in crews to merely use chainsaws to chop up larger debris so that the forest floor would be covered with slash "only" three feet deep. This was no way to effectively decrease fire hazard! Consequently, timber sales greatly added to the fire danger in the woods.

As an initial attack firefighter, I always tried to find out where the logging areas were located near a wildfire because I knew that fire behavior would intensify when the fire reached these cutover areas full of slash. Logging slash can whip up flames and send burning embers ahead of the main flame front to ignite spotfires, greatly adding to the hazards facing wildland firefighters.

To claim that historical logging has decreased fire hazards is a lie. Senator Craig is ignoring the fact that fire size has historically grown larger during the time of increased logging, not after it. Although commercial logging levels have recently declined in some areas, the legacy of past logging--the removal of large naturally fire-resistant trees, the slash, weeds, and young tree plantations covering old clearcuts--is affecting fire behavior today.

It seems to me that Senator Craig's logic of cutting down the forest in order to make enough money to save it from wildfire is kind of like the attitude that drove the American War in Vietnam: we have to destroy it to save it. I used to call it “My Lai forestry” when I worked for the Forest Service. It was and is patently absurd.

We see smoke in the valleys and mountains every summer because America is a fire-dependent continent. The very trees that Senator Craig champions cutting down depend on fire. I guess Senator Craig advocates converting the entire forest turned into a tree farm, where every square inch is planted by hand, and wildfire is kept away. He desires a return to the great heyday of logging that created huge clearcuts—swaths denuded of all living vegetation and planted with rows of nursery-grown trees. They were plantations, not forests. And as we are seeing today, young timber plantations are hardly "fireproof." On the contrary, they can burn with an unnatural ferocity and cause complete devastation.

Senator Craig asked that foresters, not judges, be allowed to be land managers. The foresters were running our forests like they were tree farms, according to economic principles that have little to do with providing ecological integrity but more to do with corporate profits. The foresters were cutting down public forests in violation of the nation's environmental protection laws, and that is why judges were forced to step in and stop the law-breaking by foresters.

Once the sign welcoming people to the Modoc National Forest was vandalized to read not “Land of many Uses” but “Land of Many Abuses”. That about summed up the “great heyday” of logging in our forests, which should belong to all of us, not just the logging companies that bid to use our natural resources.

I do agree with Senator Craig in one detail—the fires burning in the West today are hotter, more intense and more destructive. But the reason is not that we aren’t logging the forest, but because we have climate change and urban sprawl. People moving into fire-prone wildlands and building their homes out of flammable materials expect a Federal Fire Department to bear all of the costs of fire protection. Meanwhile, the planet's atmosphere is heating up from human-caused fossil fuel burning, and this is causing increased wildfire activity that is overwhelming the capacity of wildland firefighters to protect vulnerable rural homes.

Senator Craig said that 20 years ago we did not have the kinds of fires we have today—I guess he has forgotten about the Yellowstone Fires of 1988 and the West Coast Siege of 1987. Has he really forgotten about the Idaho fires of 1910, too? What about the Peshtigo Fire of the last century? The Peshtigo Fire was the deadliest wildfire in American history--it claimed the lives of over 1,500 people when wildfires were sparked in cutover lands covered by logging slash.

Senator Craig still subscribes to the old psychology that either we control the forces of nature or they will control us and defeat us. This is nonsense! We need to learn to live with wildland fires as an ecological necessity and unavoidable fact of life. We need to build homes with fire resistant materials and good sense, and create fire-compatible communities able to dwell sustainably within fire-permeable landscape and fire-dependent ecosystems.

--Fireweed

OSHA Faults U.S. Forest Service for Firefighter Deaths

2007-07-20T17:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) released its final report on the Esperanza Fire disaster that claimed the lives of an entire engine crew of five Forest Service firefighters. The L.A. Times published a story on the OSHA report, revealing that the Forest Service failed to comply with three of the Ten Standard Fire Orders and six of the 18 Watch Out Situations.

Following the criminal indictments of firefighters following the fatalities of the Thirtymile and Cramer Fires, there has been a lot of debate within the firefighting community over whether the "10 & 18" are rigid rules versus guidelines.

The Idyllwild Town Crier, the local paper of the community where most of the Esperanza victims resided, also reported on the OSHA findings:

OSHA issued six serious violations. Based on federal code, OSHA cited the Forest Service for not furnishing places and conditions of employment that were free from recognized hazards that were causing or were likely to cause death or serious physical harm.

This finding is "otherworldly," bordering on the absurd, since safety risks and health hazards are inherent to emergency wildfire suppression. Although new safety protocols, training, and cultural attitudes are reducing some the risks, firefighting will never be completely "free of hazards" that could cause death or injury. This is especially true since the environmental hazards of global warming-induced severe fire weather and extreme fire behavior conditions are getting worse.

It is comforting to hear individuals like Tom Harbour, director of Forest Service Fire and Aviation Management, declare that, "We are not going to die for property." However, this wildfire season has already experienced several near-misses, including a serious burnover that caused career-ending injuries to an engine crew trying to protect an indefensible home on the wildfire burning in the Inyo National Forest.

This harsh fact of life should be communicated repeatedly to the public and public officials: every time young people are sent to aggressively "attack" wildfires it puts their lives at risk. That risk better damn well be worth the possibility of their ultimate sacrifice. Better yet, it is time that we make proactive fire management the norm, and reactive wildfire suppression the exception.

--Lookout Lex

Wildfire Preparedness Raised to Top Level 5 Today

2007-07-19T09:52:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the National Interagency Fire Center announced that wildfire preparedness was moved up to Level 5, the highest state of alert. This was due to the high number of large wildfires (greater than 100 acres) scattered across several different regions, and the recent spate of thunderstorms which have ignited more than 1,000 new fires since last Monday. The increased fire activity has stretched national suppression resources to their limits, and the Level 5 rating makes it easier to order up resources from international allies (e.g. Canada, Australia) as well as the National Guard.

Last November at the Third International Fire Ecology and Management Congress, federal fire officials predicted that appropriated funds for federal fire operations would be exhausted by July of this year. While this has not come true yet, it is only a matter of time.

Last year, firefighters labored under Level 5 state for several months, and by default, several fires were managed as Wildland Fire Use (WFU) fires. In general, WFU require fire less crews and cost much less per acre to manage as do suppression fires that aim to assert full perimeter control. Consequently, new advocates for WFU are coming from the strangest places, such as the U.S.D.A. Office of Inspector General.

As fire managers scramble to beg, borrow, or steal crews and equipment to work on all the new fires burning in the West, it is hoped that this season will be another banner year for WFU--the safer, cheaper, and more ecologically appropriate method for managing wildland fires burning in remote, fire-adapted ecosystems.

--Lead Lighter

Angora Fire Sparks Anti-Enviro Pyroganda

2007-07-12T13:29:00.000-07:00

The 3,100 acre Angora Fire near Lake Tahoe has been contained and controlled, and is soon to be declared officially “out,” but the firestorm of controversy ignited by that blaze is far from being over.

The wildfire was ignited on June 24th from an illegal campfire located next to a popular undeveloped recreation site. Given the extremely dry fuel conditions in drought-stricken California, and coupled with strong gusting winds, the fire rapidly raced out of control. In the span of a few hours, over 200 homes in the small community of Meyers, California were completely destroyed.

The second day of the fire, two firefighters were burned over when the burnout they ignited suddenly “backfired” on them during a wind shift, jumped the fireline, and forced a mandatory evacuation of the entire Tallac Village subdivision containing another 300 homes and over 2,000 residents.

Lots of angry, confused local residents and opportunistic, anti-environmentalist politicians were looking to blame somebody for the wildfire disaster, starting with two time-tested but timeworn scapegoats: environmental activists and government regulators.

Less than 24 hours after the Angora Fire started, the bashing of environmentalists began. South Lake Tahoe city councilman, Mike Weber, started it off by blaming the Sierra Club and environmentalists in general for delaying efforts to salvage log dead trees and clear brush from around Lake Tahoe. Unfortunately for Weber, the wildfire burned in an area that had recently been thinned by the U.S. Forest Service; moreover, the agency admitted that not a single fuels reduction project within the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit of the Eldorado National Forest had been delayed or blocked through appeals or lawsuits in the last ten years.

During a pre-scheduled oversight hearing on July 26th in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to discuss the status of the federal agencies’ wildfire preparedness, Senator Larry Craig did his usual rant against environmentalists. He railed that the Angora Fire disaster was “human-caused due to environmentalists blocking clearcutting.” Craig made the preposterous claim that younger trees in clearcut timber plantations were much more resilient to wildfires than old-growth trees.

On July 3rd, Congressman John Doolittle kept up the anti-enviro bashing during a photo-op tour of the Angora Fire area. Doolittle warned reporters that the Sierra Club is “actually gravely endangering the population” and “severely threatening the environment” around Lake Tahoe by opposing salvage logging and mechanical thinning within riparian areas.

Meanwhile, at a town meeting held on June 25th in the local high school auditorium which barely escaped the flames itself, an angry crowd of local residents was bashing the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA) for its restrictions on tree cutting and other vegetation removal within the Lake Tahoe basin. The media reported charges from one local resident that the TRPA actually banned residents from raking dead pine needles off of their lawns, and his house was spared from fire destruction only because he had illegally raked his yard.

The TRPA was created by an act of Congress in 1969 in order to regulate development around Lake Tahoe, and established regulations on vegetation removal in order to protect water quality and keep sediment from running into Lake Tahoe and further degrading its world-famous deep blue color. The TRPA responded to criticism from local residents by clarifying that there were no restrictions against homeowners cutting dead trees of any size or age, and no permits were needed to cut live trees under six inches. The TRPA does require homeowners to get permits for cutting big, old trees in order to prevent some residents from cutting down large trees simply to improve their private views of the lake. The agency has redoubled its educational efforts on the TRPA website to facilitate residents' efforts to create defensible space and live with fire while still protecting forest cover and water quality to keep Lake Tahoe blue.

The TRPA has long been a target for ire by local residents and land managers irked by the restrictions placed on their autonomy to do whatever they want to vegetation on private or public land. Interestingly, just a couple days into the wildfire, a commercial website was launched that sold “Thank You Firefighters” T-shirts, and buttons with the TRPA covered by the circle-and-slash symbol. This is a relatively petty but revealing example of how quickly opportunistic private and corporate economic interests can roll out prefabricated anti-environmentalist, anti-regulatory propaganda during wildfire disasters.

The scapegoating of environmentalists or regulations for “causing” wildfire disasters through obstructionism of so-called hazardous fuels reduction and forest restoration projects is a time-tested public relations strategy invented by corporate logging interests and their political allies. It had huge play in the press during the 2000, 2002, and 2003 wildfire seasons, and was a major factor behind Congress passing the Bush Administration’s misnamed “Healthy Forests Restoration Act.” As investigators sift through the ashes of the Angora Fire and determine the actual fire behavior and fire effects of that wildfire, it is still uncertain at this time whether or not journalists and the Democratic-led Congress will fall for this anti-enviro “pyroganda” again.

--Lookout Lex

New York Times on WUI Fire Danger

2007-07-09T22:48:00.000-07:00

If you haven't seen the special feature story, "At Your Peril: On Fringe of Forests, Homes and Fires Meet," published by the New York Times on June 26th, it's worth checking out while it lasts. Additionally, FUSEE's executive director got a letter-to-the-editor in response to that story published on July 3rd. That LTE is posted on the FUSEE website.

As recent events such as the Angora Fire near Lake Tahoe demonstrate, fast-moving wildfires can destroy hundreds of homes in a single burning period. While the smoking ruins of gutted homes attract journalists like snags attract bark beetles, there is a distinctly different tone to most of the news stories of wildfire disasters like the Angora Fire. For one thing, there is more social and ecological context provided, namely, the combined effects of rampant urban sprawl into fire-prone wildlands; the legacy of past timber extraction and fire exclusion leaving abundant fuels and dense vegetation to feed the flames; the role that climate change is playing in creating severe fire weather events; and the flammable state of many rural homes whose owners failed to build their structures out of fire-resistant materials or manage the surrounding vegetation on their properties. The stories are not the same old schtick of heroic firefighters battling demonic wildfires to save helpless homeowners.

The NYT article raises many excellent points about rampant surburban development, rising suppression costs, and the responsibilities of rural residents to do their share to reduce fire risks and fuel hazards.

One passage is worth commenting upon:

Forest Service officials say they are used to being blamed. “Neither our strategy nor our priorities have changed,” said Mark E. Rey, under secretary for natural resources and the environment at the Department of Agriculture.

Safety of firefighters comes first, Mr. Rey said, then safety of residents, protection of structures and protection of resources.

Setting aside the obstinate "stay the course" stance that echoes the Bush Administration's position on the war in Iraq, Mark Rey is flat wrong in his assessment of priorities. According to the Federal Wildland Fire Policy--that "mother-of-all" interagency policies that serves as the philosophical foundation for all federal fire management agencies and applies to every acre of Federal land containing burnable vegetation--protection of private property and natural resources are of equal importance and prioritization. Suppression strategies depend on an assessment of the relative values at risk. Thus, as a hypothetical example, when faced with a choice of defending a single, remote triple-wide mobile home or a rare old-growth wildlife reserve, the home should not automatically be selected as the number one priority--just the opposite! The mobile home can be quickly replaced, but not so the old-growth grove.

This exemplifies a problem that has endured since the inception of the Federal Wildland Fire Policy: the gross ignorance and indifference of agency officials to fully understand, implement, and abide by the Fire Policy. When it was first unveiled in 1995, the federal government announced that the agencies were getting out of the business of structural fire suppression and getting into ecological fire restoration. Sadly, those were just false promises.

Ultimately, the restoration of ecological integrity and reintroduction of wildland fire offers the best promise of reducing both firefighter fatalities and home losses. Had the Fire Policy been faithfully implemented from the beginning, we would be way ahead of the curve in terms of reducing home losses to wildfire. Instead, we are chasing the dragon, and the dragon is hungry for houses.

The destructive mix of ignorance and arrogance that marks the Bush/Rey Administration should be included in future news features and the media's examinations of the social and ecological context of current wildfire events. Forest Service officials like Mark Rey bragging that "neither our strategy nor priorities have changed" amidst a rapidly changing environment, while facing widespread and well-deserved blame for mismanaging the public's forests is hardly an example of leadership or display of comfort to the wildland firefighters or rural residents who must sift through the ashes of the Administration's skewed priorities and neglected policies.

--Lead Lighter
--

California Burning, Pt. 1

2007-07-08T13:43:00.000-07:00

7-7-7 wasn’t a lucky day for the East Side Sierran communities of Lone Pine and Independence yesterday. Both communities were evacuated as lightning fires threatened to vaporize more homes in the California wildland urban interface. Other fires are burning on the Plumas National Forest NE of Quincy, in SoCal near Santa Barabara, and near Winnemucca, Nevada I’m just going to be bold and go right out there on a limb with this one - we’re going to see more civilian and firefighter deaths in California this season.

Things are as dry as I have ever seen in my neck of Sierran paradise inside Yosemite, and there is no shortge of warnngs about the dry fuels throughout the region, including , California, Nevada, and Arizona. Our own fuel moisture sampling program has verified the crispy nature of things. All that is missing is lightning, and the monsoonal flow is expected to pick up in earnest next week, sending tropical moisture towards the High Sierras. Perhaps the serious lightning will stay on the less populated East Side, but beware of the Sierra-wide lightning bust that slides over the onto the western slopes in the ponderosa pine-mixed conifer zone and down into the brush covered foothills of Gold Rush fame. There one will find remarkably dry fuels and an increasingly oblivious population of aging baby boomers, recently relocated from the cities.

Like the folks around Lake Tahoe, these urban white flight newcomers are intolerant of prescribed fire smoke and they love their trees, even the little ones that make their homes death traps. If you want a good site to watch the drama unfold, try the MODIS site, where you can see the most recent heat signature of fires burning in your area. Probably based on old cold war technology to detect Russian missle launches, a click on your region of choice will produce a map showing all the heat detected since Jan. 1st in yellow, with the most recent heat signatures from the last two passes of the satellite shown in orange or red. For this year, wherever goeth the lightning (or arsonists), goeth fire.

Of course, after years of Republican malarkey about the horrors of big government, we see the effect on disaster response quite clearly with the Katrina fiasco. Privatize it all, we’re told. Either flee in your SUV, or drown waiting for a bus that will never come. The perfect storm brewing in California this summer has many root causes, but the angry storm over the Angora Fire shows one thing quite plainly. After years of conservative whacko conditioning, the public will always blame the government 1st. Government success is no news, while government failure is big news. Oddly enough, citizens still expect emergency response personnel to bail their asses out of a sling. In a recent article in the NYT about the encroachement of more and more homes into fire-prone wildlands , we hear the usual refrain.

Some residents in the high-risk areas worry that the federal government will be tempted to pass the problem along to local governments or homeowners. “The federal government is there to protect the community from disasters,” said Ron Ehli, 50, a volunteer fire chief in Hamilton, Mont.

Damn straight, we’re going to pass the cost on to municipalities and homeowners. These are the entities that have fueled the problem of suburban sprawl into the “flame zone”, as former National Park Service Director, Roger Kennedy, calls these disaster prone areas in his new book, Wildfire and Americans. In this book, Kennedy charts the intentional collusion of automakers, road builders, developers, and atomic scientists to depopulate city centers and reduce the impact of nuclear warfare with Russia. The incentives for sprawl, born from the fear of nuclear fire, continue to this day. We have opted for the slow burn, rather than the quick falshover. Sadly, it is the young wildland firefighters today that will face the latter protecting homes that should never have been built. Today’s Fresno Bee reports the following:
Four out of five homes built near Lake Tahoe since 1990 are in areas considered to have a high fire hazard, according to a new analysis less than a week after a blaze destroyed 254 homes and caused more than $141 million in property damage.

There is certainly blame to be spread to the federal agencies for mismanagement of public lands. Principly, the policy of fire exclusion in fire-adapted pine forests is most to blame. The build-up of fuels and the drying climate ensure large fires to continue in these wildlands. Here in Yosemite, one of the 1st land management units to buck conventional 1950’s wisdom about the need to extinguish all fires, our ability to put fire on the ground has been severly limited, because of increasing nearby populations of smoke-intolerant immigrants into the flame zone.

There are slow signs of recognition. After the Esperanza Fire, that killed five firefighters in October of last year, the Fresno Bee reported on Thursday the results of a panel covened to consider development into the wildlands.

Riverside County should limit development in areas prone to wildfires or face further devastation, according to a panel appointed after October’s deadly Esperanza blaze. “We’ve had developments where 20 or 30 homes are built down in the Banning Pass area, right next to 8- to 12-foot chaparral that hasn’t burned in 50 years and they think nothing of it. We can’t do that anymore,” said panel member Larry Kueneman of Pine Cove.

Of course, it may well be too little to late. One of my greatest personal fears is the loss of institutional knowledge that has been taking place in the wildland firefighting ranks, with the ongoing departure of baby boomers to retirement. The last great influx of professionals willing to work in the woods for low pay occurred in the 1970’s and those leaders are leaving the U.S. Forest Service and Dept. of Interor land management agencies in droves today, either to retirement or to much more lucrative positions with CDF (now CalFire) or municipal fire departments, which have many open positions, as well. Another excellent article from the Fresno Bee, written on Independence Day, finally sheds light on this potentially catastrophic brain drain. Here’s the dangerous part:

Of the 230 Forest Service engines that go out on daily patrol, as many as 40 are under the direction of captains working six-day weeks under a new overtime allowance from emergency funds, officials said. Existing staffers are getting early promotions or being pressed into acting management positions. “There’ll be more people with more overtime this year,” said Campbell. “But they’ve lost the wisdom that comes with fighting these fires year after year.”

The key positions that supervise young firefighters on engines and crews, instead of having ten or fifteen years of knowledge, may have three, four, or five, at best. Many of these young leaders have been promoted much more quickly than the last generation leaders. Here’s the bottom line - This summer in California, we’ll be seeing fire behavior unlike anything that 80-90% of the current wildland firefighting workforce has ever seen before. Suburban sprawl, record dry fuels, inexperienced crews - it’s a recipie for disaster. If you don’t believe me, ask the folks in Independence. Yesterday wasn’t a lucky day for them. They rolled craps.

--Greenfire

Recap of International Fire Congress

2006-12-10T11:36:00.000-08:00

The Third International Fire Ecology and Management Congress in San Diego was a huge success!

Organized by the Association for Fire Ecology (whose membership includes several active FUSEE members), it was a veritable “Who’s Who” of fire ecology
and management experts from 22 different countries across 6 continents who came to give hundreds of speeches, papers, and poster presentations.

FUSEE members had an active role and big presence at the Fire Congress. Five of our Board members attended the conference, along with over a dozen other general members. We also served on the conference’s Steering Committee, and organized a Media Center that attracted nearly 50 journalists to cover the event. Press articles quoting FUSEE members at the conference were published all across the U.S., Canada, Australia, India, and Europe. We were also interviewed by the CNN, FOX, and MSNBC television networks.

One of the greatest accomplishments of the conference was the ratification of the San Diego Declaration on Climate Change and Fire Management. The San Diego Declaration was the first public advocacy statement by fire scientists on the connection between global warming and wildland fires, and offered a number of actions for fire managers to help prepare for the coming changes in vegetation, fire behavior, and fire effects. FUSEE members helped draft and promote this visionary document that will someday be recognized for its historic importance.

FUSEE hosted a poster display that showcased our philosophy, programs and projects. We’ve converted our poster into a slideshow available on the About FUSEE page of our website. We distributed lots of literature, including four boxes of the new book, Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy. Several FUSEE members helped work on the book project, and it is currently being offered as a special membership premium for both new and renewing
members.

FUSEE’s executive director presented a paper to a roomful of veteran wildland firefighters on the environmental impacts of the 2002 Biscuit Fire suppression actions. An even bigger audience cheered on FUSEE member, Jay Lininger, as he received the Student Association for Fire Ecology’s Graduate Student of the Year Award at the evening banquet ceremony. Six other FUSEE members
delivered oral or poster presentations at the weeklong conference.

Our most exciting experience was a private discussion among FUSEE members and Dr. Stephen Pyne, world renowned fire historian and one of the conference’s keynote speakers. Discussion ranged over a wide variety
of topics related to FUSEE’s mission of shifting the fire management paradigm. Dr. Pyne recommended that we revise the Promethean myth to affect cultural change in society at large, and develop a critique of Industrial Fire--the dominant anthropogenic source of global warming.

All in all, the Fire Congress was an exciting, inspiring, and successful event that helped us inform the wildland fire community about FUSEE, and recruit new members. The Fire Congress’s guiding theme - the causes and consequences of global warming on wildland fire - convinced us to take on the issue of climate change as a major focus for our education and advocacy projects in the coming year(s) ahead. Indeed, the heat is on wildlandfirefighters to warn policymakers and the public that there is no time to waste in preparing communities, prescribing fires, and restoring forests to confront climate change.

--FUSEE staff

FUSEE Goes to the International Fire Congress

2006-11-10T16:33:00.000-08:00

Fire Ecology and Management Congress

We’ve been busy getting ready for our activities at the Third International Fire Ecology and Management Congress the week of November 13-17, 2006 in San Diego. The Fire Congress, organized by the Association for Fire Ecology could be the largest gathering of fire experts in history. Over 625 papers and posters will be presented by representatives from 22 different countries from across 6 continents. Fire professionals from federal, state, and local fire agencies from all across the U.S.A. will be in attendance. The Fire Congress will be a virtual “Who’s Who” of fire ecology and management experts giving speeches, papers, and poster presentations.

FUSEE members will have an active presence during the Fire Congress. During Tuesday evening’s Poster Exhibition we will have a large wall display and literature table that will feature information on our philsophy, programs, and projects. To read the extended abstract for the display click here and to see a copy of the wall display click here. Come join us at our table at the Fire Congress, and meet some of the “torchbearers” in FUSEE!

Several members of our Board of Directors will be staffing the table throughout the week, networking with other fire people and recruiting new members and donations to FUSEE.

During Wednesday evening’s banquet ceremonies, one of FUSEE’s most active members, Jay Lininger, a Conservation Fellow at the University of Montana and a wildland firefighter with the National Park Service, will be honored as this year’s recipient of the Graduate Student of the Year Award from the Student Association for Fire Ecology.

Lastly, FUSEE’s Executive Director, Dr. Timothy Ingalsbee, will present a paper on Friday on the The Environmental Effects of the 2002 Biscuit Fire Suppression Actions .

The theme of the Fire Congress is very timely: the causes and consequences of global climate change. The renowned fire scholar, Dr. Stephen Pyne, who is a major inspiration for many FUSEE members, will give the final plenary speech. The Fire Congress will conclude Friday at noon with a major policy statement produced by AFE and co-signed by the conference attendees: the San Diego Declaration on Climate Change and Fire Management.

All members of the wildland fire community and other interested folks are encouraged to come participate in this historic event, but for those who cannot make it, check out future blogs and FUSEE’s website for highlights of the Fire Congress when we return from the event.