Over the Horizon Line | Hal Rothman

Wildfires: What is to be Done?

By Hal Rothman, 6-23-06

Fire season again approaches, and as always, we’re prepared physically to fight the annual cycle of fires that sweeps the western U.S. every summer. The fire bosses have congregated, the computer models and the weather reports are ready, the training has begun, the Hot Shot crews are poised, and the smokejumpers stand prepared for the call. Bring it on!

Psychically it’s a different story. Americans no longer know how to deal with wildfire.

We used to suppress it. With the settlement of the West more than 100 hundred years ago, fire became the enemy and the remedy became suppression -- putting out every fire as soon as possible after it started.
The policy began when the U.S. military fought fires in nineteenth-century national parks, carried on into the Forest Service, and became standard operating procedure for all federal agencies.
The pinnacle of suppression was the 1930s 10 AM policy. Under it, all fires were to be put out by 10 AM the morning following the first report of fire. This leap of faith required a strong belief in the human ability to control nature that wasn’t always born out in experience, but it made for a clear and strong objective.

Stopping the fires before they started was equally important and it took a different guise. “Remember, only you can prevent forest fires,” Smokey the Bear told generations of American kids and adults, and the charming bear persuaded us to put out campfires and crush out cigarettes. This too had its shortcomings, but it gave the public something to aspire to.

For seventy years, this was the mode of fighting fire in the West, and it worked -- more or less. Oh sure, there were a couple of big blowups -- the mythic 1910 fire season, when most of the northern tier burnt, is the most well-known -- and these made headlines throughout the nation. But by and large, firefighters fought fire off well enough and the policy of suppression persisted in the 1960s.

Then came one of those sea changes, a new way of looking at the world that transformed fire management. In the 1960s, fire scientists and ecologists realized that suppression had a serious downside. When every fire was put out, it meant that the amount of fuel -- plants, dead timber and the like - available to burn increased dramatically. Fire, it turned out, served a natural function. It kept vegetation down and made fires burn less hot and consequently less destructive. Forests that burned on an annual and every-few-year-cycle turned into meadows; when fire was suppressed they again became forests. A little bit of fire, it turned out, did a lot of good things.

So we tried something new: controlled burning, a name for the practice of allowing fire to burn for the purpose of making later fires less severe. This idea went under many names and had many dimensions, but the overall goal was the same. Use natural fire -- lightning and the like -- or introduced fire, fires started intentionally in accordance with the plans of specific federal agencies, to lessen the damage from catastrophic fire and sometimes to recreate historic environments. This too worked well, within reason, but it was truly playing with fire. And when people play with fire, whether in Greek mythology or in modern America, they sometimes get burned.

The burning began in the most dramatic of ways, with the torching of Yellowstone National Park in 1988. It has continued off and on, culminating in the disastrous Cerro Grande Fire at Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico in 2000 that nearly destroyed Los Alamos, the town where the atomic bomb was developed. Rodeo-Chideski, Hayman, Biscuit, and others followed in a hurry. When controlled fire escaped or natural fire was allowed to burn, they sometimes created exactly what the policy was supposed to prevent: catastrophic fire. Not only did these fires destroy hundreds of thousands of acres, they also sent the entire idea of controlled burning up in smoke.

It leaves us with a dilemma, one that seems particularly poignant this year, as the West suffers through another year of drought and the fires inexorably begin. We can’t just suppress; nor can we always control the fires we let burn.

The problem is not with the land managers; it is a problem on the land itself, one visible to anyone who hikes in any western forest. Suppression may have worked too well and 35 or so years of controlled burning have only treated a small amount of western land. It is a tinderbox out there, folks!

So we face a devil’s bargain. Our responses are too small for the problem and the consequences of failure too great to imagine. After 35 years of controlled burning, the Park Service, the most aggressive federal agency in implementing the practice, has managed to treat 2m. of its 80m. acres. The Forest Service, with much more land, is only now implementing plans to routinely use fire as a tool. We may have waited too long to fully implement introduced fire on western landscapes.

So now we are in a bind. If suppression isn’t applied, communities that have encroached on the forests and ridges of the West – and there have been no shortage of them from the Colorado mountains to the California coast – can expect to find themselves very hot indeed. Political leaders echo the cries of their constituents. Put the fires out now; save lives and property. Smokey the Bear’s still around too. Now, like everyone else, he’s got his own website.

But controlled burning has become anathema to the public. We can’t really let fires burn, even when they’re natural in origin and far from people. We’ve been singed too many times in recent years and fire managers and the leadership in every federal and state land management agency are rightly a little nervous about letting fires go. The implications if one gets away are great; the ramifications are too big to risk.

But we can’t just suppress either. All we do is defer catastrophic fire to a later date, fully aware that everyday a fuel load builds is a hotter, more destructive, more difficult fire to contain. Politics and science have crossed swords and there are no easy answers.

So the crews ready to fight the fires once again, and we all hope that the rains come early. A new model for western fire management has yet to emerge, but one must. We see the beginnings of a new flexibility in the management plans of individual forests and in the overall planning of the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise. Suppression will remain necessary, the default response when fire threatens lives and property. Controlled and natural burning will increase on public land as a way to avert the enormous fires we have seen in recent years. As a working strategy, this is sufficient; as a master plan, it is only a start.

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