Beetle Plague Advances

Time to Consider Controlled Burns

By Richard Martin, 7-18-07

	Caption: The brown ones will burn

I drove back to Boulder from Steamboat Springs on Sunday and I can tell you that the pine beetle infestation is much, much worse this year than last. It has spread north and west into Rocky Mountain National Park and into Routt County, and while the Yampa River Valley is relatively unscathed, it’s clear that it’s only a matter of time before the forests around Steamboat die and turn rust-brown just like those around Grand Lake.

The Forest Service calculates that about 44 percent of the state’s 1.5 million acres of lodgepole pine forest are now infested by beetles.

Yesterday the entire Colorado delegation introduced a “bark beetle bill” that would allocate $22 million in additional federal funds to help the Forest Service and local communities combat the threat of wildfire. Called the Colorado Forest Management Improvement Act of 2007, it stands a good chance of passage in this legislative session.

At the same time, Colorado lawmakers earlier this year approved a program to provide $1 million in matching funds from the state to help local communities and homeowners associations thin out diseased trees.

Thinning out diseased trees in a relatively contained area can be effective. But the vast majority of the infested trees are in large forests, specifically in the National Forests. And the fact is that those trees are going to burn. And it might make more sense to burn them sooner, under controlled conditions, rather than waiting on a conflagration later on. That’s the issue that the USFS and the local communities are going to have to come to grips with at some point. The traditional mindset of “battling wildfire” is not going to work in a catastrophe of this scale. The sooner forestry officials come to grips with that reality, the less chance we’ll have of spectacular, destructive wildfires in the future.

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The Federal fire managers are working under a plan, right now, that is designed to burn as much as possible.

They are evaluated by their containment costs per acre. As a result, it is beneficial to careers to use back fires into the wind as the major means of fighting a fire. If the first one does not work, just drop back and light another. Sooner or later, the wind will change, and blow the fire back into itself. and be contained. Meanwhile, the acres burned are huge due to the back fires. Ergo, the cost per acre of suppression is lower than if a concerted effort was made to hot trail and drop retardent. That stuff costs money. The burned resource is worth nothing. There is no cost, nor is there a capital asset accounting of what burns on public lands. It is the cost of paying people and machinery to fight fire that drives the effort today, and if you don't have low per acre suppression costs, your public employment career is going to be short lived.

In a very painful to see result, a very good friend who owns a couple of sections of private land, all thinned and limbed, and pile burned and in good shape for a ground fire, saw a canopy fire coming at his place, and for reasons not yet understood or stated, fire adminstrators did nothing to protect his private lands from the fire coming on to him from USFS lands. He lost it all. His timber, his cabin, his bunkhouse. Not one hand was lifted to help. There were three multi engined retardent planes in the air that could have made a drop to force the crown/canopy fire to ground where hand crews would have had an easy time in containing it. Nothing. Crews called fire camp and no one would give the word to do anything but watch. It was overhead team transition day, when one overhead team is replaced by another. Nobody was really running the shop at that time. People were working off the morning briefing, and that was all. So his years of responsible fire fuels removal meant nothing in the end. Not even a little boy to piss on it when push came to shove.

There is an agenda to not spend money on the ever increasing fire hazard coming from an ever increasing load of fuel, as trees and plants have yet to quit growing, even in times of drought. The plan as it stands, is to let a whole lot burn, and if private property gets incinerated, so what? Collateral damage. A poor investment.

But we have to remember, the fire fighters are controlled and directed by the same administration policy wonks who thought the Iraq war was over 4 years ago, and did not order up any V bottom armored trucks, which would have saved a couple thousand lives and tens of thousands of serious injuries. They did not want to spend the money. Well, now they don't want to spend money on forests, and the official policy if you look, is to burn as much as possible and not kill anybody, and if cooperative agreements are in place, the feds will make some effort at structure protection, even though they think you ought not to have a structure in the trees. If you find no comfort in my thoughts, I have done my job. What we have now does not work, and by fall, you will notice that yourself.

What happened was that 10,000 years of aboriginal burning, set fires to provide for their well being and survival, went the way of the dodo in the 19th century and before. In the time since then, heritage forests were logged and replanted, but not maintained. The interruption of the fire regime of thousands of years produced monster fuel loads that are now burning in ever increasing volumes. It took them thousands of years to make what the explorers from Europe found. We have to fix it in a lot less time, with a lot more expense. If, if we have the will.