wildfire
Watchdog Group’s Lawsuit Reignites Fire Retardant Debate
By Dillon Tabish, 4-03-08
 |
|
 | |
| A fire retardant drop on a lake in the Mt. Hood National Forest, Oregon. Photo courtesy of Stuart Williams. | |
|
A new lawsuit has been filed against the Forest Service and its use of chemical fire retardant to combat wildfires.
The Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics filed their second lawsuit in Missoula’s U.S. District Court Wednesday, claiming the Forest Service is in violation of the Endangered Species Act and other laws because the chemical retardant does in fact significantly harm wildlife in lakes and rivers.
“Our goal all along, from day one, is to end the war on fire and turn it into a management, a police action, an armistice,” said FSEEE Executive Director Andy Stahl. “For 100 years we’ve been fighting fire as if it’s evil, as if it’s unnatural. What we’ve learned especially in places like the Bitterroot Valley is when you remove fire from the dry forest ecosystems, you simply defer the day of judgment. The fire eventually does burn but it burns even more catastrophically than it would if it would have been allowed to burn earlier.”
The FSEEE is a private, nonprofit organization based in Eugene, Oregon. Stahl says the Forest Service has nearly bankrupted itself by fighting fire—about half of the agency’s budget is spent on fighting fire—and the time has come to change that.
“This whole legal strategy is an attempt to use our environmental laws to make more sensible fire policy,” he told NewWest.Net in an interview Thursday. “So, it’s well past time for the Forest Service to wean itself from fire as a cash cow for the agency, and instead learn how to manage fire, as we’re doing in a few places like the Bob Marshall Wilderness.”
The FSEEE won their first lawsuit in 2006, which found that the government was not exempt from abiding by the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act. After the ruling, District Court Judge Donald W. Molloy gave the Forest Service 18 months to work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service on environmental analyses. After no signs of compliance, Judge Molloy wrote in January, “In my view, the Forest Service is in contempt of the law and the prior orders of this court.”
In late February, Mark Rey, U.S. Agriculture Undersecretary and overseer of the Forest Service, appeared in US District Court in Missoula facing contempt charges because of the Forest Services’ lack of progress in facing up to the FSEEE’s claims.
Rey and the Forest Service had to prove that the agency had, in good faith, complied with the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act. District Court Judge Donald W. Molloy did not rule on the merits of the compliance but declared that although the Forest Service dragged its feet in completing environmental analyses on the effects of fire retardant on fish, his previous court order was eventually complied with.
Rey, a Bush administration appointee, was facing possible jail time if found in contempt of the law, while the Forest Service could have potentially been banned from using chemical retardant to fight wild fires.
The Forest Service claims, through a survey completed in late 2007, that retardant does not have a substantial impact on species. The FSEEE disagrees, and cites an incident in 2002 when a fire retardant drop killed 20,000 fish in Oregon. Scientists for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA Fisheries Service have also disputed the Forest Service’s assertion that fire retardant has “no significant environmental impact” to wildlife and habitat.
In February, Judge Molloy did not order an injunction on the use of retardant by the Forest Service, which provides aerial retardant to other agencies in Montana like the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. Last summer, crews on the Jocko Lakes fire, which caused parts of the town of Seeley Lake northeast of Missoula to evacuate and was at one point the number one priority fire in the nation, relied heavily on the use of retardant.
According to court documents, the Forest Service uses an average of 15 million gallons of fire retardant each year to fight wildfires, and in some years, as many as 40 million gallons have been used.
“In about a year we’ll have a decision and I think we’ll prevail,” Stahl said.
Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.
Comments
Burning any number of forest homes would just be icing on the cake, an opportunity for them to blame those silly people for wanting to live in a forested environment.
The reason USFS blows half its budget on fire is because Congress allowed the agency to become completely tied up in procedure, such as the four years of legalistic hooey that has set the stage for THIS filing. So now, 46 percent gets burnt in four weeks of the year, which is completely unacceptable.
As for the merits of its suit, there are none. I heard from a Canadian aviation specialist after I made a mistake in my Flathead Beacon column criticizing FSEEE about gallon capacity of Neptunes. They are downrated to 2000 gallons a run, although they can lift more. So, given they are an "average" retardant tanker, 15 million gallons of retardant in a slow year, there is a MINIMUM of 7,500 drops made per year. FSEEE is only able to cite a handful of incidents over the past decade, maybe one a year in a worst-case scenario.
Sure, killing 20,000 fish is not a good thing, but Eugene's organic diners (where FSEEE has its HQ) probably snarf than number of correctly-killed fish every week.
More important, however, is that one fish zap per year is an error rate of 0.0001333, like a thousandth of a percent. And this is technical, difficult aviation.
I suppose FSEEE will further be arguing that unchecked wildfires in unnatural fuel-loading conditions have no significant impact on the environment. And such might actually hold legal water. Nuts!
Maybe Judge Molloy isn't so far gone that he won't recognize reality and dismiss...but then it will be appealed to the Ninth Circus and I have no confidence in those clowns whatsoever.
Curious as to where you get your information that FSEEE wants "firefighting to end completely, with one aim in mind. First and foremost is to ruin the forests for any commercial or economic use"? You got any doc-u-men-ta-tion to back that up?
From the article above, Mr. Stahl stated, “This whole legal strategy is an attempt to use our environmental laws to make more sensible fire policy. So, it’s well past time for the Forest Service to wean itself from fire as a cash cow for the agency, and instead learn how to manage fire, as we’re doing in a few places like the Bob Marshall Wilderness.”
Also, from yesterday's article in the Missoulian it was explained, "The lawsuit is part of the group's campaign to reform the Forest Service's wildland firefighting mission. The campaign includes banning retardant airdrops nationwide unless people or homes are threatened, focusing on fire prevention around communities, and allowing more remote wildfires to burn as a natural part of the ecosystem."
Dave, you can hem and haw all you want, but I think most people recognize that changes need to be made to the USFS's firefighting policy. Furthermore, I believe that most people would agree with FSEEE's goals of 1) focusing fire prevention - and fuel reduction - around communities, 2) eliminating needless, expensive, toxic retardant drops in the backcountry and 3) allowing more remote fires to burn.
More info about Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics can be found at: http://www.fseee.org.
The USFS is a brewery of internal dissent, as would be expected. Employment was once based of merit and scholarship. Now employment and promotion is based on gender and ethnicity, as required by a Consent Decree signed by the Region 5 Forester in 1984, in which he agreed that USFS R-5 employment reflect California demographics: 50% female, 15% people of color, and 35% white male. All at a time when a preponderance of new hires had been GI Bill science, engineering and forestry grads. Those education and skill requirements were tossed out diversity's door. The prior hirees were abandoned in the agency, and left to their wiles to keep their jobs as the agency devolved into the small arson driven management fiasco it is today. Stahl harnessed that internal anger in the guise of providing a constitutionally guaranteed voice for those lost in the wilderness of the Consent Decree. Of course bad decisions were made in the USFS! How could they not with a new employee force hired solely on gender and ethnicity, and not merit or education, and in a 10 year time frame had to have those social engineering slots accounted for at all levels of responsibility and pay. The Peter Principle x 3 drove promotions and layoffs were suffered by the gender and ethicity challenged. The agency is not Microsoft or Intel. It is not a meritocracy. It is mandated social engineering with technical resource management responsibility that has not been met for the last 20 years. Why do you think they cannot win a lawsuit? They are lacking in the skills to manage the resource, by design. They have few research skills. And now we are supposed to believe that the USFS can manage fire by watching it? Monitor protection? That is absurd!
If you want fire in the ecosystem, you go out at the optimum times of the year and set it. You burn on wet soil, in one hour and less fuels. You burn when the first winter storms are imminent, or in late spring, when you can burn flashy fuels and have a reasonable chance of containing slop overs. Letting fire burn in the heat of the year, when 1000 hour fuels are bone dry, is madness. Pure madness. The kind of madness only an affirmative action driven bureaucracy can dream up and justify. That they don't have to go through an environmental review to consider or take that action is just plain wrong, and hardly ethical, whether or not the Andy Stahl bots agree with me or not.
FSEEE suing to prevent the use of nitrogen based slurry to retard fire is merely a display of strength in a challenge to a lacking agency. Stahl is a litigant bully, right out of the Sierra Club stables. They trained him. The USFS is a defenseless, sort of a special needs agency, run by people who think all problems can be solved by holding hands and singing at power point conflict resolution indoctrinations. Sorry. Hard charging, common sense, think on your feet leadership on the ground and in policy meetings is needed but sorely lacking by social engineering design. Stahl will prevail almost by default.
The facts of nature never go away. Trees grow in size and number every year, including dry years and drought periods. Fuels increase every year. No fuel removal except by logging for a century has produced prodigious fuel loads that cannot safely burn without incinerating every piece of organic material, plant or animal, in its way. The new growth on prior logged land is sorely needs thinning and spacing to reduce fuel loads.
Stand removal conflagration, where 700 year old trees, late succession forests, critical habitat for ESA listed species, all burns and that habitat is no longer. To have another grouping of 700 year old trees on that land, you have to wait another 700 years. It will not happen. It is gone. The USFS is proposing to rid itself of heritage forests, priceless resources, all in the name of sloth, laziness, p--- poor auditor recommendations, studpidity, ignorance, lack of institutional memory, and myriad other reasons only they can rationalize due to their dependence on knowledge from internal resources hired to fill ethnicity and gender slots in some human resources board game published long ago in the Congressional Record.
FSEEE prevailed to make the USFS consider NEPA and ESA when using retardant. Retardant is a fire fighting strategy, which FSEEE wants stopped. On the other hand, the USFS is determining not to fight fires, on an idividual basis, without any public review or oversight as to the rules that govern the making of a decision to fight or not fight a fire. By that rationale, Dave would be correct in saying FSEEE wants to (by omission, lack of commitment to ask for public opinion and oversight) stop fire fighting in much of the USFS managed landscape. There is no indication that preserving forests from stand removal fire, conflagration, is championed by FSEEE. In that light, I would have to call them a Special Interest Official Arson Apologists---SIOAA. You reap as you sow.
DEPARTMENT OF FORESTRY AND FIRE PROTECTION
5500 Price Avenue
McClellan. CA 95652-2421
(916)551-3330
Email:dan.lang@fire.ca.gov
Website: http://www.fire.ca.gov
January 24, 2007
Mr. John Bartlett, President
Barricade International, Inc.
12848 SE Suzanne Drive
Hobe Sound, Florida 33455
Dear Mr. Bartlett
At your request the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CDF) conducted a Field Operational Evaluation of Barricade II fire blocking gel as applied by CDF Grumman S2T airtankers to wildland fires during our 2006 fire season. CDF conducts such evaluations when we believe that a product may offer us a cost-effective alternative to other wild land fire suppressant products that we currently use. We have conducted several such evaluations of other vendor’s products since 2001.
Our decision to conduct the field operational evaluation of Barricade II was based on the fact that the product has been evaluated by the Wildland Fire Chemical Systems (WFCS) program of the USDA Forest Service and found to be safe for use by firefighters, and safe for the environment and the public. As a result of this evaluation, Barricade II Is listed on the WFCS “Qualified Products List (QPL) of water enhancing fire suppressant chemicals.
Our decision was also based on the results of airtanker drop tests of Barricade II conducted by the USDA Forest Service and CDF at Evergreen Air Park in Marana, AZ during November of 2005. Those tests showed that when dropped from a CDF S2T airtanker at normal speed and height above ground level, Barricade II can deliver a pattern on the ground that is very similar to the long-term fire retardant products that CDF has used for the past 40 years.
Barricade II fire blocking gel was evaluated at our Columbia Air Attack Base in Columbia, California from July 4 through August 10, 2006. Barricade II was the only fire suppressant product used in airtankers loading at Columbia during that period. The evaluation was conducted by two CDF Air Tactical Group Supervisors who directed the aerial firefighting operations, and by the pilots of the airtankers that dropped the product. All of these individuals have at least 15 years of aerial firefighting experience. Evaluations were also conducted by firefighters on the ground, who submitted evaluation forms following the fires where Barricade II was used. While these evaluations are subjective, they also compare Barricade to similar products used by the evaluators during 2005. We believe that the knowledge and experience of these evaluators provides sufficient credibility upon which to base our conclusions.
During the evaluation a total of 122,029 gallons of mixed Barricade II was dropped on 85 wildland fires. The evaluators were pleased with the “flyability” of the product, meaning the way that the liquid mass holds together against the effects of wind shear and drift that it encounters as it falls from the airtanker on to the target They were also pleased with the fire suppressing effectiveness of Barricade II once it reached the ground. They felt that Barricade II performed better overall than the long-term fire retardant products that they had previously used.
The firefighters on the ground stated that the consistency of Barricade II was very good, and better than some other products they evaluated previously. They believed that this is because Barricade II contains smaller polymer particles than some other products, which resulted in better blending with the water and other ingredients. They also felt that it provided a more uniform coating of the vegetation that it was dropped on, and that it remained in place longer on sloping and vertical vegetation surfaces than same other products. This resulted in a better resistance to ignition than some other products until the water evaporated from the dropped bad. After that, as with other polymer-based water enhancers, the product no longer provided any resistance to ignition.
We feel that Barricade II can be effective in tactical firefighting situations where direct attack on the flaming front by airtankers and/or helicopters is possible, provided that ground forces can reach the drop area before all moisture has evaporated.
In summary, we feel that Barricade II is a superior wildland fire suppressant product and can help us to more quickly achieve our fire control objectives. If Barricade II can also be a cost-effective alternative to other products we currently use, it may well become our product of choice.
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection makes no endorsements of any fire suppressant chemical products, and this evaluation may not be quoted, in whole or in part, in any way that implies such an endorsement We thank you for the opportunity to evaluate Barricade II, and we hope that it will prove to be a cost-effective tool that will help us to improve the level of wildland fire protection that we provide to the citizens of California.
Sincerely,
Daniel J. Lang
Staff Chief
Wildland Fire Chemicals Program Manager
cc:
J. Richardson
M.Padilla
D.Neverkovec
L.Holsapple