From The New West Blog
The WUI and The Western Fire Season
By Courtney Lowery, 5-12-08
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| Firefighter Matt Birtt monitors wind conditions on the Jocko Lakes fire near Seeley Lake, Montana. The Jocko Lakes fire burned more than 36,000 acres last summer. Pat Cross, a fire information officer on the fire said after the season ended that the blaze displayed fire activity “firefighters haven’t seen before in this part of the world.” | |
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Laura Zuckerman has a pretty comprehensive story today for Reuters that looks at the overall outlook of this summer’s Western fire season, with a primer on how more homes in the Wildland Urban Interface (know as the WUI) and the effects of global warming are changing the regional and national, approach to firefighting.
That’s not really news to most of us in the West who have watched tactics evolve first from the warfare-like 10 a.m. rule to a realization in the 60s and 70s that fires are natural and in some cases, should be managed, not suppressed. Now though, fire managers stuck trying to balance managing fires for natural benefit and protecting property (and in some cases lives) as more and more homes creep closer to the wildland interface. Throw global warming into the mix and you’re also weighing which fires are natural and beneficial to the ecosystem, and which can turn into catastrophic ones that can actually do more harm than good—in the remote wildlands or in the interface.
Oh, and then there’s the funding debacle.
Zuckerman’s story doesn’t fully address all the questions hanging out there (it raises, but does not go into how state and local agencies are trying to deal with the WUI issue), but it does raise some of the more important ones and gives some good fodder to think about and discuss as we head into another fire season.
Zuckerman uses Idaho as an example, where last year, fire managers were in one place, managing wilderness blazes while in another, actively suppressing to protect the community of Sun Valley. This excerpt is a good one to sum up the lesson from Idaho:
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Comments
Not mentioned here is the precursor conditions on the ground before it lights off. 400 tons an acre is way more than 40, per square and cubic foot the effect is tenfold and perhaps more with timing and conductive/radiative synergy.
And again, the idea that fire is natural, only natural, and always good is garbage. The Indians managed their fuel loads by inducing seasonal fires as well as leaving their campfires to do what campfires do. They were just as upset with megafires as white folks.
Bottom line is that the USFS needs to get with the program when it comes to fuels, removing them in a cost effective manner through programs that are large enough to be fiscally self-sustaining. Everyone yaps about sustainability, yet when it comes to actually implementing something that would sustain forests in an other-than-black state, dead silence.
Sun Valley was afforded protection. They are a relatively new community but they have very high value homes. They had air quality monitoring. Those of us in communities that predate the Forest Service weren't so fortunate. The fire crews decided that I had done such a good job of fire proofing around my cabin that they didn't need to put out any sprinklers on my property. Neighbors who hadn't done such a good job got sprinklers. The Chinese Cemetary in Warren that has exactly 0 people burried in it got sprinkler protection. Crews spent week building fire line around an airplane that crashed in 1943 at the edge of a lake.
If your neighbor allowed his yard to get in the condition that the Forest Service has allowed our forests to get into, you would be calling the City or County you live in and asking them to enforce their ordinances, ordinances designed to protect the health and safety of the neighborhood. I drive through state and privately managed forests and see how healthy and productive they are. Conservation is practiced and fires are minimized. Sure, fire has a place on the landscape, but these large 800,000 acre fires that burn at high intensity are not my idea of conservation. Somewhere there has to be a happy medium.
We were told that the fires would slow down as they burned into previously burned areas, but we saw just the opposite happened. Some of the hottest fire intensities ever recorded came form areas that have burned since 1994. 30% of the Payette National Forest burned between 1990 and 2000. We will probably pass that between 2000 and 2010.
The Idaho Conservation League is concerned about facilities that may produce 5 pounds of mercury per year in Idaho. All human caused activities in the state produced an estimated 684 pounds in 2006. Last years fires produced an estimated 29,260 pounds in Idaho in 3 months under the Forest Services preferred alternative for fire management.
Can you name one "fiscally self-sustaining" USFS program? Now, how about one that's "cost effective?" Bottom line: It's always been a (welfare-state) jobs program. Expanding the scale of make-work projects only makes them more taxpayer-dependent.
The requirements for compliance with laws written by an incompetent Congress pretty much make "cost-effective" impossible. Yet the fact of the matter remains that state and private ownerships, and even some tribal programs, DO in fact do good things in an environmental sense while keeping their head above fiscal water and providing benefits to citizens and employees.
Of course, old EF'ers like you are blind to any human benefits, especially economic, either locally or to larger society, so I know that angle doesn't hold water with you.
But as long as we're dealing with "below cost" -- what about the parks, the wildernesses, the megafire zones. All THAT is below cost, pretty much a loser for everyone. Sometimes these mega fires wreck good stuff that everyone agrees should be protected, or at least managed with timber down on the list, managed to stop or moderate loss of positive non-economic benefits -- even pillagers such as me.
I hear in the grapevine that 55 percent of the Payette has torched since 1993, which seems to be about the same time the bottom fell out of the timber game, eh? If 55 of the Payette had been mowed down, the circle-A wilderniks would be howling. But it's OKAY and NATURAL to smoke it flat?
Dude, that's just bent.