Fire season has hit the Northern Rockies and although it’s late this year, thanks to a cool, wet spring, there is plenty of fuel out there to burn.

As John Adams reports in the Great Falls Tribune today, in a briefing with Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer on Monday, Mike Kreyenhagan, a forecaster for the Northern Rockies Coordination Center put it this way: “I view the rest of the fire season as a race between the fuels drying out and the days getting shorter and a season-ending event.  I’m not sure which on is going to win.”

Rocky Mountain Fires

In Montana and other parts of the Rocky Mountain West, forests are now losing the moisture stored from spring rains and drying out.  The drier the material, of course, the greater potential there is for fire. Factor in lightening and campfires and summers bring a familiar haze in the mountains that surround us.

In an effort to anticipate the fire patterns, the U.S. Forest Service uses a complex set of equations that result in four predictive outputs that best evaluate the potential for fire. Usually, these outputs follow a typical pattern in any given year and, using reference points of extremely high and low seasons, the USFS is able to gather information regarding spread components, energy release components and burn indices, among others.

Column

A history of devastating fires in Montana, Idaho and other Rocky Mountain states should be enough to deter neighborhood firework parties, but it won’t be.

Western lands include tumbleweed desert, prairie grass, tinderbox forests with stands of dry pines, and brown foothills near big neighborhoods. Why, again, do we think it’s sensible to let loose with toys that shoot sparks, especially since some people will be hammered from the neighbor’s Fourth of July party?

Despite the elementary-school logic, telling some people they can’t set off fire fountains on a street lined with pine trees is incendiary: “Ban fireworks?  On the freakin’ Fourth of freakin’ July? This is America, you freak! Go recycle something, you freaking lame-ass dork!”

Let’s review the facts.

Yes, this is America, and today is the Fourth.  Fireworks are fun and traditional and bring back all kinds of childhood memories and they’re pretty and every kid should have a neighborhood fireworks gathering and yes, indeed, blowing things up is a favorite pastime of the American male.

And giving up neighborhood fireworks is sad.  It’s REALLY sad.

RESISTANCE IS FUTILE

A report released Tuesday by a conservation group finds that efforts to log beetle-killed trees in the backcountry won’t reduce fire risk or beetle outbreaks.

The report, released by Oregon-based National Center for Conservation Science and Policy, found that bark beetle outbreaks may not lead to greater fire risk, and that thinning the trees won’t keep the beetles from spreading.

“The primary driver of fire is not beetle kill. It’s climate,” said Barry Noon, a wildlife ecology professor at Colorado State University and an author of the report. “It’s drought and temperature.”

Fire suppression effects on fuels are likely exaggerated. Most forests types are well within their historic range of variability.  Most of the acreage burned in fires annually is in forest types that historically experienced moderate to significant stand replacement blazes. Thus the idea that large fires that occur are the result of fire exclusion is inaccurate.

There is new evidence that suggests that even low elevation dry forests of ponderosa pine and Douglas fir occasionally experienced large stand replacement blazes. The old model that characterized such forests as primarily a consequence of high frequency-low intensity blazes that created open and park-like may not be universally applicable.

Thinning won’t significantly affect large blazes because fuels are not the major factor driving large blazes.  Climatic/weather conditions are responsible for blazes.

Large blazes are driven by drought, wind, low humidity, and high temperatures. These factors do not occur in one place very frequently.  That is why most fires go out without burning more than a few acres.

The probability of any particular thinned stand will experience a blaze during the period when thinning may be effective is extremely low.

The majority of acreage burned is the result of a very small percentage of blazes—less than 0.1% of all fires are responsible for the vast majority of acres charred. Most fires go out without burning more than a few acres.

Even if it were possible to limit large blazes, it would be unwise to do so since the large blazes are the only fires that do a significant amount of ecological work.

Large fires are not “unnatural”.  There are many species of plants and animals that are adapted to and/or rely upon dead trees and snags. There would be no evolutionary incentive for such adaptations and life ways if large fires were “unnatural.”

Dead trees are important physical and biological components of forest ecosystems. They are not a wasted resource.  Beetles and wildfires are the prime agents that create dead trees.  Removal of significant amounts of biomass by thinning and/or logging likely poses a long term threat to forest ecosystems. Biomass energy is the latest threat to forest ecosystems.

Logging/thinning is not benign. Logging has many impacts to forest ecosystems including spread of weeds, sedimentation of streams, alteration in water drainage, removal of biomass, and so on.  These impacts are almost universally ignored and externalized by thinning/logging proponents.

Alternatives to logging/thinning to reduce fuels that do not remove biomass and avoid most of the negatives associated with logging practices exist, including prescribed burns and wildlands fire.

Reducing home flammability is the most economical and most reliable way to safeguard communities, not landscape scale thinning/logging projects.

News Nugget

This is the second settlement of this kind, setting an interesting trend in wildfire litigation:

As the L.A. Times reports today, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. has agreed to pay the U.S. Forest Service $14.75 million in a settlement over a 1999 fire in California that burned 11,725 acres, 3,866 of them on Forest Service land. The fire started when an old Ponderosa Pine fell on a PG&E power line, an event that the Forest Service argued could have been prevented had the utility removed the dead and rotting tree.

From a press release from the U.S. Attorney's office that handled the case:

"The fire caused substantial damage to National Forest Systems lands, including harm to ecological habitat and loss of timber values, and required forest restoration efforts that continue to date. The U.S. Attorney's office says most of the money will go to the two national forests involved in the fire, the Plumas and the Tahoe, to fund restoration work. More than $10 million of the settlement is to compensate the United States for damages to its natural resources."

The settlement comes after a similar case last year involving Union Pacific Railroad. In that case the railroad agreed to pay $102 million to the U.S. Forest Service for the August, 2000 52,000-acre Storrie Fire, also on the Plumas National Forest, which was started by UP crews working on a rail line. [more]

Beetle hysteria has raised its head again, and I am not talking about the Fab four. A prominent article in the New York Times titled “Tiny Beetle Adds New Dynamic to Forest Fire Control Efforts” quotes many foresters and others who suggest that beetle-kill trees across the West will create larger wildfires and by implications are “destroying” our forests.

For instance, Montana’s State Forester Bob Harrington said as much at conference recently, as in the article. While it may seem “intuitively obvious” that dead trees will lead to more fires, there is little scientific evidence to support the contention that beetle-killed trees substantially increases risk of large blazes. In fact, there is evidence to suggest otherwise.

At the heart of this and many other media reports are flawed assumptions about fires, what constitutes a healthy forest, and the options available to humans in face of natural processes that are inconvenient and get in the way of our designs.
[more]

The Fire This Time

Wildfire prevention efforts should focus far more on homeowners and key ecosystems -- and far less on random fires deep in the wilderness, according to a new study by the University of Montana, University of Colorado and Colorado State University.

The study -- which calls for an overhaul of the National Fire Plan --takes a hard look at federal efforts to prevent wildfires that are increasingly scorching the West and threatening homes near forests and wilderness. Only 11 percent of National Fire Plan wildfire-mitigation efforts in the last five years have occurred near people’s homes or offices, where it's critically needed, the researchers conclude.



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Guest Column

As spring arrives, this year’s forest fire season will be upon us soon. The price of fighting forest fires has been increasing substantially, now accounting for close to half of the Forest Service’s budget and costing the taxpayer billions. Yet we have failed to address the root causes of these escalating expenses.

The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management often have to pay for fire fighting by raiding other programs. Congress has started to address this issue, and the House of Representatives recently passed the FLAME Act, which will create a separate account to fund fighting the most expensive wildland fires. If this passes the Senate and becomes law, biologists and recreation managers no longer may have to fear for their budgets when large fires break out.

Unfortunately, the FLAME Act by itself will do nothing to address a key reason of why forest fires have become so expensive - the increasing number of homes on private land near forested public lands. [more]

Guest Commentary

With fresh snow piling up on the peaks, and the 2009 Montana legislature getting underway in Helena, now is the right time to have a sensible discussion regarding wildfire and fire management in Montana. The cool, wet spring of 2008 made last year’s fire season a mild one, but last year’s lazy summer should not lull us into forgetting that wildfire is a permanent concern for Montanans, and increasingly is the 800 pound gorilla looming over our state budgets. Wildfire will return next summer, or perhaps the following one, and conditions are right for a big year.

Thankfully the stage was set for constructive talks about wildfire this winter when the Montana Fire Suppression Committee released its long-awaited recommended changes to fire management laws in Montana. Although some of the proposed laws lean the wrong direction, the majority of the committee’s recommendations are needed. [more]