SOS Forests

The Incineration of the Payette

Since 1993 over a million acres of the Payette National Forest have been incinerated. In 1994 300,573 acres burned. In 2000 343,347 acres burned. In 2006 over 70,000 acres burned. And in 2007 a whopping 470,529 acres of the Payette NF went up in smoke. That’s 1.27 million acres in 4 of 14 years (I don’t have data for the other intervening years).

The Payette NF is 2.3 million acres in size, so using the data available, 55 percent has burned in the last 14 fire seasons. I have been told but cannot confirm (because I don’t have all the data) that the actual burn percentage is 70 percent .

The nearly half million acres of the Payette that burned in 2007 was more or less deliberate on the part of the US Forest Service. They planned it, and then carried it out.

Following the 2006 fire season (70,000 acres) USA Today ran the following article [here]:

Forest fire strategy: Just let it go, USA Today, November 2006

In the worst year for wildfires in nearly half a century, it may seem odd to celebrate how well some of them burned. But the Payette National Forest in central Idaho is doing just that.

“It was a real long season, but we got some nice fire effects,” says Sam Hescock, a fire management officer on the 2.3-million-acre forest where more than 150 fires this summer and fall burned about 70,000 acres. “We’re pretty happy with what we got.”

Hescock’s satisfaction reflects a shift in how the federal government approaches fire management. That shift began in earnest a decade ago and is gaining momentum. Land managers at the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies are becoming more comfortable co-existing with fire rather than reflexively trying to stomp it out with all the men and materiel at their command.

A change in thinking

Their reasoning is that fire is a natural part of the landscape that clears out underbrush and small trees and creates forest openings in a mosaic pattern. Such conditions help keep small fires from growing into the kind of large, catastrophic blazes that have become increasingly common in recent years. They now say that decades of aggressively fighting fires was a mistake because it allowed forests to become overcrowded and ripe for fires nearly impossible to control.

“The mentality is changing,” says Greg Aplet, a Denver-based fire scientist with The Wilderness Society, a national environmental group. As fires have burned more acres in recent years and the cost of fighting them has soared, “the obvious answer is not to fight fires we don’t need to fight,” Aplet says. Almost 9.5 million acres have burned so far in 2006.

The shift in thinking was formalized in a 1995 statement of federal fire policy, and strengthened in a 2001 revision. The policy recognizes that fire is “an essential ecological process,” and that decades of trying to keep fires from burning have led, ironically, to “larger and more severe” conflagrations because of the buildup of underbrush and other fuel.

“The task before us — reintroducing fire — is both urgent and enormous,” the 1995 policy concludes.

The Forest Service, National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management now routinely have detailed fire management plans that show where fires don’t have to be fought. The transition has been easiest in unpopulated blocks of land, but increasingly land managers are learning to regulate fires near communities.

Nationally, the goal over the next few years is “to increase our use of wildland fire,” says Tom Harbour, director of fire and aviation management for the U.S. Forest Service. …

This year’s success in the Payette will multiply in the years to come because the 2006 fires thinned forests and created openings that will help “reduce the size of fires in the future,” Payette forest supervisor Suzanne Rainville says.

Hescock, the fire management officer, sees less arduous fire seasons ahead. “My next four years are going to be real easy,” he says.

So proud of their accomplishments in 2006, the USFS gave Sam Hescock a national award in March, 2007 [here]:

2007 BIRD CONSERVATION AWARDS

On March 22, 2007, the US Forest Service honored outstanding achievements in bird conservation at the annual Wings Across the America awards ceremony. Joel Holtrop, Deputy Chief of the US Forest Service National Forest System, and Linda Goodman, Regional Forester from Region 6, hosted the event. They presented awards to Forest Service employees and their partners, including conservation organizations, universities, foundations, and private sector partners.

Award Recipients — Forest Service

Sam Hescock, Payette National Forest

So the stage was set for the 2007 fire season. In July 2007 the USFS declared the Payette NF a “let it burn laboratory [here]:

Forest service learns to love fire a little bit, Associated Press, 07/30/2007

MCCALL, Idaho — Western public lands, including the Payette National Forest in Idaho, the Gila National Forest in southwestern New Mexico and the Bitterroot National Forest that straddles the Montana-Idaho border, have become “let-it-burn laboratories,” federal wildfire managers say.

Sparse populations surrounding those forests make it possible to pursue some of the nation’s most progressive fire management policies.

An increasing number of wildfire managers are letting more lightning-caused fires on federal land burn, to help return forests to their natural state where wildfire and trees survived in equilibrium before modern man’s arrival. The policy also keeps firefighters from harm’s way — and could save millions of dollars otherwise spent fighting fires miles far from civilization.

Sam Hescock, a U.S. Forest Service regional fire manager on the Payette National Forest north of Idaho’s capital, remembers a key turning point in his forest: It was July 1996, and a dry lightning storm rolled over the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, igniting a remote wildfire. He told firefighters to hold off.

Last year, fighting wildfires cost $1.3 billion when a record 9.8 million U.S. acres burned. Twenty-four wildland firefighters died. A study by the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise concluded that a wildland fire costs $43 an acre to monitor, compared to suppression fires where bills can run as high as $250 an acre.

“The benefit is safety and a lot of economics,” Hescock said. “What happens if we crash an airplane or hurt a smokejumper on a fire miles from nowhere? What do we tell the parents? Why not just have a fire scar out there?”

And let it burn they did. By September of 2007 the Payette had experienced 470,529 fire acres. Of that 86,293 acres were official whoofoo (Wildland Fire Use), but many of the so-called “suppression” fires were barely staffed. For instance, on August 15, 2007, the Raines Fire on the Payette was 30,667 acres with only 13 people “fighting” it. Yet the Raines Fire was officially classed a “suppression” fire.

The Payette fires joined with fires on the Boise and Nez Perce National Forests to form a continuous burn that covered over 750,000 acres (1200 square miles) [here].

There have been many terrible fires this fire season. Okefenokee Swamp burned in the 386,722 acre Big Turnaround Fire. The Angora Fire in South Lake Tahoe incinerated 254 homes. Megafires have raged across Oregon, Alaska, Montana, and California.

The worst fire, however, the most destructive and most egregious fire of the 2007 Fire Season, is the Yellow Pine Fire of over 750,000 acres which is still burning in Idaho.

The Yellow Pine Fire is our name for a collage of dozens of fires that have blackened the Boise, Payette, and Nez Perce National Forests. The Yellow Pine Fire is a complex that includes the Rattlesnake, Raines, Loon, Zena, Profile, Landmark, Monumental, Krassel, and Trapper Ridge Fires, and a few dozen more.

Those fires have merged, for the most part, except where separated by Burns of recent years, into one large blackened stain that stretches from the Gospel Hump Wilderness north of the Salmon River (main fork), southwardly up the South and Middle Fork watersheds, and over the top of the Salmon Mountains into the Middle Fork watershed of the Payette River 90 miles to the south.

Nearly two million acres of forests have been impacted, but the exact fire acreage is difficult to extract from InciWeb reports. The individual sub-fires have been consolidated and the names changed mid-season, obscuring the facts with bureaucratic smoke. The Rattlesnake Fire is close to 100,000 acres; the East Zone Complex over 275,000 acres; the Cascade Complex nearly 300,000, the Krassel Whoofoo near 70,000 acres; and the Trapper Ridge Whoofoo is over 20,000 acres, totaling 765,000 acres (1200 square miles) for just those particular tiles in the “mosaic” that is the Yellow Pine Fire. A final total is also presently unattainable because many of those fires are still burning and expanding. …

In November of 2007 the Forest Supervisor on the Payette NF, Suzanne Rainville, “reviewed” the fire season [here].

A Fire Season in Review, by Suzanne Rainville

One of the lessons this wildfire season has taught me is to expect the unexpected. Spring and summer came early this year, by almost a month. Our fire season began earlier than expected with our first fire on the Forest April 27. Heightened fire activity was going strong to the south of us in Nevada and Utah. We sent many of our firefighters to help them, thinking we still had some time before our season would start. We did not see our first significant rain until September 23 with hot, dry weather to follow that rain. Our fires were more resistant to control than expected, and many people came to the Payette NF and worked longer and harder than expected to help deal with our large fires.

A typical Initial Attack fire would use a handful of people, some bucket work, and (on a really difficult one) one to two loads of retardant. To suppress many of our fires this year, we had to staff them with up to 80 people, helicopters, and air tankers in order to keep them small. With a shortage of resources to staff all our fires at this level, we had to prioritize and a few escaped our management efforts to become large fires.

To all of you, my sincere thanks to deal with the unexpected.

The wildfire job looms too large for any of us to cope with, much less succeed at, alone. …

Thank you to the people in harm’s way in Burgdorf, Secesh, Warren, residents in the South Fork of the Salmon River and Frank Church Wilderness, Yellow Pine, Copenhaver, Mackey Bar, Badley Ranch, Big Creek, Indian Valley, and Weiser. We appreciate the positive feedback we have gotten from several of you for the assistance the firefighters gave. You have shown genuine appreciation to those who protected lives and property. You helped us through this difficult fire season. In those rare instances where homes and structures were lost, we all share a sense of loss and frustration. …

Together, we now understand that we may face these experiences again in the future. We will never eliminate fire. We will need to work together even closer. Several areas the Forest has identified to address prior to next years fires season are to:

Work with our partners to coordinate structure protection responsibilities.

Work on fire restrictions to improve their effectiveness and intention without causing adverse impacts to land owners, business owners and recreating public.

Work together on how we manage fuels and fire on the landscape. Fire is capable of returning to the South Fork in multiple years. Areas that burned in 1994 reburned in 2007 with, in some cases, more damaging effects.

Work with the public and our cooperators regarding the role of fire in this area. How do we allow fire to play a role in the ecosystem without being quite as impactive to the public as this past fire year? …

The Payette 2007 Fire Season Statistics:

- 86 = total number of statistical fires.

- 470,529 acres burned (384,236 suppression acres and 86,293 WFU acres).

- 17% of total acres protected by the Payette NF burned.

- On 9/23, the Payette’s 86,293 WFU acres made up 92% of the total WFU acres reported for Region 4 and exceeded reported acres for Region 1.

After the 2006 fire season when 70,000 acres burned, the attitude expressed by the Payette NF was, “[Our] next four years are going to be real easy.”

One year later, after 470,500 acres burned in 2007, their attitude was, “How do we allow fire to play a role in the ecosystem without being quite as impactive to the public as this past fire year?”

Forest Supe Suzanne Rainville expressed surprise, it was so “unexpected,” but that surprise was false, hypocritical, and a big lie. The destruction was planned. Nowhere does she express regret. Regret is not even faked. The USFS has no regrets about destroying forests.

The impacts to the public and to forests of the 2007 fires on the Payette will be long-lasting. As the record snowpack of this winter begins to melt, massive erosion of the granitic soils will ensue. Streams will be filled with silt and fish spawning habitat destroyed. The community of Yellow Pine will face a denuded landscape for 30 miles in every direction. Wildlife populations, particularly forest birds, will have all but disappeared.

Those are the “impactive” outcomes of the deliberate Let It Burn policies imposed on the Payette NF and every other National Forest in this country.

Already in 2008 the Wildland Forest Leadership Council has imposed whoofoos into Fire Plans agency-wide [here]. When the public has complained, Fire Plans have been summarily thrown away [here].

The Let It Burn policies are hugely “impactive” [here, here] but the USFS will not be deterred.

The 2008 fire season will set records again for acres burned, money spent, and forests destroyed. The USFS has become a terrorist army, hellbent on burning America to the ground.
If you think fire “helps” forests, I invite you to explore the Payette NF. Walk through the now incinerated forests. Gave at the charred, blacken remains. Listen to the silence, the absence of life. Take photos and send them to SOS Forests. I will post the horror of forest holocaust.

I don’t know what else I can do to stop the madness.