The Largest Fire In California State History
Ret. Capt. Mike at Firefighter Blog forecasts that the fires burning in the Ventana right now will become the largest fire ever in California state history. His prognosis is based on what fire officials said in their morning report today. Ret. Capt. Mike writes [here]:
Officials: Big Sur Fires May Exceed 250,000 Acres
The Indians Fire and Basin Complex Fire currently burning in the Ventana Wilderness will likely combine to become the the largest fire in modern California state history.
This morning’s ICS-209 report for the Basin Complex Fire, now called Basin Complex West includes an estimated final size at 170,000 acres. The Basin Complex West fire will come close to matching the Marble-Cone Fire of 1977 that consumed 178,000 acres on the same ground.
The Indians Fire management team has stated since the start of the fire in May they expect their fire to exceed 80,000 acres. The fire has burned over 60,000 acres so far.
Wikipedia maintains a list of the largest wildfires in California history as;
1 - Santiago Canyon Fire of 1889: 300,000 acres ·
2 - Cedar Fire: 273,246 acres
3 - Zaca Fire: 240,207 acres
4 - Matilija Fire: 220,000 acres
5 - Witch Fire: 197,990
6 - Laguna Fire: 175,425 acres
7 - Marble-Cone Fire: ~178,000 acres
8 - Day Fire: 162,700 acres
9 - McNally Fire: 150,670 acres
10 - Old Fire: 91,281 acres
11 - Harris Fire: 90,440 acres (366 km²)If the Basin Complex West and Indians Fire meet the stated expectations the combined acreage could challenge the Cedar Fire of 273k acres. Worth noting both current fire managers were in command of the Zaca Fire (#3 all time) at various stages last year.
The current (this morning’s) map of the Basin and Indians Fire:
Click on the map for a larger image (700 KB).
I grew up there. I hiked the whole Ventana as a Boy Scout: Pine Valley, Chews Ridge, Little Sur, Pico Blanco, Barlow Flats, China Camp, etc. It breaks my heart to see what has become of that lovely country. Of course, it was totally roasted in the 187,000 acre Marble Cone Fire in 1977. Hard to believe that was 30 years ago.
It used to be that the Costanoan people kept the Ventana a fine and fair pine/oak savanna by careful burning, in late fall after the acorn harvest. They were wiped out by European diseases, and the remnants enslaved by the Franciscans. The annual burning stopped, but the Spaniards found ample grazing lands and ran half-wild cattle over those hills for a couple of centuries, which had a somewhat similar effect. The grazing maintained the savanna.
Eventually, though, the poison oak and chaparral came up anyway, and the grazing declined. Fuels built up. Then the catastrophic fires.
The fires of today kill everything and promote more chaparral. They are widely-spaced, occurring every 30 years or so, not like the annual fires of the Costanoans. The fires of today do not lead to fine and fair savannas but to fire-type brush.
The whole of Carmel Valley and the other coastal valleys are terrible fire traps today. They have built-up fuels that burn with ferocity, not like the gentle grass fires of yesteryear. And every time a modern fire explodes, it causes huge tragedy to the land and the residents.
The Ventana is a wilderness in name only. It actually has been homeland to human beings of thousands of years. It used to be a tended landscape. Now it is a death trap, and forbidding to humanity.
We have not done right by the Ventana as a society. We have not been good stewards. And we have let that lack of stewardship creep right to our doorsteps.
The policy today is burn, baby, burn. It’s an industry. The USFS and their personnel are making $billions each year burning America’s priceless heritage landscapes. Never history has so much been spent on firefighting, and never in history has so much burned.
Firefighters from the loftiest Incident Commander to the lowest grunt on a line crew are cashing in on fires. There is no real incentive to put fires out; the incentive is to milk the cash cow for as long as you can. The only motive is mercenary. That’s why we have monster megafires today. No one gets rewarded for going home early. From San Diego to Sand Point, from the Okanogan to the Coronado, fire is the driver, the only game in town.
Today the State of California is experiencing the early weeks of what will become the worst fire year in modern state history. There has never been a year like this one for fire. All records will be broken. But it is only an extension of our national forest fire crisis that has been building for 20 years, or in the case of the Ventana, for 30.
Our fine and fair landscapes have become roasted wastelands, scorched earth, forbidding to man and beast. You youngsters don’t know any different, but we oldsters do. We can still remember back when America was a green and gracious land, before the apocalyptic holocausts, before burning this country to ashes became the only game in town.
by Kurt
I think Capt. Mike’s list is also missing the Big Bar Fire, 1999, Trinity NF, 141,000 acres.
The stats are mushy. Some fires are considered Complexes, others stand alone. Sometimes the actual acreage for a megafire isn’t known for months afterwards, and then is subject to dispute.
At any rate, the Basin/Indians Complex is now over 180,000 acres and still growing.
Just to put things in perspective, the Biscuit Fire in 2002 in SW Oregon was 500,000 acres. And last summer the combined acreages of merged fires on the Boise, Payette, and Nez Perce NF’s in Central Idaho was 800,000 acres.
It is surprising to me how little media coverage the 2007 Idaho fires got. It was the biggest burn in that region since the Great Fires of 1910, and one of the biggest forest catastrophes in history anywhere ever.
The Stanislaus Complex never did get its due as far as devastating fires go. Since you can see so very little of it from Highway 120, people just forget that such a high-intensity fire there ever existed. Looking southward from the ridge above Hardin Flat, the devastation seems to go on forever. Some areas of the Groveland RD have burned 13 times in the last 100 years but, the re-growth of bear clover will ensure that more fires will occur down the road. The A-Rock fire burned adjacent to it in 1989, as well. I have recent pictures of the A-Rock fire and what has grown back since, (along with no salvage logging), showing few pines naturally re-seeding, lots of brush hiding the fallen giants, and snags above and below Highway 120.
Update: the combined Basin/Indians total to date: 198,207 acres.
And still growing. Today Voluntary Evacuations were suggested for Upper Cachagua, Paloma Creek, Lower Carmel Valley Road, and Arroyo Seco.
Just for reference the Stanislaus Complex Fire in 1987 was around 137,000 acres. I couldn’t seem to find it in wikipedia but there are references out on the Web.