SOS Forests

Straight Talk About the South Barker WFU Fire

I posted previously on the South Barker WFU Fire [here].

On August 7th a thunderstorm passed over the Sawtooth National Forest. Lightning struck and a tree burst into flames about a mile north of Featherville in Elmore County, Idaho. For four days the fire smoldered.

The Sawtooth NF officials could have sent a fire crew in to douse the flames. It would have cost a few thousand dollars to extinguish the tiny blaze. But they chose not to, and instead declared the South Barker Fire to be a “wildland fire use” (WFU) fire.

By that date the USFS had spent its entire 2008 fire budget and was transferring funds from other programs. The Sawtooth NF was well aware of this. … Despite the budget crisis, Sawtooth NF Supervisor Jane Kollmeyer approved the WFU designation on the South Barker Fire.

To date the South Barker WFU Fire has burned 34,250 acres and cost an estimated $5.2 million dollars [here]. (As of 09/14 suppression costs were reported to be $6,719,437).

On Sept 8 journalist Joe Jaszewski of the Idaho Statesman wrote an article in defense of the Sawtooth NF decision to incinerate 53.5 square miles of central Idaho [here]. The story for the most part parroted the party line fed to Jaszewski by USFS officials and attacked residents who regretted the fire:

Fire Wise? Officials look to fire to safeguard forest

But residents have their doubts about letting the South Barker blaze burn

by Joe Jaszewski, Idaho Statesman,09/08/08

FEATHERVILLE - What the South Barker Fire is not: a wall of flames barreling through the wilderness, incinerating anything in its path and leaving a blackened moonscape in its wake, hundreds of years away from rejuvenation.

What the South Barker Fire is: creeping flames meandering through dead pine needles, built-up underbrush and small saplings, mostly leaving larger trees unscathed.

Forest managers hope that by allowing this low-intensity fire to burn away shrubs and dead trees, they can protect the area from larger, catastrophic fires for decades to come - lessening the risk to recreation areas, private property and lives.

The fire in the Fairfield Ranger District of the Sawtooth National Forest - which started Aug. 7 - is being managed as a “fire-use” fire. This means that fire officials have outlined a safe perimeter within which they will allow the fire to burn. When the fire exceeds those boundaries, immediate suppression actions are taken.

When flames spotted into the Boise National Forest, that part of the fire was immediately attacked.

Within 48 hours, the northwest flank of the fire was fully contained by seven hot-shot crews, helicopters, airplanes and engines.

“We threw everything we could get on it,” said Val Norman, logistics chief for the fire.

Fire information officer Chris Wehrli emphasizes that “fire use” does not mean fire has free rein to go wherever it wants.

“There are 200 firefighters out there who monitor this and are actively managing it,” he said. “We’re not just standing back and watching it burn.” …

They’re like soldiers on a peacekeeping mission. Working behind the scenes, keeping an eye on things, but ready to pounce if the situation warrants. …

Officials estimated in August that the South Barker Fire had cost $99 per acre. Soper estimates that fire suppression fires cost about $3,000 per acre. However, fire-use fires usually burn more acreage, which dilutes their per-acre costs.

Actual per acre costs on the South Barker Fire were $150 per acre (do the math, Joe!). But more importantly, total costs were $5.2 million that the USFS did not have and that required cancellation of other programs, such as fuels management, trail maintenance, and forest research, and every other activity the USFS engages in.

It’s total costs, not costs per acre, that make affect the bottom line. And the suppression costs do not reflect the damages to resources inflicted by the fire, which include destruction of soils, vegetation, habitat, water quality and quantity, fisheries, air quality, recreation, scenery, etc.

And spending millions on suppressing a fire doesn’t necessarily put it out, Norman said.

“It’s Mother Nature that puts out fires - it’s not us,” he said.

Val Norman may not be able to contain, control, or extinguish fires (I accept his admission of total incompetence), but other firefighters can, do, and have put out thousands of fires this year alone. It is a gross insult to the fire community at large to plea total incompetence on behalf of everyone else, when such is abundantly and patently false.

Forest scientists say many fires are natural and needed in the woods, allowing healthy trees to thrive and eliminating deadfall and other easily burned materials that can strengthen the intensity of catastrophic fires. …

The unnamed “forest scientists” are dead wrong. The South Barker WFU Fire killed large green trees and left more dead fuels on the 53.5 square miles than existed prior to the fire. Every day of this fire the (209) fire reports stated that whole tree torching and crown fire was ripping through forests. Duff and deadfall do not crown. Only live green trees crown.

The fire hazard has not been abated. The Sawtooth NF has not been fireproofed. In case after case this year, old burns (some less than 15 years old) have exploded into new fires. The Rattle Fire on the Umpqua NF is currently reburning the Spring Burn (1996). The Biscuit Fire (2002) reburned the Silver Fire (1987). Catastrophic fires do not eliminate large woody fuels, they merely rearrange them. Subsequent vegetative growth replenishes fine fuels and the hazard returns relatively quickly.

No forest resources benefit from unprepared fires, especially mid-summer fires. Yet that canard is repeated again and again, including prominently in Jaszewski’s article:

But while fire-use fires may benefit the forest, they aren’t necessarily welcomed by residents - or officials.

A few days ago, Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons bashed the Forest Service for letting a fire there grow too much and too close to Jarbidge.

“The forest fire that we have today was allowed to get out of control, knowing the dangers of the fuel loading and the weather conditions - dry, hot, windy,” Gibbons told the Elko Daily Free Press.

Around the South Barker Fire, residents and visitors frequently complain about smoke to Kris Nitz, who, with her husband, Greg, owns the Nitz Pine Store in nearby Pine.

That smoke wouldn’t be there, presumably, had the fire been one of the 98 percent of forest fires that are attacked and successfully suppressed.

“(Some residents) thought that it should have been put out when it started,” said Kris Nitz.

Pat Johnson, who lives between Featherville and Baumgartner, is one of those residents.

She worries that the fire will devastate the forest, like the Lowman Fire did in 1989.

“I don’t believe in ‘let burn.’ I would truly rather see selective logging than total devastation,” she said.

Johnson said she doesn’t fully believe reassurances from fire officials that the forest will be better off.

“You can’t tell me trees aren’t burning,” she said. …

Like most rural residents, Pat Johnson believes what she sees with her own eyes, not the patently false propaganda spouted by admittedly incompetent USFS officials, unnamed “forest scientists,” and urban journalists who goosestep to whatever the authoritarian party line is, no matter how mendacious.

Fire can allow certain invasive weeds, such as cheatgrass and skeleton weed, to take hold. These quick-growing invasive plants can re-establish themselves more quickly than native species. But forest managers weigh those risks against the benefit of possibly saving thousands of acres of forest from a catastrophic fire.

There is more than 34,000 acres of land inside the boundary of the fire. But wildlife biologist David Skinner estimates that only about half of that, possibly even less, has actually burned.

The fire is burning a “mosaic” pattern, he said - low-intensity fires often leave lots of land untouched, and the more fires are allowed to burn through forests, the more likely the fires are to remain low-intensity.

A walk through the burned portion of the fire reveals blackened hillsides with healthy, green trees. In some places, burned land abuts lush drainages. This kind of fire doesn’t often produce the heat necessary to kill large trees. Thick bark on Ponderosa pine trees makes them more resilient to fire.

Crown fire kills ponderosa pine trees no matter how thick their bark. Pine bark beetles infest burned areas following fires and kill surviving trees in the “mosaic.” The death dealing is not finished. Trees will continue to die from the South Barker WFU Fire over the next five years.

The “mosaic” is not a scientific term. It is an artsy word without scientific definition. In that sense it is much like “fragmentation,” another artsy word that cannot be defined. In years past “forest fragmentation” has been decried as the worst thing that can happen to forests. Now the “mosaic” is touted as the best thing that can occur, yet there is no substantive difference between fragmentation and mosaic. Most people know that and are repelled by the self-contradictory eco-babble, which is based on political doublespeak and not on forest science.

Particularly repelled by the doublespeak and the forest destruction are expert foresters who have dedicated their lives to the care and maintenance of public forests. Among them are retired Forest Supervisor Glenn Bradley, who wrote the following letter to Joe Jaszewski of the Idaho Statesman. As a professional forester I find Mr. Bradley’s letter to be very compelling. I hope you do, too.

Dear Joe-

I must respond to your story about the South Barker Fire in Monday’s paper. I firmly believe that the public is being sold a very lop-sided view of these “fire use” fires. The only real truth in the article is that if you burn the entire forest often enough there will be no fuel and you will not have to worry about fires. The same scheme will work in cities if you burn all the houses before an accidental fire gets started.

The problem is that the National Forests were not reserved simply to be fire proof areas covered with ashes. They were meant to be productive producers of timber, sources of clean water, forage producing ranges, desirable recreation sites, and quality habitat for fish and wildlife. The people in Featherville, Mountain Home, Boise, Seattle, Atlanta, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles and all points in between have a right to be up in arms with the idea that the Forest Service would allow a fire to burn “naturally” in their National Forests under conditions when the outcome is completely unpredictable.

Properly applied fire can be a valuable tool when used within a reasonable prescription. Letting a single-tree fire spread at will in early August in an area like the South Boise River canyon in “Red Flag” weather should be classed as arson. Governor Gibbons of Nevada is exactly correct in his assessment.

The Forest Supervisor told me personally after the first week of the fire that they had planned some prescribed burns in the area of the South Barker fire that would burn about 1000 acres per year for the next four years. Those may have been very good plans, but they hardly compare with what is happening with the current fire.

The comparisons of cost between the fire use fires and others is not valid at all. Instead of comparing the order of 1800 meals to the order for 170 meals, you should be comparing the 170 meals to about 6 meals that would have been required if the fires had been properly attacked when they first started. The fact in the South Barker case is that the two single tree fires could have been extinguished for a few hundred dollars the day they started. Instead, the Forest Service chose a course of action that has now cost $5.4 million by their own reporting this morning. The decision is even harder to understand when one considers that field offices had been notified prior to the fire that the fire fighting budget had been exhausted for this year. That means the multi-million dollar bill has to be paid from funds that were intended to operate campgrounds, maintain roads and trails, produce forest products, manage wilderness areas, etc.

The real sad part is that the steep granitic soil in that country has taken almost a century to get revegetated to the point of relative stability after it was severely disturbed by sheep grazing and trailing around the turn of the last century. Many years of improved management by the Forest Service and the livestock owners has resulted in a big improvement in vegetative cover. Now the process has to start over and there will again be large “blow outs” of sediment in the streams when heavy rains fall on denuded slopes.

The other sad fact is that this is not the only place this kind of mismanagement of fires is happening. I have seen recent pictures of extreme erosion occurring in the South Fork of the Salmon River as a result of the 2007 fires. A retired Ranger from that area told me a couple of weeks ago that the damage is many times worse than the sedimentation from logging roads was in the early 1970’s. His prediction is that the river will not be suitable for salmon spawning in his lifetime and probably not even in his son’s lifetime.

Please do all you can to let the public know that uncontrollable fires in the heat of the summer are not a valid way to manage the National Forests. You quote the fire team as saying this fire was managed to do what they intended. The fact is the “little slop over” onto the Boise N.F. was 3000 acres and was the biggest fire on the Boise N.F. so far this year.

In case you wonder why I am concerned, I’ll try to explain. My Dad was the Ranger at Shake Creek six miles east of Featherville from 1937 to 1950. I grew up there and know that country like the back of my hand. In 1958, I came back to Shake Creek as Assistant Ranger. Since then, I have worked a career with the Forest Service and retired as a Forest Supervisor in California. I was born into the Forest Service and it has always been my favorite government agency. I am concerned partly because of the country I love that has been needlessly burned up and partly because I feel the Forest Service has lost sight of its mission and is no longer managing land to provide the goods and services it should be producing.

Glenn Bradley, Shoshone, ID