SOS Forests

The South Barker Fire

- If this situation is not corrected quickly, the Forest Service will not survive.

by Glenn Bradley

On a hot August afternoon in 1946, Iron Mountain Lookout reported a big smoke in Barker Gulch just east of Featherville. My Dad was on a pack trip, but the five men from the Shake Creek Ranger Station flew into action. My mother called the crew from Dave Stokesberry’s sawmill at Featherville and a few other people from the Featherville area. My job as a ten year old was to take the standby horse from the barn and ride to the fire so I could carry drinking water to the men as they worked.

When I got to the fire, the roar of the crowning was deafening and I was full of fear. It was my first exposure to a really active fire. The fire burned about 80 acres that afternoon. My dad got there about midnight. We all worked through the night, and by morning we had a semblance of a line around it. Our only power equipment was a portable Pacific Marine pump.

With that background, you can understand why a short news article in the Twin Falls paper of August 8, 2008, caught my eye. It said there were two single tree fires in Barker Gulch that had started about 1:00 PM on August 7. It also said the Forest had not decided as of 5:20 PM whether to put the fires out or let them burn. It said Forest officials considered their potential to spread to be slight. The article ended by saying that red flag conditions were forecast for the next day.

I was on my way to a family reunion when I read the article. When we returned from the reunion, there was an article in the August 15 paper saying the fire was now 1,355 acres and a national team had been called to help fight it. It also said the area from Baumgartner to Featherville had been closed.

I could hardly believe it. Just a few days before it started, the Chief had notified the field that the fire budget was exhausted and fire activities would have to be paid from other appropriations for the rest of the fiscal year. I knew the country well enough to know it could grow a lot more and cost into the millions.

I wrote an e-mail to Tom Harbour and told him something was terribly wrong with the policies if a forest could choose to ignore a chance to put a fire out for a few hundred dollars and then spend millions on it when there was no fire money left. I went on to say that it was at least unprofessional and probably criminal to let a fire go in steep, fragile, beautiful country in extreme burning conditions with no prior planning and no way of predicting where it might stop.

I sent copies to the supervisor and the ranger and a few retirees. Within a day, I got an overwhelming number of responses from retirees all over the country. The few I had sent copies to sent them on to people they knew. All but one said they agreed with me 100% and cited similar situations in their areas where it appeared no common sense was being used in fire management.

Jane called me the next Monday and assured me the people in Featherville agreed with what she was doing. I told her I could agree to some prescribed burning if it were done with good planning and preparation in compliance with NEPA, and under weather conditions when it could be controlled. She said they had done some planning and had identified about 4,000 acres in that area that they would like to burn at the rate of 1,000 acres per year over the next four years. I told her I wouldn’t have a problem with that if they did it when they could manage the fire properly, but to try to do it with no preparation in mid August just because they had an ignition in the area made no sense to me. I advised her she should put this fire out immediately and wait for favorable weather to do the burning.

I called some friends in Featherville and asked if they were okay and how they felt about the fire. They said they were scared to death. The fire was on the ridge just above their house and they could see flames from their deck. They said the people on the river had been polite at the public meetings, but they did not know of anyone who agreed with letting this fire burn. They said they appreciated the Boise Forest because when the fire got onto the Boise, they jumped right onto it and stopped it. They said the Boise had offered to help the Sawtooth put the rest of the fire out, but the Sawtooth told them to go home. It should probably be noted here that what was reported as “a minor slop-over onto the Boise” was 3,000 acres and was the biggest fire on the Boise Forest this season.)

That night, a young man from Featherville called me. He said he had heard that I was pushing to get the Sawtooth to put the fire out. He pleaded with me to do everything I could to get them to stop it quickly. He offered to get signatures from everyone along the river on a petition to have the forest stop this one and never to let another one burn under similar conditions. I told him I was still hopeful that reason would return and the forest would take proper action without a petition.

I checked the progress of the fire every morning on the NIFC site. They updated the acres and the costs, but never once made any mention of the cost of damage to the watershed, scenic values, fish or wildlife habitat, timber, lost opportunities for recreation, or livestock forage.

I think the forest did a rather skillful job of avoiding a massive public outcry about this fire. The first thing they did was to close the entire area so no one could go see what was happening. As of September 25, the closure was still in effect except for the main road along the river. The few very scant news releases in the paper were obviously written to avoid any public reaction. They just quoted the acres burned and said the fire “is meeting resource objectives”. The matter of fact type of reporting gave the impression that this was just a normal part of the fire business. There never was any attention drawn to the fact that this was the largest and most destructive fire to burn in that area since the establishment of the Forest Service.

The fire management team hosted a reporter from the Boise paper and told him they were letting the fire burn so they could establish a mosaic pattern of vegetation which would be beneficial to wildlife and help fireproof the area for future fires. A little further in the article, they said there was a lot of unburned area within the fire because the vegetation tended to be in a mosaic pattern which didn’t carry fire solidly!

The team also told the reporter that people cannot put fires out. He said only mother nature can do that. The team’s other arguing point was that it is much cheaper to let fires burn than to put them out. They quoted a figure of $99 per acre to let one burn versus $3,000 per acre to put one out. Regardless of what the team told the reporter, the cost per acre on the South Barker fire was $187 as of September 19.

No matter what the average costs are, if you put it out when it is small, the cost will be small. If it burns a lot of acres, the bill will be big even if the cost per acre is low.

On August 25, we went to the regional retirees meeting in Boise. As part of the field trip there was a discussion of fire activities and the Boise forest reported on some of their let-burn fires from 2006 and 2007. The assessment of Ned Pence on the damage in the South Fork of the Salmon River on the Payette was that there has already been more siltation into the river from the fires there than from all of the logging and road building prior to now. He said he is sure the Chinook salmon will not be able to spawn in the river again in his lifetime or probably not in his son’s lifetime.

His observations were exactly in line with what I expect from the South Barker fire. I asked the Boise Supervisor to comment on at least the “slop over” from the South Barker fire. She really didn’t want to talk about it, but as we talked, she put a new level of fear into me. She said the Boise had not identified the area of the “slop-over” as a let-burn area, so they put it out. She said the Sawtooth had mapped an area of about 109,000 acres around the South Barker fire as a Maximum Management Area. She went on to say that as long as the fire stayed within that MMA, the Sawtooth would let it burn until snow flies.

That was the first time I had heard of anything of that size. It was about two orders of magnitude bigger than the 1,000 acre per year burn plan Jane had told me about. I wrote another e-mail to Jane asking how she was complying with NEPA for such a major federal action. I asked her if the 50 year old plantations in Marsh Creek and Shake Creek had burned. I asked her what the objectives are of letting the fire continue to burn.

She said she was relying on the Forest Plan for NEPA compliance. She did not respond to the question about the plantations or the objectives. I told her I did not agree that the forest plan provided project-level site specific NEPA Compliance.

A project of this size is a major federal action and should have the whole site specific analysis and disclosure with public involvement and Environmental Statement with a Record of Decision

On September 12, there was a mention of the South Barker fire in the weekly summary of major events that the Chief puts out. It finally spelled out what the objectives are. Listen carefully!

They want to “improve habitat for the white headed wookpecker which feeds mostly on pine seeds.” They want to improve habitat for the flammulated owl. The third objective is to maintain the old growth forest by eliminating the younger trees.

I looked up all the information I could find about that woodpecker and owl. Nothing I read indicated any preference for any particular age class of forest. The woodpecker is listed as locally common, feeding mostly on insects found in the bark of ponderosa pines and some pine seeds in the fall and winter. The literature also said it is almost never found outside the ponderosa pine zone in Idaho. I told Jane I thought live trees had more bark bracts and on them than dead ones and I have never seen a burned snag produce any seeds. I said I believe one acre of ponderosa pine can produce enough seed to feed millions of woodpeckers, so I doubt if lack of pine seed is a limiting factor.

The owl is almost never seen and, like all owls, is carnivorous. It eats mice and other small rodents and prefers pine and oak forests. I told Jane that unless she plans to replant the burned area to oak I could not see how the fire was going to benefit the owl.

I told Jane I thought these two species were really red herrings and she should be more concerned about the habitat she is destroying for the real fish which include the listed Bull Trout in Shake Creek, Willow Creek, and Skeleton Creek as well as the very popular rainbow trout fishery in the river.

I also told her that converting to old growth forest can’t work. It is like basing the hope for the future of our society on the longevity and wisdom of the people in the nursing home. Eventually the old trees will die no matter what is done and it would be nice to have some younger ones to help stabilize the soil and replace the old ones when they are gone.

I also pointed out that even if there had been some validity to the objectives in the ponderosa pine zone, the ugly fact remains that over 80% of the burn is not in the ponderosa pine type.

As of September 19, the South Barker fire had burned 37,583 acres and had cost $7,041,364. I still think it is a huge mistake. Forest Service retirees all over the country are adamant that this kind of burning should not continue. Some are considering court actions, some are recommending media blasting, some are working toward influencing politicians, and some, like me, still hope the Forest Service as an agency will somehow come to its senses and revise the policies so this kind of thing won’t continue to happen. Many influential retirees whom I respect very much have shared the opinion that if this situation is not corrected quickly, the Forest Service will not survive.