SOS Forests

Bradley Replies to Forsgren

Hi Harv-

Thank you for responding promptly to my e-mail of February 3.

I must have done a poor job of expressing my concerns, because your letter did not really respond to them at all.

I am very aware that there are areas in the national forests that are in dire need of fuel reduction. My concern is that it should be done in an appropriate way . Simply letting large areas burn in the peak of the fire season because they happened to be hit by lightning is a long ways from responsible action.

You place the blame for the “untenable” condition of the national forests on Smokey Bear and past fire policies. A couple of other factors are probably even more significant. As a nation, we have decided through laws, court actions, and agency policies that the forests are to be untouched by anything resembling a commercial use of the fiber and forage they grow. The last figures I heard on timber production in the national forest system quoted an annual growth rate of 20 billion board feet and an annual harvest rate of about 3 billion board feet. That means that every year we are accumulating 17 billion board feet of wood that will eventually burn either by prescription or by accident. To help visualize the magnitude of the problem, try to picture 11 lines of bumper to bumper loaded logging trucks reaching from New York to Los Angeles. They would be carrying the amount of timber that is grown but not harvested each year in the national forests.

We seem to prefer to buy our lumber from Canada, burn oil, gas, or coal to produce power, and let our forests die and burn up. A high priority for people in leadership in our country and in the Forest Service should be to work toward converting this surplus wood into valuable products rather than struggling with the never-ending job of trying to burn it up as fast as it grows. I realize that timber harvest alone will not solve the problem on all areas of the forests, but it would surely help.

Changes in fire fighting policies have contributed to the problem in a big way. We learned very early that most of the effective fire line building had to be done at night when the fires cooled down enough to allow direct attack. We built and burned out the lines at night and tried to hold them during the day. Now, very little line building is done at night, so you are forced to attack fires indirectly. This means lines are built a long distance ahead of the fire and large areas are burned out between the line and the fire. Sometimes, indirect attack is the only system that will work. Most of the time direct attack will still work. It sickens me to read the morning reports on fires that say for several days in a row the fire didn’t grow, but thousands of new acres were burned out. We always felt that if a fire would stand still for a day or two, we could capture it.

Now, back to the South Barker WFU, which I maintain was a huge mistake. The only objectives that were publicized for the South Barker fire related to the Ponderosa pine type and were not validated by anything I could find in the literature regarding the benefiting bird species. Whether they were valid or not, the ugly fact remains that 80% percent of the burn was not in the Ponderosa pine type.

The arguments you advanced toward reducing the understories and creating openings in the stands are valid concepts in fuel reduction. The problem with letting lightning do it at the peak of the fire season like it was on South Barker is that a high percentage of the stands and plantations you were trying improve were killed by the fire. It will happen every time if you try to burn when you are getting crown fires. Their woody fuel is then added to the future problem. The result is about as productive as throwing the baby out with the bath water.

At the beginning of the South Barker, Jane Kollmeyer told me that they were letting it burn because they had plans on the shelf to burn 4,000 acres in that area over the next four-year period. I have no argument about the validity of those plans. If they had been burned under conditions that didn’t damage the existing stands and allowed control to keep the fire in the planned area, I would have supported the project. My concern is that the burning conditions were too severe when they burned the planned area and there was no way to keep it inside the project boundary. There were no site specific plans and there was no preparation for the other 31,000 acres they burned. The majority of those acres were not timbered and there was no need for fuel reduction on them. Burning them destroyed what vegetation there was to hold the soil on the steep granitic slopes. That damage alone very likely exceeded the cost reported for the fire.

I understand that your were trained as a fisheries biologist, so I don’t need to elaborate on the impact of accelerated erosion and stream silting on aquatic life. Since the streams in that area are habitat for the listed Bull Trout, ignoring the watershed damage and fish habitat destruction is even more difficult to excuse.

Letting fires burn in the peak of the fire season has many logistical risks. Any effort used on them could be robbing resources from emergencies in other places. Mike Detorri told me that part of his rationale for recommending that the South Barker fire should be allowed to burn was that fire fighting resources were plentiful because the only action was in northern California. My friends in Trinity County, California report that they were hit by an unprecedented lightning storm two weeks before the South Barker started. Some of their fires were not manned for two weeks due to lack of resources. The Gnarl Ridge fire near Mt. Hood started two days after the South Barker. Nothing effective could be done with it for several days because of lack of resources. Mike either got some poor information or made some poor assumptions.

In several cases, unforeseen weather events have been blamed for escapes of recent WFU’s. It is a fact of life that if you let a fire burn for several weeks during the hot part of the summer, you are almost sure to encounter some conditions that will generate explosive burning. These are not unforeseeable events.

I have not been to the East Slide Rock Ridge area since it burned, but I did fight fire in that area in the early sixties. Obviously, the people who decided to let it burn underestimated its potential. I agree with Assemblyman John Carpenter when he said, “Anyone who lets a fire burn in Nevada in August is crazy”. There may have been some benefits, but I wonder if they were worth the $9 million. How did the BLM and the private landowners feel about your sharing the fire with them. When the situation was reversed in 1964, Maurice Guerry was burning on his private land late in the fall and inadvertently burned some Humboldt N.F. land near Pole Creek. He was billed for the damage to the Forest. Did you get a bill this time?

You reported with pride that the Forest Service has burned over 200,000 acres per year using WFU as a tool. I submit that acres alone are a poor measure of success. Bigger is not necessarily better. We would all feel better if the South Barker fire had correctly burned only the 4,000 acres that needed burning instead of the other 31,000 that went up with it.

I am disappointed with your statement that we should expect you to be using unplanned ignitions more and not less in the future. After our local failures, that statement seems almost as callous as the statements at the hearings in Weaverville, CA by Mark Rey and the local Forest Supervisor last September 9. When asked if there could be any reimbursement for the nine culinary water systems that were destroyed by back burns, they responded that the people should contact the NRCS to see if there was any farm money available.

I disagree with your statement that access issues keep you from being able to ignite fires at the time and place you want them. Choosing your time, place, and conditions will allow you to burn when you are prepared under conditions that you can control. Any other method is just trusting dumb luck. Our national forests are too precious to be managed by dumb luck. It may be true that 98% of the fires are stopped with initial attack, but the other 2% are causing 98% of the damage and costs.

Harv, the point of all of this is that there are right ways and wrong ways to do things. Reducing fuels by burning is legitimate when no other option is available, but it must be done with good planning and preparation. Conditions must be such that the results can be predicted. Laws such as NEPA, and ESA must be obeyed, the public must have a chance to participate in the process, and the impacts must be considered before it happens. When it is finished, the results should comply with the plans, and the benefits have to exceed the costs, including all of the negative impacts on the resources and the involved people.

I encourage you to do everything you possibly can to stop the wanton and wasteful burning that is occurring on our national forests. If the requirements of the above paragraph are not met, you should direct the field officers to put the fire out. You should also use your influence to get national policies back to rational levels. I want to support you, but I can’t do it when you are allowing the forests I love to be destroyed.

Sincerely,

Glenn Bradley
Shoshone, Idaho