After-the-Fact Fire Planning
Imagine that you are a District Ranger or a Forest Supervisor assigned the protection and stewardship of a vast tract of public forest. Then imagine a fire is ignited on that tract in the middle of summer.
Would you let that fire burn? Would you in addition call in a team of people who had never seen your forest and knew nothing about to draw up a Let It Burn plan 10 days after the fire started?
Sounds like total lunacy, right? Or worse yet, deliberate and criminal disregard for the the land, of the law, and of plain common sense.
It is hard to believe that such cavalier and destructive actions could possibly be made by the people charged with stewarding our public forests. And yet, the story is not only true, it has been repeated numerous times across the West in recent years.
We post the following letter by retired USFS Forest Supervisor Glenn Bradley to the current Forest Supervisor of the Sawtooth National Forest. Mr. Bradley points out that ex post facto “planning” of wildfires is thoroughly disingenuous, irresponsible, illegal, and destructive.
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Hi Jane-
At our meeting of retirees on December 1, 2008, you gave me a copy of the South Barker and Johnson 2 Wildland Fire Use Implementation Plan. I apologize for taking this long to send you my comments after I read the plan.
The plan was written by the WFU team after they came to the fire. It may have provided some valuable guidance to the team, but it had no bearing on the decision to let the South Barker Fire burn, because the fire was about ten days old by the time the plan was written.
The first thing that jumped out at me was on Page 3 under “II Objectives”. It states that, consistent with the Forest Land and Resource Management Plan goals, the objective was to restore and maintain ecosystems consistent with land uses and historic fire regimes. The fire did a lot more to disrupt ecosystems than it did to restore them. It effectively canceled all land uses for the duration of the fire and damaged scenic, timber, and watershed values for many years to come.
It is not clear what is meant by “historic fire regimes”. I suspect that may refer to the natural pattern of burning that might have occurred before there was any attempt to manage fire by the Forest Service. If my suspicion is accurate, you should quickly revise the forest plan to adopt a better goal. One of the primary reasons that the national forests were created was that the American people were not happy with the rate that “natural” fire was damaging the timber and watersheds and threatening their properties. Today’s local public is not exactly thrilled with the rates their national forests are being burned up by WFU’s and AMR’s either.
Several of the plan’s other objectives failed, but the team probably couldn’t prevent that. They were a victim of the situation that was handed to them because of the decision to let the fire burn. For instance, they set objectives to keep the fire from burning onto the Boise N.F., to keep it from burning private land, manage it in a cost effective manner, and interpret the role of the fire to visitors. The fire burned 3000 acres on the Boise N.F., it completely burned the private land in Marsh Cr., it cost $7 million to suppress and herd, and visitors were barred from the area by the closures. There was no way for the team to “make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”.
Under “Natural Resource Objectives”, I give the team good marks for leaving their camp sites in good condition. I saw nothing about trying to keep the fire from burning the steep granitic slopes that are prone to accelerated erosion. There is evidence that someone recognized the fire would destroy the stability of those slopes, because signs were erected right after the fire warning people of the increased threat of flash flooding, landslides, etc., but the fire was purposely herded into the higher, more fragile country.
There is an objective to minimize damage to identified conifer plantations to the extent practical. The plantations I saw were either not identified or were not considered practical to defend or else this objective just plain failed. I saw no mention of any concern for the value of the timber within the burned area. You may not be harvesting timber today, but I think the day is approaching when we can no longer afford to waste our domestic timber while we pay Canada to deplete their stands.
Under “Constraints”, the first one makes it clear that this fire should never have qualified as a WFU. It states that the fire must maintain or restore water quality for fish species. The fire was purposely herded into the higher, more fragile watersheds where the erosion potential is the greatest. Given the listing of the Bull Trout and the long-term reputation of the streams for sport fishing, it is hard to imagine why every effort wasn’t made to keep from burning the tributaries to Shake Creek, Willow Creek, and Skeleton Creek. To the team’s credit, there was consideration given to stopping the fire at Shake Creek and Willow Creek, but those options were not selected.
Another constraint was that it should be consistent with recreation opportunity spectrum objectives. I haven’t seen your ROS objectives, but I doubt if they condone burning the entire foreground view to three of your campgrounds and three miles of the north side of the main travel corridor.
Here again, by the time the team came, some of that damage was already occurring, but these constraints should have dictated that the fire be stopped as soon as possible.
On page 8, the plan obviously underrated the probability of the fire getting onto the Boise N.F.
A few other items caught my eye. You and Mike both stated that part of your decision to let the fire go was that it was a wet year and things looked green. Actually, the winter moisture was normal, but the plan states on page 9 that for 90 days prior to the fire the area received only 70% to 90% of normal precipitation. It also states on page 11 that no fuel moisture readings had been taken on the district prior to the fire. I think you and Mike may have been deceived by the “green” appearance and didn’t have any data to tell you the fuels were drier than you thought. The weather station being relied upon was at Fleck summit at an elevation of 7100 feet. Conditions are far different at that elevation than at 4500 feet in the river canyon. Even at Fleck summit, fuel moisture was low enough to allow active burning.
On page 11, under “Fire Behavior to Date”, there is a misleading statement about the fire when it was discovered. It sounds like it was up and moving in heavy fuels when first discovered. The fact is that it was in a single tree and was judged to not have much potential according to the news release you published on August 7.
Perhaps the most significant observations relative to this fire were made on page 14. The first paragraph substantiates what I have maintained from the onset. It states that, “The fuels in the fire area are very broken stands of mixed conifer, aspen, sagebrush, and open grassy slopes”. This substantiates the fact that the area had a very nice natural mosaic of vegetation and did not need to be burned to establish such a pattern. Even the cover photo on the plan shows this mosaic quite well.
At the bottom of page 14, the plan makes it clear that there is no pattern of difficult fires in the South Boise drainage which would lead a manager to think large-scale burning was necessary to get control of the fuel situation. The whole Fairfield district averages 6 to 7 fires per year and probably only half of those are in the South Boise drainage. In the last 18 years, only two fires have exceeded 100 acres. They both started the same day in August of 1992 and burned a total of 2,081 acres. I don’t have statistics, but the only other fairly large fire I remember in the South Boise part of the district since my dad went there as Ranger in 1937 was the fire I mentioned earlier in Barker Gulch in 1946. It was stopped at 80 acres the first night. There is at least 70 years of history coming right up to the present that says almost all fires in the South Fork drainage can be handled quite easily with aggressive initial attack. This area definitely should not have been a candidate for large-scale fires to reduce fuels.
The statement about smoke on page 26 projects a very casual concern about the impact of smoke. It says they “may” want to consult with Idaho State DEQ, but monitoring of smoke will be limited because of the area’s remoteness. There is no mention of the fact that smoke made the valley very unpleasant to be in for over a month and it reduced recreation opportunities as far away as the SNRA to almost zero on several days. I remember much more rigid attention to smoke management many years ago when we were just burning a few acres of logging slash. Has the concern about air pollution and carbon release vanished?
The plan used state-of-the-art computer modeling techniques to predict a number of factors. I respect the fact that a lot of work went into that effort. In spite of those efforts, the results didn’t match the predictions very well. For instance, on page 16 it states that on 8/18, they predicted that in seven days the fire would be about 9,000 acres. According to NIFC records, on the morning of 8/26, the fire was 19,426 acres. On page 27 there is an estimate of costs. It says the final cost of the fire will be $2,616,060. Actually, the fire cost over $7 million and no estimate of resource damage or rehabilitation is included.
On page 28, under the “Information Plan”, there is a section on key messages to try to sell to the public. One states that wildland fire is a natural process and another says that using wildland fire as a tool is an opportunity to reintroduce natural fire to the ecosystem. This kind of thinking is at the heart of the problem. Wildfire that is neither predictable nor controllable has no place in managed land with high resource and recreational values. All intentional burning should be done on a planned basis with carefully thought-out objectives, thorough analysis of impacts, compliance with all laws, public support, and under conditions that allow control of the outcome.
On page 29, there are some very misleading statements. One says, “The Sawtooth National Forest is on the cutting edge of wildland fire management by thoughtfully considering the full spectrum of incident management options”. The truth is that this fire should have been suppressed for a few hundred dollars when it was in one tree instead of costing over $7 million 35,000 damaged acres later. Most of the area should not have been burned at all. The small area that could have benefited by some underburning was burned in red-flag weather with severe damage to the standing timber and plantations.
Another statement on that same page suggests a future strategy of building on local community support for using wildland fire as a management tool. I know a number of people who live along the South Boise River. The closest thing to a positive feeling about the fire that I have heard came from the store owners. They said the smoke was almost intolerable, but the firefighters did spend some money at their businesses. Beyond that, the feelings of the people who have contacted me range from disbelief that the Forest Service would let this happen to complete anger and disgust. Many years of trust for the agency were lost in this one incident. There is no “local community support”.
The crowning statement is that, “The Sawtooth National Forest is committed to reducing the cost of managing wildland fire incidents, while meeting resource objectives without endangering the lives of firefighters and communities”. This one fire burned more acres and cost more money than all of the previous fires that have burned in the South Fork drainage of the Fairfield district since the Forest Service was created! Had it been aggressively attacked, it would have cost very little and would have only placed two or three people at risk for about one day.
Jane, all of the above is not something to feel good about or to continue. I hope you and all of your people as well as all others in the Forest Service will immediately return to a policy of responsible land stewardship wherein unplanned fires are immediately suppressed and intentional burning is done with proper planning and beneficial results.
Sincerely,
Glenn Bradley
by bear bait
by Bob Z.
What would it cost to bring Glenn Bradley out of retirement?
His knowledgeable assessment of all the political double-speak that pretends to be “fire science” and “forest management” these days is worth billions. Literally.
Time to get rid of the dead wood. The USFS has jumped the shark and taxpayers need to be made aware of the costly charade they have engaged in the past few years. Billions are being destroyed and wasted. Lives and dollars.
In the business world they hold seminars about critical thinking processes. Evidently that does not happen at the Forest level in the USFS. That critical thinking is not apparent, as revealed in these reviews by persons with long, successful management careers, is appalling. It is great public service for retired USFS management and line personnel to expose this WFU fraud for what it is, and to actively and publicly state their opinions.
We are losing assets and resources that take hundreds of years to replicate or replace, with a shrug and some sort of eco-babble justification from the powers that be. Smoke is claimed to be a great health hazard if you or I burn storm debris in our backyards or a farmer burns a field to remove pests and straw. Yet smoke from forest and range fire gets a pass. It is natural.
I got news. All smoke is natural if it is created by fire in plant material. And if there is a health hazard, forest and range fire is the most controllable source of that health hazard we have. I do wonder if the EPA is not remiss in failing to examine and cite Federal land managers for range and forest smoke when no effort at remediation or mitigation are made. In too many cases the USFS makes no attempt to extinguish or control a pollution source under their control and management. Instead, they encourage airshed pollution by policy and direction. That ought to make for a few interesting lawsuits.