SOS Forests

Revisiting the Station Fire

Last September the Station Fire [here] ignited in the Angeles National Forest, burned 160,600 acres, and destroyed 90 homes. Two Los Angeles County firefighters were fatally injured during the fire. The Station Fire was the largest fire in LA County history, cost nearly $100 million in suppression expenses alone, and inflicted economic damages of 10 to 50 times that amount.

Shortly after the fire was contained, the LA Times charged that mistakes had been made in fighting the fire [here]. Specifically, the newspaper alleged that aerial attacks were delayed in the first hours of the Station Fire, and the delay led to the fire growing out of control.

It was more than an hour after first light, and some six hours after U.S. Forest Service commanders had determined that the fire required a more aggressive air attack. But the skies remained empty of water-dropping helicopters — tankers that were readily available.

There was uncomfortable irony to the LA Times allegations. One year earlier LA Times reporter Bettina Boxall won a Pulitzer Prize for a series condemning aerial firefighting as a waste of money [here]:

Air tanker drops in wildfires are often just for show

The bulky aircraft are reassuring sights to those in harm’s way, but their use can be a needless and expensive exercise to appease politicians. Fire officials call them ‘CNN drops.’

In November an after-action review panel made up of two representatives of the U. S. Forest Service, one from L.A. County Fire Department, one from CalFire, and a private consultant determined that decisions made by Incident Commanders on the Station Fire were reasonable and prudent.

It was easy for the review panel to dismiss the hypocritical LA Times. That newspaper is hugely politicized and not in a good way. I inimitably wrote at the time [here]:

It is fascinating (like watching a train wreck) that those who would ground the aircraft and ban fire retardant are the first to whine when the aerial drops on a fire in their neighborhood are an hour late (according to their expectations). …

While the untreated fuels built up year after year, the LA Times sneered at fuels management, forest stewardship, and aerial firefighting. They editorialized (directly and indirectly) in favor of do-nothing un-management of national forests across the USA, with particular haughty superciliousness about hazard reduction on fire-prone forests in their own backyards.

Then, when a predictable holocaust erupted (again, for the umpteenth time in SoCal), the LA Times is suddenly pointing their bony finger at everybody and anybody other than themselves.

But the dripping-with-hypocrisy radical Left chic clique at the LA Times were not the only ones concerned with poor decision-making on the Station Fire. A collection of former (now retired) USFS officials were also dissatisfied with the cursory after-action review.

Last Tuesday a penitent LA Times published the following story:

Former Forest Service officials want a wider probe of the Station fire

Many believe last year’s internal investigation ignored critical errors.

By Paul Pringle, Los Angeles Times, May 18, 2010 [here]

A group of former U.S. Forest Service officials is calling for a new and independent investigation into the agency’s handling of last year’s devastating Station fire, with many contending that an internal inquiry completed in November ignored critical missteps.

That probe by the Forest Service’s Washington, D.C., headquarters found no tactical errors in the initial attack on the fire. And in a key conclusion, it blamed hazardous terrain for the lack of a heavy air assault early on the fateful second day, when the blaze began to race across the Angeles National Forest.

“I didn’t think that conclusion was even close to being correct,” said Larry Boggs, a former fire management officer who worked for the Forest Service for 31 years, 13 of them in the Angeles. “It was a whitewash. Aircraft would have been quite effective on the fire that day.”

Many of the two dozen retired officials asking for the investigation held prominent positions in the Angeles and in the Forest Service’s regional and national offices, said an organizer of the group, William Derr, a former special agent in charge of the Forest Service’s law enforcement arm in California. Many remained active in fire protection for years after their retirement in a variety of consulting, contracting and teaching jobs, Derr said.

It is easy to dismiss the two-faced LA Times, but not so easy to ignore real fire experts. The two dozen “retired officials” are among the most accomplished and experienced forest and fire managers in the world. The current leadership of the USFS learned their craft at the feet of the retirees, who include in their number former Forest Supervisors, Regional Foresters, Deputy Chiefs, and Special Agents.

Last December the retired experts contacted USFS Chief Tom Tidwell and Region 5 Regional Forester Randy Moore and requested a more comprehensive review of the Station Fire. The parties met in January and the current administrators said they would look into the matter. Additional inquiries were made, but no official follow-up review has been undertaken.

Until last Tuesday, the matter had been circumspect. The LA Times accurately reported the reason for that:

The retirees began a behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign for a rigorous review in October, making their case through e-mail exchanges, telephone calls and meetings with Forest Service administrators, said Derr, who wrote several letters to the agency asking for the fuller investigation. Even after those requests were rejected, Derr said, he and other retirees were reluctant to go public because of an enduring loyalty to the Forest Service.

Loyalty is a complex thing. The folks involved have served exemplary careers with the Outfit, and their loyalty and affection for the US Forest Service is beyond question. But when that agency is suffering a real collapse of leadership and expertise, and repeated failures to achieve the mission, loyalty demands tough love — a sincere effort to correct incipient flaws and inadequacies.

The Station Fire was one of numerous highly destructive megafires arising on USFS lands that have ravaged both public and private property over the last two decades. The root causes of our ongoing forest fire crisis are fairly obvious yet seemingly intractable.

The principal cause of megafires is the enormous fuel build-up that has occurred on USFS lands. The USFS is not the National Park Service; the USFS mission is to actively manage vegetation for multiple resource values, not to take a hands-off, leave-nature-alone approach. Yet that stewardship mission has been obstructed by various political forces, and as a consequence biomass has accumulated to a-historical, extremely hazardous proportions.

Wilderness, roadlessness, and a no-touch philosophy has been forced upon the USFS from the outside, despite internal resistance. So ill-conceived is the no-touch philosophy that incendiary fuels have been allowed to build up next to the densest population centers in the West: Los Angeles, San Diego, Oakland, etc.

The catastrophic fires are predictable and preventable, but USFS efforts to treat fuels have been hamstrung and sabotaged by lawsuits from the radical Left chic clique.

At the same time, those so-called “environmentalists” have also undercut and compromised fire suppression efforts. As pointed out above and elsewhere on this website, there has been a strong push by certain factions to dismantle firefighting capacity and expertise.

It’s a double whammy — allow fuels to build up to unheard of levels and sabotage fire suppression. The results of those policies are not only predictable, they are writ large upon the landscape by the tens of millions of acres of scorched earth, destroyed ecosystems, and smoking ruins of homes, towns, and cities.

Despite outward appearances, the root problem is not biological, not founded in ignorance, and not overly expensive to solve. The root problem is political. It is a question of political will, and currently those who will destruction have the upper hand.

The Station Fire could have been prevented, or at least mitigated and much less destructive, if common sense land stewardship had been applied beforehand. We have tens of millions of acres in the West where application of common sense stewardship — ecologically sensitive and restorative treatments — are desperately needed. The capacity to treat those lands exists; all we need is the will to do it.

The Station Fire could have been controlled at a much smaller size and without so much damage to natural and human-built resources if fire managers were given a green light to put fires out — instead of a red or yellow light and handicapping restraints on fire suppression practices.

The LA Times reported:

After learning of the calls for another inquiry, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) told The Times that he plans to convene a panel of Los Angeles-area House members to take testimony here, including from the retirees.

“We can have a full airing of the issues that have been raised,” said Schiff, who also has urged Congress to require the Forest Service to consider ending a practice that bars its firefighting aircraft from flying night missions.

Forest Service officials said they would welcome the Schiff hearings. “We’ve got nothing to hide,” said Angeles Forest Supervisor Jody Noiron.

The retirees said a second Station fire review should look at whether the Forest Service generally has become less aggressive in attacking wildland blazes and had been hobbled by an exodus of managers with firefighting expertise.

Well okay. Everybody agrees that a full inquiry won’t hurt. Nobody has anything to hide. Let’s have a full airing of the issues.

A full airing, of all the issues.

It’s time for that. Let’s not limit the inquiry to situational nuance and he-said-she-said. Let’s get down the nitty gritty. Let’s look at the root causes of the Station Fire and other megafires with the intention of solving our forest fire crisis nationwide today.

The piecemeal approach, fire by fire with narrow focus and blinders on, has not been successful. We need to take a Big Picture approach instead. Allow all the political factions to have their say in the public arena — not just the chic clique in their dying Dead Tree Press. Let’s blow this issue wide open and get to the root causes.

I’m not afraid of doing that. The retirees are not. Congress claims to be courageous. The USFS has nothing to hide. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain — but if we don’t get to the roots of our fire crisis and we don’t address the causes, then we truly will lose a great deal to repeated megafire destruction and disaster.