SOS Forests

Assuming Responsibility for Forest Fires

by Glenn Bradley, USFS (ret.)

Personnel from the Sawtooth NF gave a talk about the South Barker Fire at our Forest Service Retirees luncheon last week.  The maps, charts, and tables they brought represented a great deal of work by current USFS staff.

I think some of the figures needed some additional interpretation, however. The fire looks better on the papers than it does on the hillsides. First, the burn intensity map shows a high percentage of the burned area with relatively cool burns. It would be closer to the truth to say that most of the fire area did not have enough fuel to carry a hot fire and therefore did not need to be burned in the first place. Although the fuel was light, the fire did burn what precious little vegetation there was to hold the soil on those steep granitic soils.

Conversely, the areas that burned severely incurred a great deal of unacceptable damage to the forty-six year-old pine plantations and to foreground scenic values along three miles of the river at the west end of the fire. When I visited Marsh Creek in October, I estimated that about half of the plantations were killed. At the meeting, USFS staff reported 30 percent mortality.  That sounded quite low to me, but it still is an unacceptable waste of the significant investment in site preparation, planting, and forty-six years of growth and care.

As presented, the percentage of intensely burned riparian areas was also deceiving. The maps denoted riparian areas as strips 600 feet wide on each side of a stream.  Therefore, even though the stream beds we saw in Marsh Creek, Barker Gulch, and Willow Creek were completely gutted by the fire, they represented only a small percentage of the 1200 foot wide strip and showed up in the figures as a minor impact. In truth, in that steep country the real riparian area is often only a few feet wide and if it all burns, the impact is 100 percent.

Letting this fire burn was a huge mistake. It is not rational management to let the timing and location of lightning strikes determine when and where fires burn. There is no moral difference between intentionally setting fires in the forest and allowing easily-extinguishable fires burn. Both should be crimes. It is completely wrong to either set or let a fire burn with no real way of knowing where it might stop or how much damage it will do.

Many people are immensely frustrated with the whole WFU concept. I have boiled it down to just a few thoughts which explain why decisions are made to let very damaging and expensive fires develop. I have concluded that just a few principles are driving the policy, and making the use of WFU events popular with some fire managers.

Perhaps the major factor is the budget process.  It has been impossible for most units to get funds to carry out needed prescribed burns, so they have chosen the option of waiting for a lightning strike, letting it burn, declaring it an emergency, and tapping into the unlimited funds that come rolling their way. In the case of the South Barker Fire, the $7 million dollars spent boosted the district budget from $3 million to $10 million. A great temptation!

The next factor is the lack of preparatory effort. Fire managers simply rely on the forest plan to provide all of the necessary NEPA documentation and suffer no stress of public meetings or appeals that could occur from project planning.

The third benefit to a fire manager is that there is no way to lose. By waiting for lightning to set the fire, they can call it a “natural” event and assume no responsibility for the results. If the Forest Plan draws the acceptable boundaries big enough, it is almost impossible to have an “escaped fire”.

Some problems with these factors are that Congress appropriates money with the intent that it should be used for the purpose it was appropriated.  If they learn that a District Ranger or Forest Supervisor can manipulate the process and capture huge amounts of money simply by choosing not to put a small fire out, they will probably figure out a way to plug the hole in the money sack.

I predict the lack of planning and preparation will soon backfire.  Forest Plans clearly do not contain the site-specific analyses and documentation required by NEPA.  As soon as someone gets mad enough to challenge the process in court, the Forest Service will lose and pay for whatever damages occurred.  If the Forest Service chooses not to comply with NEPA, judges will see that they do.

The practice of blaming “nature” for the fire and letting it do what comes naturally will have to be terminated, or the public and Congress will soon figure out that they don’t need a Forest Service in which no one assumes the responsibility for managing our national forests.

I hope by next fire season there is a rational policy of managing fires.

The Fix Is In — Lawsuit to Kill Old-Growth

The enviros are suing again, this time to promote, not prevent, the destruction of old-growth forests.

Shocking but true. I’ll say that again, just so you don’t get the message backwards. A slash pile of so-called “conservation” groups filed a lawsuit Nov. 24th against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to enjoin the Spotted Owl Recovery Plan. Their reasoning: the Plan allows for restoration forestry that would prevent and/or reduce the impact of catastrophic fire in Oregon old-growth forests.

Some background. The northern spotted owl was listed as endangered species in 1990. Finally, 18 years later, a recovery plan was presented last May [here], after the USFWS was forced to do so by court order. The reason given by the USFWS for NOT creating a recovery plan in all those years, something required within 3 years of listing under the Endangered Species Act, was that the Northwest Forest Plan satisfied that requirement. From the USFWS Press Release that accompanied the 2008 The Northern Spotted Owl Recovery Plan (NSORP):

A draft recovery plan for the northern spotted owl was completed in 1992 but not finalized due to the development of the Northwest Forest Plan, which amended 26 land and resource management plans (LRMPs) of the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. These LRMPs serve as the basis of conservation for a wide variety of species, including the northern spotted owl. The draft recovery plan released today builds on the Forest Plan and solely addresses the recovery needs of the northern spotted owl.

The Northwest Forest Plan has been a catastrophic failure. Spotted owl populations have declined 60 percent or more, old-growth habitat has been incinerated in megafires, and the economy of the region, especially the rural economy, has been decimated. Absolutely no good has come from the Northwest Forest Plan. The years of suffering and tragedy associated have been a monumental waste.

A draft spotted owl recovery plan was proposed by the USFWS over a year ago, but withdrawn after wide criticisms. The draft plan promoted “wildland fire use” (whoofoos) in spotted owl forests. The final plan, the NSORP, threw out all the whoofoo language.

more »

Ruling on management of roadless wilderness areas will cause more destructive forest fires

From The JURIST Legal News and Research Services, Dec 8, 2008 [here]

by Mike Dubrasich, Executive Director, Western Institute for Study of the Environment

With her most recent decision, Magistrate Laporte is playing a game of judicial chicken, perverting NEPA, and causing catastrophic harm to the environment.

Background: the Clinton (Dombeck) Roadless Rule was rushed through (by proclamation) in the waning days of that administration. It was immediately litigated in more than a dozen courts. In 2003, Judge Brimmer, a United States District Court Judge for the District of Wyoming, found, in response to the Complaint filed by the State of Wyoming, that NEPA had been violated on several different levels, including the fact that Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) input from the states had been excluded, the process had been rushed, the United States Forest Service (USFS) had failed to take the requisite “hard look” at the proposed rule, and that the NEPA process was a sham in order to adopt a political rule. Judge Brimmer also found that the Roadless Rule violated the Wilderness Act in that it designated 58.5 million acres as defacto wilderness despite the fact that only Congress has the authority to do so. Judge Brimmer enjoined the Roadless Rule. The USFS developed an alternative plan to ensure that states would be part of the process. This plan, called the State Petitions procedure, ensured that not only state concerns would be addressed, but that tribes, local governments, and the general public would be able to express their concerns in order to develop site-specific rules for each National Forest.

The usual enviromental groups sued in the Ninth District Court and, in 2006, Magistrate Laporte concluded that the State Petitions procedure violated NEPA because it was not accompanied by an EIS. In the strangest twist of legal logic, she then reinstated the illegal Roadless Rule, and ordered that the USFS comply with its terms. She made that ruling despite Judge Brimmer’s earlier decision, despite the fact that Judge Brimmer reached his conclusions after a comprehensive review of the Administrative Record, and despite the fact that she had no idea as to whether the Roadless Rule complied with NEPA or not. Her decision was odd to say the least, which is confirmed by the fact that the State Petitions procedure was not an environmental action per se but a remedy to fix the original defective and illegal Roadless Rule EIS. Requiring an EIS to fix an EIS sets up an infinite loop of EIS’s.

more »

Money growing on Oregon trees

by Tom Partin, guest opinion, the Oregonian, November 30, 2008 [here]

The economic news facing Oregon is grim. Governor Ted Kulongoski and the state’s legislative leaders face an anticipated $1 billion budget shortfall and an unemployment rate that has shot up to 7.3 percent. Meanwhile, Oregon’s forest products industry is struggling mightily and is estimated to lose another 7 percent of its jobs in 2009 on top of the 7.5 percent reduction experienced this year. The Governor has an opportunity to aid Oregon’s economy and the struggling wood products sector by supporting the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Western Oregon Plan Revision.

The BLM’s plan would help put rural Oregonians back to work and improve forest health conditions for the 2.1 million acres of O&C County timberlands in southwest Oregon. The plan calls for the sustainable harvest of 502 million board feet annually, which is less than half of the annual growth of these forests. The plan also sets aside over half of those lands for endangered species. It is a balanced plan that would also help idle plants reopen and improve the dire economic conditions the Governor must now address.

Harvests from Oregon’s federal forests are less than 10 percent of levels experienced in the early 1990s. A more sustainable level of harvest is needed to help the industry access reasonably priced local timber to remain economically viable in the face of intense domestic and international competition. Our federal forests are also in a dire need of increased management to address a growing forest health crisis.

more »

Wizard Fire Review

The Deschutes National Forest has issued (Dec. 3rd) a Fire Review of the Wizard Fire.

The Wizard Fire was a prescribed fire set by USFS personnel last Sept. 25th in the Metolius Research Natural Area. The intention was to underburn 30 acres. The fire escaped, however, and 1,840 acres burned on both sides of the Metolius River near Wizard Falls, a mile north of Canyon Creek and 3 miles north of Camp Sherman.

The Wizard Fire was declared a wildfire the day after ignition, and $3,849,914 were spent on fire suppression before 100% containment was achieved on Oct. 4th (see W.I.S.E. Fire Tracking [here]).

The Deschutes Fire Review is [here]. The Review Team attributed the fire escape to the lack of fire patrols during the evening of Sept. 25.

The principle causal factor of the escape stemmed from a lack of patrolling of the unit the evening or next morning following ignition. No agency policy was violated, however the prescribed burn organization failed to implement required operational procedures.

A Prescribed Fire Burn Plan was prepared, approved and met policy requirements, but did not sufficiently address the mop up and patrol phase of the prescribed fire. There was no documentation or formal plan developed (which was supported by interviews) for mop up and patrol the following day. These are procedures which normally occur in the periods following ignition of a prescribed fire.

Instead of patrolling the fire, the burning crew went home at 6:00 pm. There was no mention of patrolling in the Burn Plan, which addressed only the day of ignition with no mention of subsequent work. Mop-up was discussed in the Burn Plan but not implemented. The Review noted that:

1. Implementation documentation, including plans for post ignition efforts [was] poor. …

2. Distractions such as personnel rotating off the burn assignment due to approved annual leave, Incident Management Team activations of key personnel, not filling positions behind detailed personnel, work assignment diversions, and individual personal issues, prevented supervisory overhead redundancy from noticing breakdowns in critical operational requirements such as post-ignition patrols.

3. There was a perception of a pressure to burn more acres (either through the fire organization or through a sense of individual responsibility) that may have lead to urgency to move from one unit to the next without adequate attention to the previous day, as well as a perception of being understaffed to meet expectations. …

4. Relatively new or less tenured employees may have assumed that overhead were taking care of operational activities when in fact they were not.

5. … There was an initial impression by some personnel that snags should not be cut unless a serious threat or a problem. This led to a delay in falling the snags that were threatening the fireline creating possible firefighter safety issues and changes in tactics. …

There were no special weather events, no wind storms or sudden heat waves that might have contributed to the escape. The Review Team placed the blame on poor or negligent actions on the part of the burning crew.

However, in this observer’s opinion, the real culprit was the lack of forest preparation. The 30-acre site and the surrounding forest had not been adequately prepared to receive fire. Too many small trees, fuel concentrations, and flammable snags were present. What should have been a low-running ground fire threw burning embers into dense fuel concentrations.

If significant restoration forestry had been done ahead of time, then those problems could have been rectified and mitigated.
more »

Magistrate Laporte Thumbs Nose at Judge Brimmer

Tuesday Magistrate Elizabeth Laporte of San Francisco reinstated Clinton’s Roadless Rule, again, in spite of US District Judge Clarence A. Brimmer’s issuance of a permanent national injunction against that Rule last August [here].

Magistrate Laporte decided that the Clinton Roadless Rule would stand in the Ninth District (and New Mexico), but not the Tenth District. In “the spirit of comity” Laporte decided Judge Brimmer’s  national injunction was regional only, and her magistrateship would trump Judge Brimmer’s in California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Idaho, and Montana, and New Mexico, too, even though the latter is the Tenth District [see US District Court map here].

Some comity, eh? More like a game of chicken. Magistrate Laporte’s decision is [here]. Specifically, she

… set aside the State Petitions for Inventoried Roadless Area Management Rule (“State Petitions Rule”) (70 Fed. Reg. 25,654 (May 13, 2005), reinstated the Roadless Area Conservation Rule (“Roadless Rule”) (66 Fed. Reg. 3,244 (Jan. 12, 2001) and enjoined Defendants “from taking any further action contrary to the Roadless Rule without undertaking environmental analysis consistent with this opinion.”

In so many words, Magistrate Laporte enjoined the State Petitions procedure because implementation of that procedure was done without an Environmental Impact Statement as required under NEPA (the National Environmental Policy Act).

Now this is complicated, so I hope you follow it. Clinton’s Roadless Rule (locking up 58.5 million acres) was done as a last minute act just before Slick Willie departed the Oval Office. His Rule was jammed through by then USFS Chief Mike Dombeck without proper NEPA analysis. After Bush II took office, a number of states sued the USFS under NEPA. Wyoming’s petition was heard by Judge Brimmer. He ruled, in 2003, that Clinton’s Roadless Rule was arbitrary and capricious because it violated NEPA.

Get it? The original Rule violated NEPA. The USFS was in a quandary. What to do, what to do? They didn’t want to throw out Slick Willie’s and Dombeck’s junk Rule, but they were ordered to do so by the Tenth Circuit Court. Indeed, fourteen additional courts found the same flaws that Judge Brimmer did. So Bush II’s USFS Chief, Dale Bosworth, decided to let the individual state’s have some say so in whether they wanted all that acreage declared roadless or not.

more »

The Draft 2009 Quadrennial Fire Review

The National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG) has prepared a draft 2009 Quadrennial Fire Review (QFR). The NWCG is made up of representatives of the U.S. Forest Service and the four U. S. Department of Interior agencies that constitute the federal wildland fire bureaucracy. The 2009 QFR, like its predecessor, the 2005 QFR, is “a strategic evaluative process that develops an internal assessment of current programs and capabilities for comparison to future needs for fire management.”

The draft 2009 QFR has been made available through the International Association of Fire Chiefs [here].

In the draft, facilitator Dr. Al Hyde (a senior staff consultant on public management innovation for the Brookings Institution’s Center for Public Policy Education) requested comments and constructive criticism. We were only too happy to oblige.

W.I.S.E.’s comments regarding the draft 2009 Quadrennial Fire Review are [here].

Please enjoy, and pass them on.

Fire Kills Old-Growth Say Researchers

We have stressed repeatedly that wildfires kill old-growth. This is not news. It is a well-known fact. Old-growth was killed in the Biscuit Fire (2002), B&B Fire (2003), Black Crater Fire (2007), and Rattle Fire (2008), among hundreds of other recent fires covering millions of acres.

I don’t think there is any point to linking to all the previous SOSF posts on this subject. It would be a lot of work anyway, because there are so many. Here is one of many photos of fire-killed old-growth posted previously. Click on the pic for a larger image.

If you can find the unhappy blogging forester in this photo, it will give you some sense of scale.

Other forest experts have pointed out the obvious, that fire kills old-growth. Drs. K. Norman Johnson and Jerry F. Franklin gave testimony to Congress a year ago [here], and they were quite frank about the fact that fire kills old-growth.

Now a new study by US Forest Service researchers confirms what everybody already knew: fire is killing old-growth.

more »

Invoking Misconceptions About “Ecosystems”

Another in our seemingly endless series about the “balance of nature” and other intellectually bankrupt eco-babble concepts [see also here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and many others].

The Ecosystem Illusion

Review by Mark Sagoff, professor at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland, College Park. 2000. [here]

of: Defending Illusions: Federal Protection of Ecosystems, by Allan K. Fitzsimmons. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999, 330 pp.

The protection of nature is a goal easier to embrace than to explain. If by “nature” we mean everything in the universe–all that is bound by the laws of physics–then our protection of nature is not required. Since we cannot perform miracles, our actions are as natural and fit as much into nature’s design or plan as the behavior of any object or organism. The opposite of nature in this sense is the supernatural, defined as anything to which the laws of nature do not apply. …

In Defending Illusions, Allan Fitzsimmons, an environmental consultant, argues persuasively that nature in this sense, above the level of the organism, possesses neither organizing principles nor emergent qualities that biologists can study. It has no health or integrity for humans to respect. The only laws or principles in nature are those that apply to everything and that human beings cannot help but obey. …

Historically, racists, sexists, and tyrants of all sorts have invoked conceptions of nature or of the natural to condemn whatever they happened to oppose. Fitzsimmons believes that environmentalists who appeal to the notion of the ecosystem similarly misrepresent their own preferences as those of Mother Nature. Because science must speak in secular terms, it refers to ecosystems instead of to Mother Nature or to Creation and ascribes design to ecosystems without any mention of the Designer. This conception of nature as orderly, however, derives not from any empirical evidence but from assumptions and beliefs that are essentially romantic or theological.

Fitzsimmons quotes Jack Ward Thomas, the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service in the Clinton administration: “I promise you I can do anything you want to do by saying it is ecosystem management. . . But right now it’s incredibly nebulous.” The utter nebulousness–indeed, vacuity–of the ecosystem concept accounts for its amazing prominence in environmental policy and planning, because researchers can absorb any amount of funding in trying to understand concepts such as ecosystem health, integrity, and stability. These concepts, Fitzsimmons argues, will always mean what anybody wants them to mean and thus will only add confusion to the already impossible goal of keeping nature free of human influence.

Fitzsimmons also quotes environmental scientists such as Oregon State University professor Jane Lubchenco, who concedes that the goal of sustaining ecosystems “is difficult to translate into specific objectives” in practice. He adds that “no amount of training–theological or ecological–can give substance to such notions as ‘the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.’” This does not imply, however, that Fitzsimmons opposes well-defined efforts to provide green space, protect wetlands, add to the nation’s parklands, preserve endangered species, and so on. Rather, he argues that vague imperatives implied in theories of ecosystem management provide no clear goals and offer no way to measure progress in these efforts. ..

For the entire review, please see [here].

Mt. Hood Wilderness Expansion Is Bad Public Lands Policy

Wilderness designation is fatal to forests. As we pointed out in our (not yet completed) series entitled Fraudulent Wilderness [here, here, here], wilderness designation destroys forests, wildlife, habitat, watersheds, airsheds, heritage, and other environmental values by eliminating stewardship, stewardship that has been ongoing in the Americas for 13,500 years.

For example, this summer catastrophic fires incinerated old-growth forests, habitat, and heritage in the Boulder Creek Wilderness, Sky Lakes Wilderness, South Sierra Wilderness, Jarbidge Wilderness, and Ventana Wilderness. The damages beyond the Wilderness boundaries from smoke, fire, and watershed destruction were severe and will be long-lasting.

Other designated wilderness areas subject to catastrophic fires since designation include Alpine Lakes, Bandelier, Black Canyon, Bob Marshall, Bull of the Woods, Frank Church-River of No Return, Golden Trout, Gospel Hump, Hells Canyon, Lake Chelan-Sawtooth, Manzano Mountain, Marble Mountains, Mount Adams, Mount Hood, Mount Jefferson, Mount Washington, Okefenokee, Rogue Umpqua Divide, Saddle Mountain, Selway-Bitterroot, Siskiyou, Tatoosh, Yolla-Bolly, San Rafael, Dick Smith, Three Sisters, Kalmiopsis, Matilija, and many others.

The lame duck Congress is gearing up to declare millions more acres “wilderness” in contempt of the true nature of those lands and without regard for the environmentally disastrous consequences.

The following letter from Mr. John Marker, USFS (ret.) points out to Congress, once again, that wilderness designation is fraught with negative externalities, not the least of which is the inevitable destruction of watershed values. SOS Forests kudos to John for his unwavering devotion to good stewardship and indefatigable efforts to educate Congress about the on-the-ground realities.

10 November 2008

To: Senator Ron Wyden

Dear Senator Wyden:

Once again I write to you urging reconsideration of your support for expanded legislated wilderness on Mt. Hood. The past summer provided another wake up call of why wilderness expansion is a bad idea.  The Gnarl Ridge Fire, the second major fire in the last five years on the North side of Mt Hood, burned 3280 acres, killing most of the trees on half of the burned area, and damaging trees on the remainder. The fire would have also destroyed Cloud Cap Inn and Tilly Jane recreation area, both historic sites, without several accurate air tanker drops and good luck. Control costs of the fire are estimated at $15 million.

The Gnarl fire burned through about 40% of the Crystal Springs Water District’s Zone of Contribution, land that collects snow and rain for Crystal Springs, a major source of domestic water for the Hood River Valley.  Damage to the watershed is still being studied.  Insect killed trees, heavy fuel loading from overstocked forests, topography and lack of access were major obstacles to control of this fire.  Half of the land burned was in designated wilderness.  Wilderness areas, as the two recent fires illustrate, neither save or protect Mt. Hood.  Fire on the mountain with today’s fuel loading and changing weather conditions is not natural, but destructive, and healing the damage is in decades if not centuries. The expansion of legal wilderness area on the mountain is bad public policy, in my opinion, based upon 50 years as a forester.

The goal of protecting this magnificent natural resource is commendable, but proposed wilderness expansion will, in my view, place the mountain at greater risk of damage, and also increase risk of harm to neighboring lands and communities. The proposal also ignores the 1897 Organic Act’s mandate of sustained production of renewable resources from the national forests with water and wood priority.  Wood supply may no longer be critical, but water is, and certainly from Mt. Hood.

Legislated Wilderness provides no protection for the land from impacts of fire, insects, disease, catastrophic storms, air pollution or climate change. This designation severely limits the ability to control or prevent damage from such forces by strictly limiting management and treatment options as well as access.  Wilderness constraints jeopardize protection of adjacent non-wilderness areas such as Bull Run, Government Camp, Cooper Spur and other land and communities adjacent to the national forest.

Currently many areas of forest inside the proposed Wilderness expansions are threatened by aggressive insect and disease activity, plus the continuing build up of fire risk from dead and overcrowded trees. If, as many scientists predict, the Northwest climate pattern continues warmer and drier, the risk of destruction will expand as forest ecosystems are weakened by this change.  The increasing human use of the mountain also raises the threat of damage to the land from overuse and abuse. To ignore these realities contradicts the stated goal of “protecting” and “saving” Mt. Hood.

An alternative for protecting Mt. Hood is available.  It is development of the plan called for in the Walden-Blumenauer legislative proposal, starting with acknowledgement of the biological and climatic forces constantly at work on the mountain, which recognizes Mt. Hood’s critical role of providing clean and abundant water for more than a million people living in its shadow. The plan must also recognize the reality of federal budget constraints.

Once these fundamentals are understood, a plan for the mountain’s future, with watershed value as the critical resource, can be built. It will establish guidelines for protecting watershed values, the forests, recreation and other values.  This process can be expedited by using the existing congressionally mandated national forest plan as a starting point.

To my way of thinking, recognition up front of the priority for Mt. Hood management, and understanding that locking up the land is not the way to save or protect against the challenges of people and nature.  Stretching and bending the intent and provisions of the Wilderness Act to “protect” and “save” this land does a disservice to the intent of the act and those who created it, and to the public’s land.

Sincerely:

John F. Marker, Forester (ret.)

The Concern Over Forest Policy Is Not New

An important news story, with a twist:

As Fires Scorch West, Forest Policy Is Concern

By John H. Cushman Jr., The New York Times

Between the radiant sky and the parched earth, the only sign of fire in the rugged Boise National Forest was a glowing ember of fear in the eyes of the forest supervisor, Stephen P. Mealey.

“I am sitting here terrified,” he said on Sunday. “The only thing between us and disaster is a lightning strike.” …

A fire weather forecast — red flag warnings, lightning level one — crackled over the helicopter radio as he flew over a 250,000-acre expanse scorched bare by a wildfire…

His helicopter settled in a remote clearing in a place called Tiger Creek, and Mr. Mealey clambered up a slope where, shortly before the 1992 fire, the woods had been thinned of underbrush and then lightly burned by the Forest Service. At the height of its intensity, the 1992 fire had raced through the treetops until it reached the spot where he stood.

“When the fire hit this site, it lay down,” Mr. Mealey said, and the thinned woods survived intact. Now, in a plan that would radically change the management of his 2.5 million-acre forest, Mr. Mealey wants to greatly expand the thinning of the dense woods and the use of controlled burning.

This new approach is important, Mr. Mealey said, because conditions are so ripe for catastrophic fire that the odds approach inevitability here and in many areas of the drought-stricken West. But he said it was going to be a “tough sell” and could take a long time to put into effect.

In a report issued in April, the National Commission on Wildfire Disasters, set up after the devastating fires in Yellowstone National Park in 1988, endorsed this philosophy of intensive thinning followed by the use of small, controlled fires to burn out parts of forests throughout the West.

“The prevention of catastrophic wildfires must begin with the restoration of more healthy forests through the reduction of dangerous fuel levels and the eventual increase of less intense and more ecologically friendly fires,” said Neil Sampson, the commission’s chairman and the executive vice president of American Forests, a conservation group. …

He and some local forestry experts say this is an unnatural condition caused by decades of logging large trees, mainly Ponderosa pines, that resist fire and drought especially well, and allowing smaller, more flammable and densely packed species to remain. …

Mr. Mealey and others want the forest to look more as it did at the start of the century, dominated by thinly spaced, towering Ponderosa pine, never allowing the shorter, denser and more flammable Douglas fir to encroach on it.

Dr. Leon F. Neuenschwander, a forestry professor at the University of Idaho at Moscow, has recommended applying a combination of commercial logging, selective thinning and controlled fires on 50,000 acres a year over the next 10 to 30 years. …

What’s the twist?

more »

New Regional Forester On Meet-and-Greet Tour

Recently named Region 6 U.S. Forest Service Regional Forester Mary Wagner [here] was joined by U.S. Congressman Greg Walden at a community meeting in Enterprise, Oregon, last month. The two heard serious complaints about USFS management. From the Wallowa County Chieftain [here]:

FS looks to new tools for new times

Tour conducted by Congressman Walden introduces brand-new regional forester to ‘passionate’ testimony in Elgin, exemplary problem-solvers in Enterprise

By Kathleen Ellyn and Samantha Bates, Wallowa County Chieftain & East Oregonian, 10/30/2008

Brand-new Region 6 U.S. Forest Service Supervisor Mary Wagner wanted to assure rural counties that she was as eager to see management policy changes in the Forest Service as they were.

“We need new tools for new times,” she admitted to a group of more than 30 citizens, timber industry leaders, representatives from environmental, tribal and community organizations and county officials Oct. 22 in Enterprise.

“Today there is a call to experiment with different things because doing what we’re doing is not getting us to the goal we want,” she said. “We have an obligation to look at things a different way.”

She was preaching to the choir.

By the time she rolled into Enterprise in the company of county payments champion U.S. Congressman Greg Walden (R-OR), who was continuing his 16-county, 63-meeting tour, she had heard loud and clear from every community in her region that what the Forest Service needed was a complete overhaul of its business model.

more »

Guerrilla Forest Planning

In secrecy, in the dead of night, beyond the view of the public, the US Forest Service has altered Forest Plans across the nation.

Over 30 National Forests today have adopted Let It Burn into their Forest Plans, with no public notice, no public hearings, no peep to the Media, no announcements in the Federal Register, no word to the wise at all.

Like Viet Cong guerrillas, USFS officials have donned black pajamas and ski masks to creep with stealth into the document vaults, and they have pasted whoofoo (WFU, Wildland Fire Use) between the lines in Fire Plans from Washington to New Mexico, from Montana to California.

The Fire Plans are part and parcel of the Forest Plans. Such Plans are required by law (NEPA) to be presented to the public for open and transparent evaluation prior to adoption or alteration. The USFS leadership knows that, but their jiggering of Fire Plans and injecting Let It Burn was so offensive and improper that they knew the public would reject it. So they did it in secrecy.

Like the eco-terrorists who have burned Ranger Stations and schools, USFS leaders perpetrated the Burn Baby Burn Plans under the cover of darkness.

And now, when the terrorist planning is coming to light, the USFS is claiming that the Plans are inviolate and must be obeyed. They are the law, even though they were created illegally.

And now millions of acres of our forests have been in incinerated in whoofoo Let It Burn fires perpetrated by the selfsame guerrilla agents who doctored the Fire Plans.

There was no public announcement, no NEPA process, when the Sawtooth NF scribbled whoofoo provisions into their Fire Plans. This summer the Sawtooth NF burned 38,500 acres in the South Barker WFU Fire [here], in accordance with their altered Fire Plan. When questioned about the lack of NEPA compliance, the excuse given was “we didn’t have time for that.”

The NEPA process would have revealed that Let It Burn wildfires in the middle of summer damage vegetation, wildlife, watersheds, airsheds, public health and safety, recreation, roads and infrastructure, and cost $millions (in the case of the South Barker WFU Fire, $7,041,364 in “suppression” costs alone, but inflicting 10 to 20 times that much in resource losses).

Nobody bothered to inform the public when the Ochoco NF adopted whoofoo. But altered Fire Plan verbiage was the excuse given to the public when the Ochoco NF burned the Mitchell Watershed in the Bridge Creek WFU Fire [here] this summer. That fire jumped the property line and burned 2,000 acres of private land, too. When the private landowners complained, the USFS spokesperson sneered at them and told them to “file a claim.” Yet no public filing was done when the Ochoco NF wrote secret whoofoo language into their Fire Plan.

Mum was the word at the Sequoia NF when they adopted WFU. But it was tough to hide the Clover WFU Fire (15,300 acres, $8,315,000) [here].

Dead-of-night secrecy was the strategy at the Humboldt-Toiyabe NF, Okanogan-Wenatchee NF, Gila NF, Bitterroot NF, Caribou-Targhee NF, Boise NF, Wallowa-Whitman NF, and dozens of others.

The latest rumor is that 30 National Forests have altered their Fire Plans to include whoofoo. The number of public hearings in that regard? Zero. The cost? $2 billion in direct costs this year alone and perhaps $50 billion in resource damages.

Government functionaries sneaking around altering documents in the dead of night, alterations that “legally” allow them to incinerate vast tracts of public forest, is not the way “open government” is supposed to work. It is more akin to totalitarian-style government.

It is time to root the guerrilla terrorist public employees out their spider holes. We need an office by office search to round up the midnight document forgers. It is time to shine the bright light of public scrutiny on the agents of darkness and to unmask the secret scribblings of the Let It Burn subversives.

South Barker Aftermath

We have previously posted about the South Barker WFU Fire [here, here, here, here, here]. Last week retired District Ranger and Forest Supervisor Glenn Bradley toured the South Barker Burn with personnel from the Sawtooth National Forest. This is his report:

by Glenn Bradley, USFS ret.

Several of you asked me to report back to you after I toured the South Barker Fire area with Forest Supervisor Jane Kollmeyer.

Actually, I have made two visits to the burn.  Carolyn and I spent Saturday, October 18, looking at some of it.  On Thursday, October 23, I went there with Jane and her people.

Before I start, I would like to say that I appreciate Jane’s willingness to meet me in the field and discuss various aspects of the fire.  She was accompanied by District Ranger, Mike Dettori, Forest Public Information Officer, Alicia Bennett, and District Wildlife Biologist, David Skinner.  By chance, we connected for a few minutes in the field with District Forester, Alan Young.  All of them treated me politely and our discussions were open and candid.

We met first in the Fairfield District Office where we looked at maps showing the various intensities of burning, the area burned on different days, and the boundary line called the Maximum Management Area, which was drawn after the fire was allowed to burn to guide the fire team as the outside allowable perimeter of the fire.  Two points came out that are significant.  First, no prior project-level planning had been done except a proposal to burn 1,000 acres per year for four years in the Barker Gulch area and a decision in the revised Forest Plan that Wild Fire Use would be an option in that part of the forest.  Second, was a statement to me by David that this had been by far the biggest thing that had ever happened to the district and it had been so all-consuming that no time had been available for any other work since the fire started.

We left for the field visit and our first stop was in Barker Gulch.  I was surprised by several things.  One was that the large trees seemed to burn about as readily as the younger ones.  Another was that I was the only one in the group who was concerned about the burned-out riparian zone along the stream and the probable accelerated erosion which will occur from the steep granitic slopes left bare by the fire.  Mike asked me why that concerned me and I told him I thought it was important to keep the streams running clear water and to not fill Anderson Ranch Reservoir with silt.  He replied that those canyons were formed by water erosion and he viewed it as part of the natural process and it didn’t worry him much.

As we drove on up the river, I expressed concern that for three miles the entire hillside on the north side of the river was black with almost all of the trees killed.  I told them that in the old Multiple Use Planning system, that would have been mapped as either “Water Influence Zone” or “Travel Influence Zone”.  In those zones, recreation and scenic values would be considered dominant, and every effort would be made to protect the beauty of the area.  In this case it is even more important because it is the foreground scenery to the Abbott, Chaparral, and Bird Creek Campgrounds.  Mike said he agreed that it did not look very good, but in their panic in the early stages of the fire they had purposely back-burned that area to try to keep the fire within the MMA.  He said in hindsight that it would have been better to let the fire back down those slopes with a cooler burn and less crowning.  I suggested they should have considered some of those things before they decided to let the fire burn.  It should be noted that, even though the meager news reports in the Twin Falls paper called it a creeping, underburning fire, it did a lot of crowning and even jumped the South Boise River near the mouth of Bird Creek and also burned 3000 acres outside the MMA in Cayuse and Little Cayuse Creeks.

The next area we looked at was in Marsh Creek.  In 1959, I marked a large timber sale there.  One of our objectives was to clean out some decadent stands of Douglas fir that were heavily infested with dwarfmistletoe and to replant with Ponderosa pine.  Those plantations were established in 1962, and have grown very well.  Further investments have been made in thinning them in recent years.  I am very sorry to report that those plantations have sustained about 50% mortality according to Forest Service monitoring studies.  A fellow who lives in Featherville wrote to me last night and expressed my feelings very well.  He said he and his wife went to Marsh Creek the first day the road closure was lifted.  He said he was glad they went alone because he doesn’t like for other people to see him cry.

In the 1959 timber sale, we saved some mature Ponderosa pines as seed trees in some of the units.  I was surprised again to see some of those big trees completely charred from bottom to top even though they were not near any other large trees that could have carried fire up them.  Some areas simply burned so hot that everything in them got cooked.

As we ate lunch looking into Cayuse Creek, we talked about what the area would look like in future years.  We had very differing ideas.  I said I would expect the areas that burned hot on the upper west slopes to have significant raw gullies.
Mike said he expected aspen to sprout in those places.  There were aspen in the moist bottoms, but not on the dry, west-facing slopes.  I’m still betting on the gullies.

Jane did some probing into my background in fire while we were eating.  I told her I had been on some large fires, but I preferred to keep them small.  For the record, under the old Red Card system, I held qualifications beginning as a Crewman and advancing to Crew Boss, Sector Boss, Division Boss, Line Boss II, and Line Boss I.  I served on Class E fires in Idaho, Nevada, Utah, and California.  South Barker was not my first exposure to large burned-over areas.

The road up Shake Creek was blocked at the second crossing.  No burn was visible from there.  I do know that the fire got from Marsh Creek to Willow Creek and Shake Creek is in between, so I expect the plantations in upper Shake Creek are no better off than those in Marsh Creek.  Carolyn and I walked into the burn in Willow Creek on October 18 and saw long steep slopes completely denuded by the fire as well as burned out riparian areas along the creek with ash and debris in the stream.

From Willow Creek on up the river, the fire only burned in the upper portions of the drainages, so most of it is not visible from the road.  The down sides of that fact are that the heads of the drainages have the most fragile soils and there was no need to burn them for fuel reduction.

After spending the whole day, it was not clear to me why they wanted to let this fire burn.  Other than a brief private visit with Dave about woodpeckers and owls, there was no mention from Jane or Mike about the objectives centered on those species.  All three objectives stated by the Chief related to the Ponderosa pine type, but 80% of the burn was outside the Ponderosa pine type.

I believe the potential of the fire was grossly underestimated from the beginning.  It was first reported as “slight potential to spread”.  Mike said that after the first few days of the fire, he thought it might run to 10,000 acres and cost 1.5 million dollars.   I detected no feeling of failure from the resource loss or from the fact that they burned 37,000 acres and spent over 7 million dollars.

Neither Mike nor Jane knew if they had complied with Idaho DEQ smoke management requirements.  Although people along the river told me they were choked by smoke from about 1:00 AM to about 2:00PM each day and it was not possible to see well enough to run boats on Anderson Ranch Reservoir during those hours, Mike said there were only a few days that it was severe enough to be hazardous to health, so he didn’t think it was too bad.  When I told him that the smoke in Sawtooth Valley had practically precluded recreation use there for several days, there was no response.

I detected no real concern about the fact that all recreation use along the river was curtailed for about two months.  The only comment Jane made was that if the campgrounds had been concession-operated, they would not have let the fire burn because the concessionaire may have sued them for lost income.

While some small areas within the burn may have benefited from the reduction of fuels, the natural character of the vegetation in the burned area was a mosaic pattern with drastic changes from aspect to aspect without continuous fuel that needed broken up.  An objective to reduce fuel loading could only be justified in spotty areas within the early part of the burn.

No mention was made of the expected changes the fire would cause to the grazing permittees, but it did burn on at least one sheep allotment.

We met District Forester, Alan Young, in Marsh Creek.  He was working with burn intensity maps to determine which areas of the plantations needed to be replanted.  I asked him how he would finance the reforestation efforts.  He said they would get fire money to do that.  (Is there something wrong with this picture?  You burn it on purpose with money you don’t have, and then you get more money to replant it!)  I asked him how he would feel if he got it all replanted and tended it for fifty years and then some Ranger decided to burn up his plantation.  He didn’t respond.

Near the end of the day, I pursued the issue of NEPA compliance with Jane.  She said it is impossible to do the kind of analysis and public involvement required by NEPA because there was no time between the ignition and the decision.  I believe that is a cop out.  I do not buy the excuse that it is “natural”.  Whether a forest officer starts a fire or simply lets one burn, I believe he or she is responsible for it.  There is no question in my mind that it qualifies as a major federal action.  If the NEPA compliance work was not complete, the fire should not have been allowed to burn.

Relying on lightning to ignite fires, even where a decision has been made to do some burning, guarantees that it will come as a surprise and at a time when the people involved are less than fully prepared.  It would be much smarter to do burning projects by lighting the fire at a time and under conditions when results can be predicted.

Letting fires burn in the peak of the fire season ties up resources that are needed for “real fires”.  Letting fires burn for long periods of time in mid-summer assures that there will be days of high winds or other dangerous weather.  Letting a fire burn for a long time in fire season impairs visibility so that “real” fires might not be discovered while they are small.

Landscape type fires cannot be controlled to do what is needed.  If they are too big to handle, they will do as they will.

Letting fires burn when there is no fire money robs all other programs of funds and infuriates the congress.  They are less inclined to fund fire management if they know money is being needlessly spent on purpose.

If there are any benefits to the South Barker Fire, they are minimal and questionable.  There is no denying of the fact that a lot of area is damaged and a lot of money was spent.  I still believe letting this fire burn was at least a 7 million dollar mistake. The lack of concern about accelerated erosion is troubling to me.  I have watched this country gradually heal up over the last 60 years from severe damage done by heavy grazing and trailing of sheep in the early 1900’s.  It took a giant step backwards this summer.

I hope the Forest Service will change the policy so that intentional burning will be done on a planned, rational, legal, and controllable basis, rather than the “Flying by the Seat of the Pants” way that South Barker and a number of other WFU fires have been handled lately.

Forest Fires Degrade Soils

New findings by a team of Oregon forest scientists reveal that the Biscuit Fire (2002) not only incinerated 500,000 acres of forest, it also stripped soils clean off the landscape. Millions of tons of “sequestered” carbon were emitted by the Biscuit Fire, but more than that, the soil was sucked up into fire plumes and blown off the site, leaving a only a rubble of heavier stones.

The study, Intense forest wildfire sharply reduces mineral soil C and N: the first direct evidence by Bernard T. Bormann, Peter S. Homann, Robyn L. Darbyshire, and Brett A. Morrissette, is to be published in the peer-reviewed Canadian Journal of Forest Research [Can. J. For. Res. 38: 2771–2783 (2008)] in December. Extracts and a link to the full text may be found in the W.I.S.E. Colloquium: Forest and Fire Sciences [here].

The study was unique in that soil measurements were taken before the fire and the same plots remeasured after the fire. Most studies examine burned and unburned post-fire plots, and retrospective assumptions must be made regarding pre-fire conditions. In this case, however, the Biscuit Fire  burned through a portion of a 150 ha Long-Term Ecosystem Productivity (LTEP) experiment (Bormann et al. 1994; Homann et al. 2008), and the forest scientists were able to examine soil changes in paired pre- and post-fire plots.

Bormann et al found that more than 10 tons per acre of carbon and between 450 to 620 pounds per acre of nitrogen were vaporized by the fire. Some 60% of soil carbon and 57% of soil nitrogen losses came from mineral soil horizons (below the duff and humus top layers). In addition they found that 127 megagrams (127,000 kilograms) of soil per hectare disappeared. The scientists conjectured:

An intriguing alternative explanation for most of the missing fine soil is transport via the massive smoke plume. The elevation of the smoke column and the spread of the plume provide a plausible convective erosion process for off-site transport of substantial material. Large plumes of smoke, some more than 1500 km long, were visible most days during the months of the fire from the NASA MODIS satellite (Fig. 9). Fine soil particles have been detected in smoke (Palmer 1981; Samsonov et al. 2005), and wind speeds near the soil surface — driven by extremely strong vortices resulting from fire-driven atmospheric convection (Palmer 1981; Banta et al. 1992) — can carry smoke to the lower stratosphere (Trentmann et al. 2006).

They called this an “alternative explanation” because their first thought was that post-fire water erosion carried the soil away. However, erosion box measurements accounted for only a third of the missing soil. The plume explanation was based on speculation because the plume contents and volume were not accurately measured (for obvious reasons).

Total soil carbon losses from the Biscuit Fire were estimated to be 9 teragrams (9 million metric tons). That does not include carbon emissions from the incinerated vegetation, which we estimate to be an additional 35 Tg. The sum (44 teragrams or million metric tons) is roughly equivalent to the carbon emissions of 9 million cars driven all year.

The fire was hot enough to melt heavy-duty aluminum tags on steel grid posts placed as part of the LTEP experiment. The scientists estimated that fire temperatures were hotter than 700 degrees C (1300 degrees F) based on kiln tests on similar tags. At those temperatures tree mortality was near total as was fine fuel consumption.

The result was a seared landscape, devoid of living organisms, charred beyond recognition, and cooked deep into the soil. Fine soils were blown away, seed banks destroyed, and the essential productivity of the site vastly depleted. Bormann et al concluded:

The intensity of wildfires and magnitude of losses of fine soils and soil C and N have additional implications for soil fertility and subsequent rates of plant production and C sequestration. Soil C losses lead to increased bulk density and reduced soil water-holding capacity, cation-exchange capacity, and sources of energy for microbial communities. To the extent that soil N, soil C, and soil structure control productivity, these changes should result in major declines that will last as long as it takes to return to prefire conditions.

That could take decades or perhaps centuries.

It is stunning to realize that the US Forest Service calls such fires “beneficial” to resources. The USFS has embarked on a program of Wildfires Use For Resource Benefit (WFU). They have not specified which resources benefit, or how, or quantified the alleged benefits. It is abundantly clear from this study that resources are seriously degraded by wildfire, at least by this fire. Soil, biological, air, and water resources were severely damaged and those damages will remain and continue for perhaps many human lifetimes.

The authors of this study point out that resource degradation is contrary to the legal mandate and mission of the USFS:

Any potential loss in productivity is relevant to the US National Forest Management Act of 1976, where the Secretary of Agriculture is required, ‘‘through research and continuous monitoring, to ensure that management systems will not produce substantial and permanent impairment of the productivity of the land’’. The US Endangered Species Act of 1973 is also relevant to the management of high-intensity fires, for example, in the case of the northern spotted owl that nests primarily in stands of large trees averaging only 32 large trees ha–1 (Hershey et al. 1998). When soils can no longer produce such trees, the area of suitable habitat that could redevelop after fire is also lessened.

It is hugely unlikely that spotted owls will ever reoccupy the Biscuit Burn. The area has been rendered unfit to grow large trees, and current USFS policies virtually guarantee that severe, catastrophic fires will revisit the area periodically.

There is no question that prevention of the kind of forest destruction inflicted by the Biscuit Fire is desperately needed before all our public forests are similarly destroyed. Current USFS policies of WFU and unrestrained forest incineration must be altered. Restoration forestry, which prepares forests to receive fire in a manner that protects, maintains, and perpetuates forests, must be mandated and implemented on a landscape scale as soon as possible. From Bormann et al:

Much of the recent debate has centered on the effects of post-wildfire management on tree regeneration, wildlife habitat, and future fire risk (Donato et al. 2006; Newton et al. 2006; Shatford et al. 2007; Thompson et al. 2007). In light of the first direct evidence of major effects of intense wildfire on soils — based on extensive and detailed pre- and post-fire soil sampling — we think that soil changes, especially the potential loss of soil productivity and greenhouse gas additions resulting from intense wildfire, deserve more consideration in this debate. In forests likely to be affected by future intense fire, preemptive reduction of intense-fire risks can be seen as a way to reduce losses of long-term productivity and lower additions of greenhouse gases. Preemptive strategies may include reducing fuels within stands but also improving fire-attack planning and preparation and changing the distribution of fuels across the landscape to reduce the size of future fires. Practices can include thinning and removing or redistributing residues and underburning.

In forests already affected by intense fire, amelioration to increase C sequestration, tree growth, and eventually late successional habitat should be strongly considered. Amelioration practices might include seeding or planting N2-fixing and other plants, fertilizing, and managing vegetation and fuels through time. To the extent that receipts from pre- and post-wildfire logging are the only means of paying for these practices, such logging should be balanced against other management objectives and concerns. Harvesting before and after fire to generate revenue, if done improperly, has the potential to harm soils, but this outcome needs to be weighed against the outcomes resulting from increased high-intensity fire and from not ameliorating after soils have been burned intensely.

This forest science paper is cutting edge and a breakthrough (we hope) from the typical dull and pointless pseudo-science we have been subjected to over the past two decades. It is late, but not too late, for the general public to realize that forest stewardship is preferable to forest incineration. The public must demand responsible forest stewardship, and particularly restoration forestry, from our public land management agencies.

This year we have (again) witnessed massive forest destruction by deliberate burning, from Idaho to California. Old-growth forests have been decimated in the South Barker, Rattle, Middle Fork, Iron, Siskiyou, Ukonom, Blue, Clover, and dozens of other fires. The resource degradation from fires of past years has been amply evident and continues. The situation is intolerable. The USFS MUST learn how to care for forests and MUST engage in forest stewardship right away. Resistance to stewardship is untenable and should serve as grounds for immediate dismissal of any who advocate or engage in forest destruction.

This paper quantifies some of the destruction inflicted by catatsrophic forest fires. Let us hope that the lessons learned are taken to heart.