The incineration of the Payette NF (and the Boise NF) did not go unnoticed by the local residents. The following words and photos are excerpted from Discover McCall Idaho, a local promotional website, and the McCall Star-News. Special thanks to Joe B. for providing the links. Satellite photo courtesy NASA.
July 19, 2007 [here]
Loon Lake Fire marches toward vacation homes — Secesh residents advised to evacuate
by Tecla Markosky, The Star News
Residents of Secesh Meadows northeast of McCall were advised to evacuate their homes on Wednesday in the face of the growing Loon Lake Fire. …
About 80 people attended a community meeting Tuesday night. Estimates says between 40 and 50 buildings are in the area occupied by between 50 and 100 part-time residents.
The atmosphere was congenial at the beginning of the meeting but immediately switched when the fire management team began its presentation. …
Bob Frye of the fire management team said firefighters can work to protect a home from igniting, but do not have the training to fight a house fire.
“If a house is on fire, it’s gone,” Frye said.
Elsewhere on the Payette, the Krassel Complex includes four lightning fires being allowed to burn through the forest where they can improve forest health, managers said.
These fires started on June 17 and may burn throughout the fires season as long as they continue to be beneficial, said Jack Horner, public information officer for the California team watching those fires.
July 26, 2007 [here]
Secesh residents breathe easier as Loon Fire quiets
by Tecla Markosky, The Star News
… Vern Peterson, a 20-year fulltime Secesh resident, said he is frustrated with the Forest Service over the management of the local lands.
“As thick as that forest is, the Forest Service knows that if they don’t de fuel it, we’re going to continue to have this problem,” said Peterson, a retired logger.
“Yet they don’t have timber sales,” he said. “This is totally out of control. It was a time bomb waiting to happen.”
Last weekend, Peterson had especially good visibility of the encroaching flames.
“My neighbors a few homes down could see the trees go off like roman candles,” he said.
Sept. 20, 2007 [here]
Acres burned this year blow away previous records
by Michael Wells, The Star News
This year’s forest fire season has shattered previous record years for both the Payette and Boise national forests.
Fires have burned 394,313 acres on the Payette forest as of Tuesday, Payette forest spokesperson Denise Cobb said.
The previous record on the Payette forest was 343,347 burned acres in 2000.
Fires have burned 243,316 on the Boise forest this year, Boise forest spokesperson David Olson said.The previous record on the Boise forest was 207,000 acres in 1992.
This year’s burned area represents 16 percent of the Payette forest’s 2.3 million acres and 9 percent of the Boise forest’s 2.6 million acres.
May 10, 2008 | 2 Comments | Topic: 2007 Fire Season, Federal forest policy
Since 1993 over a million acres of the Payette National Forest have been incinerated. In 1994 300,573 acres burned. In 2000 343,347 acres burned. In 2006 over 70,000 acres burned. And in 2007 a whopping 470,529 acres of the Payette NF went up in smoke. That’s 1.27 million acres in 4 of 14 years (I don’t have data for the other intervening years).
The Payette NF is 2.3 million acres in size, so using the data available, 55 percent has burned in the last 14 fire seasons. I have been told but cannot confirm (because I don’t have all the data) that the actual burn percentage is 70 percent .
The nearly half million acres of the Payette that burned in 2007 was more or less deliberate on the part of the US Forest Service. They planned it, and then carried it out.
Following the 2006 fire season (70,000 acres) USA Today ran the following article [here]:
Forest fire strategy: Just let it go, USA Today, November 2006
In the worst year for wildfires in nearly half a century, it may seem odd to celebrate how well some of them burned. But the Payette National Forest in central Idaho is doing just that.
“It was a real long season, but we got some nice fire effects,” says Sam Hescock, a fire management officer on the 2.3-million-acre forest where more than 150 fires this summer and fall burned about 70,000 acres. “We’re pretty happy with what we got.”
May 9, 2008 | 4 Comments | Topic: 2007 Fire Season, Federal forest policy
The following editorial appeared Sunday in the Yakima Herald-Republic. We post it in full:
Plea further extends Thirtymile tragedy
Yakima Herald-Republic Editorial [here]
In a New Year’s Eve editorial on the last day of 2006, we were willing to concede at the time that “four manslaughter charges brought against a U.S. Forest Service crew boss nearly 51/2 years after the deadly Thirtymile Fire in Okanogan County could finally be proof that justice delayed is not necessarily justice denied.”
That hope has been dashed now that a plea-bargaining deal has led to fire crew chief Ellreese Daniels pleading guilty in U.S. District Court in Spokane Tuesday to two misdemeanor charges of making false statements to investigators.
The magnitude of the reduction in charges is staggering: In exchange, the government dropped four felony counts of involuntary manslaughter and seven felony counts of making false statements.
Sentencing is set for July 23.
“Like all plea agreements, there was a recognition of the evidence and the law as it exists,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Rice said in an Associated Press report out of Spokane. “We feel this is an appropriate disposition of the case.”
Really? Will there ever be “appropriate disposition” of a case in which so many nagging doubts and unanswered questions remain? Four people died and the only person charged in the incident gets a plea-bargaining slap on the wrist and won’t have to face trial — during which a more complete story of what happened up to and during that fateful day could unfold during testimony.
Frankly, we’ve been less than impressed from the start with the federal government’s handling, at all levels, of the Thirtymile incident.
We also take note of the fact that Daniels was the only one to face criminal charges out of the fire near Winthrop that killed four Central Washington firefighters on July 10, 2001: Tom Craven of Ellensburg, and Karen FitzPatrick, Jessica Johnson and Devin Weaver, all from Yakima.
We remain convinced that Daniels must answer in part for the tragedy because he was directly responsible for the safety of his crew. But we also maintain that the blame for the Thirtymile debacle involves much more than just what happened on the fire line that day. Blame must also extend further up the chain of command and include a culture of stonewalling and cover-up so prevalent in the U.S. Forest Service at the time.
In addition, a September 2001 investigation by this newspaper revealed that the Forest Service broke more than a dozen of its own safety rules. Federal investigators came to an even more damning conclusion: The Forest Service had 28 rules in place to keep crews safe. At Thirtymile, 20 of them were broken, according to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
The negligence, according to the original charges, included Daniels failing to prepare the crew for the possibility of being overrun by flames.
The fact he was singled out prompts memories of the scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq when Iraqi prisoners were mistreated by United States military personnel. Of 10 people convicted out of that debacle, none ranked higher than staff sergeant. That in a system noted for its chain of command that demands the following of orders.
Reforms within the agency were supposed to ensure a tragedy such as Thirtymile never happened again. Yet, seven firefighters have been fatally trapped since by forest fires in Idaho and California.
That’s not to simply say the lessons of Thirtymile have not been heeded. After all, we’re talking about a very dangerous line of work, one in which every possible step must be taken to ensure the safety of firefighters on the line.
But we also don’t totally agree with the fears of many in the firefighting community that the unprecedented prosecution of Daniels might send a chilling message into the ranks of his colleagues across the nation — that they could face felony charges if something similar happened on their watches.
Anyone responsible for neglect of duty that leads to tragic consequences should face such charges. In our system of justice, whether such charges are justified is determined in a trial with all the pertinent facts on display, not with plea bargaining.
The plea deal may have technically closed the books on the prosecutorial phase of Thirtymile. But the nagging question remains: Will justice ever be completely, and adequately, served in this case?
May 6, 2008 | 1 Comment | Topic: Federal forest policy
The Forest Foundation of Auburn CA and the National Association of Forest Service Retirees have issued a joint review of California forests. Their finding is that the lack of reforestation following forest fires is responsible for converting an average of 30,000 acres per year of forest to brush.
Nearly 150,000 acres of forest has been converted to brush over the last seven fire seasons in CA, not including conversion that has occurred in wilderness areas.
Recent homilies about “renewing the forest” with wildfire as uttered by obsequious government functionaries and power-grasping eco-terrorist BINGOs are supercilious, pusillanimous, and specious. Wildfires do not “renew” forests, they decimate and destroy forests and convert them to tick brush. Blood-sucking, disease-carrying tick populations thrive, but forest creatures lose their habitat when wildfires ravage forests. Those vegetation changes are permanent without intervention, because fire-type tick brush generates yet more fires that exclude trees.
But why should we wax eloquent on the subject, again and again and again? Let others carry some water. Kudos to the Forest Foundation and the National Association of Forest Service Retirees for their honesty and integrity. Here is the full text of the joint pronouncement:
Read more
May 5, 2008 | 1 Comment | Topic: Saving Forests, Federal forest policy
Science Mag, that bastion of political bias with occasional glimpses of actual science, published a garbled article which reviewed the blue-ribbon panel review of the languishing USFWS Recovery Plan for the Northern Spotted. We have reviewed their review of the review, and present some clarifications for your illumination.
The article in question is Spotted Owl Recovery Plan Flawed, Review Panel Finds by Erik Stokstad, Science, Vol. 320, dated May 2, 2008. A parsimonious summary, all of one sentence long, is available [here]. But we shall provide you a little bit more than that. The article begins:
A blue-ribbon panel of scientists has confirmed major flaws in the proposed recovery plan for the northern spotted owl, a threatened species that has driven forest policy in the northwestern United States for nearly 2 decades. As did earlier reviews, the final one, by the Sustainable Ecosystems Institute (SEI) in Portland, Oregon, concludes that the Fish and Wildlife Service’s (FWS’s) plan does not put enough emphasis on protecting the owl’s habitat.
It also says that massive thinning of dry forests is needed to prevent habitat from going up in smoke—a recommendation that makes some environmentalists nervous.
Explanation: in 2006, fully 16 years after listing the northern spotted owl as an endangered species, the US Fish and Wildlife Service finally got around to drafting a Recovery Plan, something they should have done in Year One. It took a series of lawsuits to force them to do it.
But the Recovery Plan was fatally flawed, in that if it had been approved and followed, it would have been fatal to spotted owls, barred owls, owl habitat, old-growth forests, forests in general, rural economies, and various other species, communities, and institutions.
The USFWS’s Recovery Plan was dead in the water from the get-go, and everybody knew it. They withdrew it after a few weeks of high-pitched whining from all sectors. A private consulting company was hired to review the fatally flawed Plan. That company, the Sustainable Ecosystems Institute, appointed a “blue ribbon” panel and held a series of meetings. Their conclusion: back to the drawing board!
Ah, but with one added instruction: Stop Incinerating Spotted Owl Forests!!
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May 3, 2008 | 4 Comments | Topic: Saving Forests, Federal forest policy
Speaking of restitution…
The poor woman charged with accidentally cutting three trees on the Lake Tahoe lot adjacent to her own [see here], which unfortunately (for her) belonged to the US Forest Service, has agreed to a plea deal. Instead of 20 years in the Federal penitentiary (more than any recently convicted eco-terrorist received) she will pay a $100,000 fine and perform 80 hours of community service.
Although the homeowner was busted by thug enviro cop functionaries of the arson-minded Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, the fine will be sucked into the bottomless maw of the arson-minded USFS. From KRNV TV [here]:
Plea deal in cutting of Lake Tahoe Forest Service trees
A plea deal has been made for an Incline Village woman who was charged with two felonies after she hired a company to chop down trees on national forest land to enhance her view of Lake Tahoe. The deal with federal prosecutors will likely keep her out of prison.
Patricia Marie Vincent, 57, will pay $100,000 in restitution and do 80 hours of community service in exchange for her guilty plea today to a lesser charge.
She was indicted in January by a federal grand jury in Reno on felony charges of theft of government property and willingly damaging government property. Vincent faced up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for each of those original counts if convicted. Assistant U.S. Attorney Ron Rachow agreed to drop the felony charges and charge her with one misdemeanor count of unlawfully cutting trees on U.S. land.
That crime carries a maximum sentence of one year in prison, a $100,000 fine and possible restitution. But Rachow said under the plea agreement, she would face a year of probation, 80 hours of community service and pay $100,000 in restitution, $35,000 of which would go to the U.S. Forest Service and $65,000 to the National Forest Foundation.
The ultimate sentence will be decided by U.S. District Judge Brian Sandoval on June 3.
In contrast, the incompetent pigs who burned down 254 homes last year at Lake Tahoe got off scott free. Oh yeah, that would be the nazi-like functionaries of the USFS, working in tandem with the nazi-like functionaries of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency.
Funny how justice works in this country, or doesn’t work, or works for some power factions and gangs, especially powerful outside agencies of the bloated, corrupt, ruthless, legally-immune and dangerous-to-all Federal Government and their running dog, unelected, affiliate local gangs, but not for regular citizens.
May 2, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: 2007 Fire Season, Federal forest policy
Three campers left their campfire unattended, and it erupted into a forest fire. The campers have been charged with Federal crimes and face jail, probation, fines, and restitution penalties.
The X Fire is burning on Tusayan Ranger District the near the southern rim of the Grand Canyon. It began April 29th and has consumed about 2,050 acres. The fire has been largely contained by Hot Shot crews and fire personnel of the Kaibab National Forest.
The three campers were apprehended without incident and have cooperated with authorities.
From the Arizona Republic in Flagstaff [here]:
Authorities track down trio suspected in X Fire
by Lindsey Collom - The Arizona Republic
When an unattended campfire touched off a 2,000-acre blaze just outside of Grand Canyon National Park Tuesday, it didn’t take long or much effort for authorities to track down the people believed to be responsible.
A trio of campers, visiting from Texas, returned the next day to the site in the Kaibab National Forest to retrieve a sleeping bag, court records show.
The three cooperated with authorities and, after being questioned, were summoned to appear in federal court in Flagstaff Thursday - even as fire crews continued to rein in the X Fire by dousing hotspots with water, digging at smoldering dumps and aerating the soil. …
The X Fire suspects could face a maximum penalty of six months in jail, five years’ probation and a $5,000 fine. A judge could also force them to pay what it cost to fight the fire. Murphy estimated the fire suppression tab to be $250,000 by Thursday morning.
Interestingly, the Kaibab NF spokesperson claimed that the X Fire has benefited the forest:
Meanwhile, Murphy says the forest is benefiting from the blaze, which has burned overgrowth and ground fuels while mostly sparing trees. Fire also releases nitrogen into the soil, promoting new growth.
“It’ll be nice again,” he said.
Also interesting is the fact that in 2006 Kaibab NF personnel burned 58,000 acres of that national forest in the Warm Fire, a whoofoo (Wildland Fire Use fire) that consumed 40,000 acres of old-growth ponderosa pine and Mexican spotted owl habitat. The Warm Fire was a deliberate act on the part of Kaibab NF personnel, and in direct violation of a Court Order and Record of Decision that prohibited such burning [see here for more about the Warm Fire].
Yet, in the case of the Warm Fire, no Kaibab NF personnel were charged with Federal crimes, jailed, put on probation, fined, or forced to pay restitution. The Warm Fire rang up a bill of over $7 million in suppression costs, ten times that in resource losses, and more $millions in subsequent forest rehabilitation expenses. That work has only begun, following a year of planning which also cost a pretty penny.
No one claimed that the stand replacing (total tree mortality) Warm Fire “benefited” the forest. Yet the perps went unpunished and are still collecting Federal paychecks.
All that is not an excuse or defense for the three campers who unwittingly started the X Fire. But whatever punishment the judge and jury apply to those three, something in excess of a hundred times more severe punishments should have been meted out to the Kaibab NF personnel responsible for the Warm Fire.
May 2, 2008 | 4 Comments | Topic: The 2008 Fire Season, Federal forest policy
The following article appeared in the Missoulian today. Rather than comment on their site, I am commenting on mine.
State fire panel discusses solutions in Hamilton
By JOHN CRAMER of the Missoulian [here]
HAMILTON - Montana’s Fire Suppression Interim Committee kicked off its statewide road tour Monday at ground zero in the West’s growing dilemma on how to reduce large-scale wildfires at a time when more people are building homes in fire-prone forests.
No homes are built in National Forests. No one is allowed to construct residences on public land.
The Bitterroot National Forest, which the U.S. Forest Service considers America’s most threatened national forest because of the population explosion in the Bitterroot Valley’s “wildland-urban interface,” served as a backdrop for the state legislative committee’s first public forum.
Good for John Cramer for putting Wildland-Urban Interface in quotes. The WUI (pronounced Whooie) is a figment of the government’s imagination. The Bitterroot NF is not “wildland,” it is public forest. There are few urban areas in the Bitterroot Valley. Outside of those areas, the rest of land is rural private property. It is not “interface.” It is where all the farms, all the ranches, and all the homes are. People have the right to live on their land and more power to us.
We also have the right not be incinerated by wildfires emanating from the Federal Estate. If the USFS cannot contain fires on their acres, then they are remiss, not doing their jobs, and that land should be removed from public ownership.
We also have the right not to be incinerated by backfires set by remiss government employees, or we should have that right. Recently the Ninth Circuit Court held that private citizens do not possess any defense against firebrand USFS employees who burn our homes down [here]. I say take the land away from the recalcitrant, legally immune, incompetent USFS if they cannot forebear from burning down the homes of private citizens.
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April 29, 2008 | 5 Comments | Topic: Private land policies, Saving Forests, Federal forest policy
It has been a busy week for news already. Some of the highlights (or lowlights):
USFS Chief Gail Kimbell proffered an excuse for soaring fire costs and her agency’s failure to do a Congressionally ordered analysis of the nation’s aerial firefighting program following fatal crashes of planes working on wildfires: “We are a nation at war, and we’re a nation with a huge budget deficit.” [here].
Pretty cheesy. We can’t do our job because the nation is at war. It could be the war that Kimbell is talking about is the one the USFS is waging on forests and landowners throughout the West. Her agency did find $54 million to spend on conservation easements to stop homebuilding on private land. It “saved” the taxpayers money by curtailing private property rights and resident stewardship of the land in favor of holocaust megafires.
Weyerhaeuser was busted in another anti-trust case. A Portland jury on Monday ordered Weyerhaeuser to pay almost $28 million for unlawfully monopolizing the market for finished alder lumber [here].
U.S. Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey was in Missoula on Monday to answer questions about controversial secret meetings between the U.S. Forest Service and the Plum Creek Timber Company. Plum Creek is the country’s largest private landowner, with 8 million acres nationwide and 1.2 million acres in Montana [here].
More gravy for the Big Potato. Maybe Mark doesn’t realize that we’re a nation at war.
In wildlife news, a rabies outbreak is plaguing the Southwest. A rabid bobcat attacked two hikers, who had to kill it with a hammer [here]. Lesson: never go hiking without a hammer. For more rabies news see Wolf Crossing [here].
Speaking of disease-carrying animals, twelve “environmental” groups have sued to halt wolf delisting [here]. Nuff said.
On the climate front, the founder of the National Hurricane Center is being forced out for his failure to buy into Algore’s Inconvenient Lie [here]. Naughty, naughty. Here come the PC police.
And finally Friends of the Earth have been blamed for starving millions of poor to death after spreading ugly rumors about American food aid to Africa [here]. Guess that’s one way to deal with the overpopulation problem. Pin a medal on FOE.
Lovely news. Going outside now. Had my fill of it. If there were some way to dig the news into my garden, I’m sure I could grow pumpkins the size of Volkswagens. For big punkins, it’s all about the bull …
April 29, 2008 | 2 Comments | Topic: The 2008 Fire Season, Private land policies, Climate and Weather, Saving Forests, Politics and politicians, Federal forest policy
by Bear Bait
The Land and Water Conservation Fund. The money to buy land from willing sellers to provide for resource, water, air and ecosystem conservation. And it comes from taxes on motor boat fuel, Federal surplus land sales, and offshore oil and gas fees and royalties. The slush fund for NGO preservation. They buy a piece of ground, and the Govt gives them twice what they paid for it. Back door tacit funding by Big Govt for Big NGOs.
Softwood lumber and timber is in worldwide surplus. Pinchot would be proud of his efforts at forestry education, and those who followed his lead. Great reforestation and aforestation efforts, worldwide, have grown the softwood timber supply in a mathematical progression to where that resource is a glut on the market.
However, it is a young forest, worldwide, with post WWII forest repairs in Europe and Asia, and international land management providing species travel worldwide. The long cutover ponderosa pine of the new West is now produced in Chile and Argentina, Douglas-fir is grown in New Zealand, Ireland, England, France; the list is long.
My friend who imported pine from South America to serve the US market now sells the very same wood, all of it, to China. And he is not sure how long that market can last. The East Coast of the US gets wide dimension softwood from Europe for home construction, cheaper than they can get it from the West Coast.
To use the new forest, at the earliest possible entry, the whole of home building was changed to use engineered wood products in lumber, truss, beam, and panel constructs. Your grandparents house in no way resembles today’s methods, quality of materials, or durability. But neither do your shoes. Large logs are still cut in a handful of mills to make special products for historical reconstruction, remodeling, and export. There is only a vestigial milling capacity and market for those products. It is a small log economy we now live in now, and wood fiber is the one commodity the world is over-supplied with, other than human beings.
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April 28, 2008 | 1 Comment | Topic: Private land policies, Federal forest policy
