Retardant Justice
by Dave Skinner, the Flathead Beacon, [here]
It must be spring. After all, environmentalists have “sprung” at least six or seven new lawsuits on the Northwest court system the past couple weeks – and Earthjustice is about ready to file against delisting Northern Rockies wolves.
But it’s a just-dismissed lawsuit that has my attention, especially since I just got “carded” for this year’s fire season. It was filed by the Eugene, Oregon-based, so-called Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (FSEEE) in District Judge Donald Molloy’s Missoula courtroom, way back in October 2003. I’ll spare you the stultifying federal acronym soup.
On the surface, FSEEE basically sued the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) in order to force a full-blown paperwork shuffle on the environmental effects of air-dropped fire retardants.
Judge Molloy took two years to rule for the paperwork shuffle, in October 2005, at which point FSEEE crowed “Group Wins Lawsuit to Protect Firefighters and the Environment From Toxic Aerial Fire Retardant.”
But the use of chemical retardants hasn’t been stopped. FSEEE never asked for that to begin with. Molloy’s 35-page ruling specifically pointed out the case was not about the safety or toxicity of retardants per se, but only a procedural case affirming the need to shuffle paper if and when “substantial questions” of environmental impact “may” exist.
The already overwhelmed Forest Service dragged butt on the shuffle, goading Judge Molloy into threatening Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey with jail unless the paperwork hit Molloy’s desk – which it did in late February 2008.
The Forest Service concluded that using retardant poses no “significant environmental impact” to Judge Molloy, who dismissed the case March 12.
Now, after four-plus years, FSEEE spokesman Andy Stahl (the guy who made “spotted owl” a household word) is telling reporters his group intends to file ANOTHER lawsuit over retardant in Molloy’s court. It’s all part of what Missoulian reporter John Cramer terms “another decade-long campaign” to stop “the war on fire.”
With the “no significant impact” paperwork from USFS in hand, FSEEE apparently now plans to attack the paperwork in court, in the hopes of finding an uncrossed T or undotted I that will bring about a legal injunction against retardant use.
Now, how much environmental impact is at issue? Bomber slurry is basically 85 percent water, 15 percent fertilizer. The fertilizer binds the water, slowing evaporation, plus it sticks to everything it lands on. A bomber line of slurry therefore stays more effective at slowing or stopping a fire’s advance for a longer time than plain water drops. It works … so well that the Forest Service uses 15- to 40-million gallons of slurry per year. Using a 2,700-gallon P2V Neptune tanker as an “average” slurry bomber, that comes out to at least 5,500 to 14,800 “bomb runs” a year.
In its complaint, FSEEE raised the issue of retardant drops directly into streams or lakes, citing one in 1996, one in 2000, one in 2003, and most scandalous of all, a 2002 Oregon drop into a stream that killed 20,000 fish. Bad? Of course, but one run out of 5,000 (or more) is objectively a darned low “defect” rate for such technical flying. Never mind that Eugene’s ecotopians probably eat 20,000 organically-killed fish a week.
Nuts? Yep, yet FSEEE righteously claims its “mission is to forge a socially responsible value system for the U.S. Forest Service.” They intend to ram their retardant version of social responsibility through the courts, and just might.
Don’t be surprised if FSEEE files their case, and on some trivial technicality, an injunction comes down at the worst possible time. Some poor fire boss will have to announce: “Folks, we need to ground our air fleet and wash out the tanks today. We’re also pulling all our crews, as the bombers were the last chance we had of holding this line without killing someone. Sorry. The judge says a one in 5,000 chance of killing a few minnows overrides any of your trivial concerns. We hope you got your heirlooms and families out in time, have a nice day.”
Retardant justice, indeed.
I might add that this “stop the war on fire” rhetoric is disingenuous and deceptive. “Stop the War” is a common enough liberal slogan, but we must ask what is and is not a war, and what war are we talking about here?
Do we wish to “stop the war” on illiteracy? Or “stop the war” on infectious diseases?
The ultimate goal of “stop the war on fire” is to Burn, Baby, Burn. Allowing holocausts run rampant in our public forests does not aid fish or any other form of wildlife. Nor does it benefit any natural resources. Unchecked fire will (and does) destroy whole watersheds and adjacent communities.
The plaintive plea to “stop the war on fire” is little more than a call to arson and the catastrophic destruction of rural America. The pleaders are not “watchdogs” or “do-gooders” but rather they are eco-radical Marxist anarchists who hate America and seek to incinerate our landscapes. Connect the dots.
The use of trite political catch-phrases like “stop the war” to promote an agenda of holocaust is Orwellian and despicable. Perceptive observers should not be persuaded by such pusillanimous rhetoric.
The perceptive Mr. Skinner might have added that the FSEEE based their “standing” in the case as “fire retardant might harm the fishing experience of USFS employees.” Meaning that FSEEE-ers want to do the fish killing on their own, not that that they wished to protect fish.
Which begs the question, what is the effect of fire retardant on fish? It’s apparently a little-known fact that forest fires kill fish, with the sluicing of ash and eroded soil into streams and lakes following fires, not to mention the occasional boiling of streams during catastrophic burns. A short list of fire effects on streams:
- Changes in infiltration due to collapse of soil structure, increase in bulk density, removal of organic matter, reduction in soil porosity, clogged soil pores, and increased reaction to rainfall droplet kinetics, and
- Decrease in soil wettability (hydrophobia), concretion, increased water repellence, increases in surface flow, increase soil particle transport, rilling, gulleying, and increased erosion, and
- Substantial changes in stream water chemistry, solid and dissolved material transport, pH, bacteriological characteristics, sediment influx and transport, dissolved sulfates, nitrates, nitrites, chlorides, iron, and other cations, and turbidity, and
- Increases and decreases in discharge rates and seasonal streamflows, peak flows including flash flooding, minimum flows, as well as total annual streamflows, and
- Degradation of aquatic habitat, aquatic biota, spawning gravels, fish populations, cultural resources, and human health and safety.
When fire retardant is used to stop forests from burning, fish actually benefit, and ergo the “fishing experiences” of FSEEE-ers do, too. Their lawsuit is absurd to the max.