After-the-Fact Fire Planning
Imagine that you are a District Ranger or a Forest Supervisor assigned the protection and stewardship of a vast tract of public forest. Then imagine a fire is ignited on that tract in the middle of summer.
Would you let that fire burn? Would you in addition call in a team of people who had never seen your forest and knew nothing about to draw up a Let It Burn plan 10 days after the fire started?
Sounds like total lunacy, right? Or worse yet, deliberate and criminal disregard for the the land, of the law, and of plain common sense.
It is hard to believe that such cavalier and destructive actions could possibly be made by the people charged with stewarding our public forests. And yet, the story is not only true, it has been repeated numerous times across the West in recent years.
We post the following letter by retired USFS Forest Supervisor Glenn Bradley to the current Forest Supervisor of the Sawtooth National Forest. Mr. Bradley points out that ex post facto “planning” of wildfires is thoroughly disingenuous, irresponsible, illegal, and destructive.
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Hi Jane-
At our meeting of retirees on December 1, 2008, you gave me a copy of the South Barker and Johnson 2 Wildland Fire Use Implementation Plan. I apologize for taking this long to send you my comments after I read the plan.
The plan was written by the WFU team after they came to the fire. It may have provided some valuable guidance to the team, but it had no bearing on the decision to let the South Barker Fire burn, because the fire was about ten days old by the time the plan was written.
The first thing that jumped out at me was on Page 3 under “II Objectives”. It states that, consistent with the Forest Land and Resource Management Plan goals, the objective was to restore and maintain ecosystems consistent with land uses and historic fire regimes. The fire did a lot more to disrupt ecosystems than it did to restore them. It effectively canceled all land uses for the duration of the fire and damaged scenic, timber, and watershed values for many years to come.
It is not clear what is meant by “historic fire regimes”. I suspect that may refer to the natural pattern of burning that might have occurred before there was any attempt to manage fire by the Forest Service. If my suspicion is accurate, you should quickly revise the forest plan to adopt a better goal. One of the primary reasons that the national forests were created was that the American people were not happy with the rate that “natural” fire was damaging the timber and watersheds and threatening their properties. Today’s local public is not exactly thrilled with the rates their national forests are being burned up by WFU’s and AMR’s either.
Bradley Replies to Forsgren
Hi Harv-
Thank you for responding promptly to my e-mail of February 3.
I must have done a poor job of expressing my concerns, because your letter did not really respond to them at all.
I am very aware that there are areas in the national forests that are in dire need of fuel reduction. My concern is that it should be done in an appropriate way . Simply letting large areas burn in the peak of the fire season because they happened to be hit by lightning is a long ways from responsible action.
You place the blame for the “untenable” condition of the national forests on Smokey Bear and past fire policies. A couple of other factors are probably even more significant. As a nation, we have decided through laws, court actions, and agency policies that the forests are to be untouched by anything resembling a commercial use of the fiber and forage they grow. The last figures I heard on timber production in the national forest system quoted an annual growth rate of 20 billion board feet and an annual harvest rate of about 3 billion board feet. That means that every year we are accumulating 17 billion board feet of wood that will eventually burn either by prescription or by accident. To help visualize the magnitude of the problem, try to picture 11 lines of bumper to bumper loaded logging trucks reaching from New York to Los Angeles. They would be carrying the amount of timber that is grown but not harvested each year in the national forests.
2007 Fire Season Federal forest policy Saving Forests The 2008 Fire Season
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W.I.S.E. to Forsgren: Time for Public Dialog About USFS Fire Policies
Dear Mr. Forsgren,
Thank you for your email of Feb 5th. I have posted it in its entirety at SOS Forests [here].
Your email was in response to Mr. Glenn Bradley’s email of Feb. 3rd, posted [here]. Mr. Bradley is a retired USFS Forest Supervisor, as you know, and his concerns regarding the South Barker WFU Fire have been posted numerously at SOS Forests. Mr. Carl Pence, another retired USFS Forest Supervisor, has also weighed in on this topic, posted [here].
The Fires
Over the last three years SOS Forests has posted many, many essays and discussions about WFU (Wildland Fire Use). We have explored WFU fires that have blown up and caused extensive damage to heritage forests. These include:
• The Warm WFU Fire in 2006 [here, here, among many other posts]. The Warm WFU blew up to 58,640 acres and caused over $70 million in damages to old-growth spotted owl habitat on the Kaibab NF. Ancient home sites, soils, air, and watershed values were incinerated or severely damaged, along with rare old-growth ponderosa pine. The Warm Fire was designated and managed as a WFU in a prohibited zone in direct defiance of a legally binding Decision Notice issued by a federal judge and acknowledged in the Forest Plan EIS. In the aftermath the District Ranger was reassigned, and at angry public meetings USFS officials, including the Regional Forester, were excoriated, as I am sure you recall.
Forsgren Responds to Bradley Re WFU’s
Harv Forsgren, Regional Forester of the Intermountain Region, responded to Ret. Forest Supervisor Glenn Bradley’s letter, which we posted [here]. We now post Mr. Forsgren’s reply:
Hello Glenn!
I would like to respond to some of your concerns regarding wildland fire use as a management tool in our nation’s forests and grasslands. It is often a difficult decision to manage an unplanned ignition as an opportunity to restore and maintain ecosystems; the simplest thing is to aggressively attack and extinguish every start at the smallest possible size. We have been extremely successful in doing so. Over 98% of all starts are suppressed in the initial attack phase.
What we have learned after many decades is that this success has contributed to an untenable situation across broad landscapes. Our ecosystems are dynamic, and our success in initial attack has interrupted the natural diversity of age classes that are necessary in many ecosystems to provide for that variability in fuel types and flammability that would normally temper extreme fire behavior and spread. There is a marked trend toward more dense stands, less variability, fewer openings and more layered development in the canopies, turning forests that had once been relatively resistant to severe fire behavior under all but the most extreme weather into landscapes that are prone to crown fire behavior and rapid fire movement under much less extreme conditions.
Our efforts to increase acres treated from planned management activities have also accelerated dramatically. In the past 10 years, we have doubled the number of acres treated each year to reduce hazardous fuels. Nationally the Forest Service now treats approximately three million acres per year and yet, despite our best efforts, we continue to fall behind as the natural accumulation of fuels surpasses our managed fuel reductions. We will continue our efforts to plan and execute vegetative management projects designed to protect communities and resources, but those efforts alone will not solve the current broad scale forest health and fire risk issues. Appropriately planning for, recognizing, and seizing opportunities to meet our objectives using unplanned ignitions in some areas under favorable conditions improves our ability to make strides toward the goals of improved forest health, reduced hazardous fuels and safer communities. It is my expectation that we will be using unplanned ignitions to meet management objectives more, not less in the future.
Glenn Bradley on WFU’s
Allowing forest fires to burn unimpeded and out of control may seem like a good idea in theory, especially to urban types who know absolutely nothing about forests or forest fires. But in practice Murphy’s Law rules: if something can go wrong, it will.
USFS Let It Burn fires have a tendency to blow up and turn into raging holocausts that incinerate vast acreages. Examples are numerous, and in our recapitulation of the 2008 fire season we will discuss quite a few tragic and stupid fires which were Let Burn with terrible consequences to people and nature.
Two of those tragic and stupid Let It Burn fires last year were the East Slide Rock Ridge WFU Fire (54,549 acres, ~$9 million to suppress) [here] in Nevada and the South Barker WFU Fire (38,583 acres, ~$7 million to suppress) [here] in Idaho.
In both cases small fires were allowed to burn in order to “save money,” and in both cases the fires blew up, did enormous damage, and cost many millions to suppress. The long-lasting damages to forests, wildlife, watersheds, and public health and safety are easily 20 to 40 times the suppression costs. The best laid plans (actually the secret and wholly incompetent plans) of the USFS went awry big time.
We posted about the USFS review of the ESRR-WFU Fire last month [here]. This week Retired Forest Supervisor Glenn Bradley wrote a letter to current Region 4 (Intermountain) Regional Forester Harv Forsgren congratulating him for ordering that review. Mr. Bradley has given permission to post his letter to Mr. Forsgren, which follows.
The 2008 Fire Season: A Recap, Part 1
by Mike Dubrasich
With over 5.3 million acres burned in wildfires nationally, the 2008 fire season was a distinct improvement over 2007 (9.75 million acres burned) and 2006 (9.89 million acres burned, the worst fire season in fifty years).
However, US Forest Service fire suppression expenditures topped $1.9 billion, the third most expensive in history (2005 - $2.13 billion and 2004 - $2.35 billion were more expensive). Overall cost-plus-loss (suppression costs plus damages) are estimated to have been ~$40 billion in 2008.
Graph based on data provided by the National Interagency Fire Center Wildland Fire Statistics and the USFS Wildland Fire Management budget FY2000 - FY2008 (as of 11/04/2008).
The following is a recap of some of the high and low lights of the 2008 Fire Season.
January
The 2008 Fire Season began with ominous signs. In January enviro groups demanded the jailing of Under Secretary of Agriculture Mark Rey because he refused to eliminate the use of fire retardant on Federal forest fires [here]. Had he done so, the fire season might have been even more catastrophic nationwide. As it turned out, the USFS deliberately burned vast tracts anyway, so while the litigious groups failed to get Rey hauled off to the pokey, they did succeed in convincing the USFS to Burn, Baby, Burn.
The previous December USFS Chief Gail Kimbell declared that it was her personal goal to inflict wildfire on 400 million acres of private land, as well as the 200 million acres of USFS land [here]. Kimbell’s mad conceit was couched in her Open Space Conservation Strategy which promotes “wilderness values” on private forest land.
“If people have an incentive to hold on to wildlands (rather than develop them), we as a society benefit from that,” she [Gail Kimbell] said in an interview. “We all benefit from keeping wildlands wild.”
Kimbell’s Open Space Conservation Strategy calls for the elimination of houses, buildings, lawns, and pavement on private property. Fire is to be “reintroduced” on all forested acres in the USA. In the eyes of the USFS, forest fires provide “resource benefits,” and they wish to inflict the “benefits” of catastrophic fire on every acre in America that has a tree on it.
Meanwhile flash floods arising on the 2007 Zaca Burn inundated Santa Barbara [here]. The Zaca Fire on Kimbell’s watch burned 240,200 acres and was the second largest fire in California’s recorded history.
Whoofoo Review Finds Faults
The East Slide Rock Ridge WFU Fire was ignited by lightning Aug 10, 2008, on the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest about 15 miles southeast of Jarbidge, Nevada. Officials of the H-TNF declared it a WFU (Wildland Fire Use fire or “whoofoo”) immediately and let it burn unchecked.
The ESRR WFU Fire [here] was only 300 acres on Aug 17th, a week after ignition. But by Aug 20th it had grown to 5,000 acres and was threatening 30 historic cabins and the Pole Creek Guard Station. By Aug 21st the fire was nearly 10,000 acres and had spread out of the Maximum Manageable Area (previously established at 113,000 acres). Even so, the whoofoo designation was retained.
On Aug 21 the ESRR WFU Fire grew to 11,250 acres and the wind was blowing. Wiser heads prevailed and the whoofoo designation was scrapped. A Type 1 IMT (the big boys) was requested to suppress the fire. However, on Aug 24th all personnel were evacuated as high winds pushed the fire to 14,489 acres. The next day the fire doubled in size and threatened over 100 residences in the community of Murphy Hot Springs, ID.
By Aug 26th the ESRR WFU Fire was 38,595 acres and zero percent contained, but winds died down. Two days later the fire was 47,701 acres and aggressive backburning and aerial attack had slowed the fire front. On Aug 29th Governor Gibbons, US Congressman Heller, Nevada State Forester Pete Anderson, and other government and local officials visited helibase, received a briefing, and toured the fire area. The next day the fire reached 54,329 acres, close to its final size.
On Sept 10th the final acreage was 54,549 acres. Suppression costs to that date were $9,571,300.
For more discussion of the East Slide Rock Ridge WFU Fire see [here, here, here, and here].
2007 Fire Season Federal forest policy Politics and politicians The 2008 Fire Season
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Senate Pushes Massive Forest Holocaust Act
In the very first act of the 2009 Congress the US Senate pushed through a catastrophic incineration bill that guarantees megafire holocausts across Oregon the West.
While the national economy collapses, the US Senate fiddled and earmarked 200,000 acres in Oregon and 2 million acres in eight other states for wholesale destruction by raging wildfire. It is important to note that those fires will not stop at the newly designated holocaust boundaries, either.
The Oregonian reported today [here]
WASHINGTON — Crashing through a barrier that blocked popular wilderness bills for more than a year, the Senate on Sunday voted overwhelmingly in favor of legislation that would permanently protect more than 200,000 acres of threatened “natural treasures” near Mount Hood and other Oregon locations, as well as 2 million acres in eight other states.
The 66-12 vote on a rare weekend session cleared the way for final passage later this week of a sprawling public lands bill that extends formal wilderness status and protection to federal land across a wide swath of the country in addition to expanding national parks.
Though many senators grumbled about a Sunday session, the vote was a happy milestone for Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who has been pushing the Oregon elements for more than a year only to be blocked by objections from a single Republican lawmaker.
With Sunday’s vote, those objections have been overcome and the path to additional protection for land and streams in Oregon has largely been cleared.
Protection? Guaranteed destruction is more like it. Last summer alone 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.
Rattle Fire Photos
The Rattle Fire in the Boulder Creek Wilderness was less than 1,000 acres and under control at the end of August this summer. Then the fire management team was ordered off because they had done too good a job of suppression. The Rattle Fire was Let Burn and eventually charred more than 20,000 acres. Most of the 19,100-acre BC Wilderness was roasted, and the fire spread out of the designated wilderness area to the west, south, and east. Much of the 16,500-acre 1996 Spring Burn was reburned.
A priceless, heritage, Oregon old-growth forest has thus been destroyed by repeated fires. There was no attempt to rehabilitate the Spring Burn, there will be no attempt to rehabilitate the Rattle Burn, and it is reasonable to expect that another fire will re-devastate the area in another 12 years.
We tracked the Rattle Fire at W.I.S.E. Fire Tracking [here]. We commented on this tragedy [here, here, here, here, here, here, and here]. Now we sadly present some photographs of the destruction.
The following photos and captions are courtesy consulting forester Javier Goirigolzarri of Resource Management Services LLC, Roseburg, OR. JG was among those who lobbied hard for rehabilitation of the Spring Burn, to no avail. So-called “environmentalists” fought successfully to let the Spring Burn rot in place, thus ensuring that the Rattle Fire would burn with ferocious intensity.
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.
Federal forest policy Politics and politicians The 2008 Fire Season
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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.
Forest Service suppression tactics don’t meet muster
by Charley Fitch, Speak Your Piece, Redding Record Searchlight, December 7, 2008 [here]
The Concerned Citizens for Reasonable Fire Management, consisting of Forest Service retirees, foresters, Trinity County citizens and business owners, have been studying the 1999, 2006 and 2008 fires on the Big Bar Ranger District. We believe that we see a pattern that is most disturbing. Since 1999 over 300,000 acres of the district, in northwestern Trinity County, have been burned. From the 1905 inception of the Forest Service until 1999 — 93 years — less than 100,000 acres. Maybe a result of global warming or drought — we don’t believe so! We have the rain records to prove it.
The recent Fire Forum was definitely a step in the right direction. When studying fire suppression covering all of Northern California, involving multiple fire agencies with different suppression responsibilities, it is unlikely that any clear solution could evolve. However, our group has concentrated on only the Big Bar Ranger District of the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Here we have been able to isolate some issues and have narrowed the focus.
Why such a dramatic rise in fire size and duration? Our analysis leads us to the following reasons. Forests are creating more woody volume each year. In fact the Shasta-Trinity as of the early 1990s was growing 400 million board feet each year. Now with the current environmental protections in place, the Shasta-Trinity is removing less than 50 million board feet annually. So each year the forest builds up more fuel in the forest. Of course we can just watch it grow and then let it burn. That seems to be the opinion of many people who call themselves environmentalists. Or we allow removal of reasonable amounts of timber that can be used to build houses, offset some of the lumber imports into this country and reduce the fuel loading in the forests. Tough choice?
One very important facet of this very complicated issue that was not brought out in the write-up of the forum is a change in suppression tactics used by federal fire managers. This seems to be one issue that nobody wants to bring out in the open. The federal fire agencies have at least in behavior if not in written policy altered their suppression tactics. The underlying issue is safety. Firefighting tactics long accepted as effective and safe are now shunned by fire managers.
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.
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The Pyric Moral Hazard
Dr. Stephen J. Pyne, our favorite World’s Foremost literary fire historian intellectual, has written another essay in his Between Two Fires series. Pyne’s essay (below) compares the megafires in Southern California this fall with the dissolution of the US and world credit market. Palatial homes and securitized derivatives both melted away in a matter of minutes as the financial and fire communities were shocked and awed, helpless to do anything about it.
A Wildfire Expert Views the Money Meltdown
What SoCal’s blazes should teach Wall Street
By Stephen J. Pyne, TheTyee.ca, November 25, 2008 [here]
Even for the literal-minded, it’s hard not to lump the conflagrations on Wall Street with those in Southern California. The meltdown of 401(k)s with the street signs at Sylmar. The frantic, ever-escalating press conferences and bailouts of any significant credit institution with the desperate deployment of ever-greater masses of engines and helitankers, all equally ineffective.
Somehow the spark of a credit crunch managed to leap over fiscal firewalls and spread throughout the economic landscape, much as relatively small blazes blew over I-5 and threatened the power supply of Los Angeles. The general destruction has moved upscale, so that trophy homes burn along with trailer parks, and hedge funds with day traders. When the winds blew, they exposed any combustible object to embers, and threatened to incinerate anything vulnerable. The entire system, it seems, is vulnerable, and everyone knew that the winds always blow. It’s just been convenient to pretend otherwise.
In the late 19th century Bernhard Fernow looked over the American fire scene and condemned it, as only a Prussian forester could, as the result of “bad habits and loose morals.” There was no excuse, he huffed, for these annual conflagrations. We might restate his observation today with only slight alterations. The American fire scene remains the product of bad habits in its refusal to apply the most primitive standards of hazard zoning and building fire codes, and for its inability to replace feral fire with tame fire.
It remains the product of loose morals in the form of loose money and the political shenanigans that hide their infiltration through institutions. Those subprime loans have made it possible to occupy subprime landscapes, and America’s fire agencies have unwillingly hidden the full risk by protecting sites that are really beyond their charter. It’s a kind of pyric moral hazard.
The country now has, apparently, millions of homes in excess of its citizens’ ability to pay for them. It has occupied landscapes that we cannot hope to hold against wildfire. The mixing of the wild and the urban is the landscape equivalent of securitizing mortages. Most of the worst risks are hidden in ill-conceived exurban enclaves built over the past 25 years.
Privatize profits, but not losses
If today’s outcome is a bear market for securities, it’s been a bull market for burning.
The response to both seems to be, privatize profits and socialize losses.
It’s not as though history is helpless to suggest solutions. We’ve been through this before when the agricultural frontier slashed and burned its way across the continent and littered the country with incinerated towns. Then, too, there was a problem with enforcing boundaries because landclearing fires routinely bolted into forest and park reserves.
Now the problem has inverted, and it is the fires that breed in wildlands that threaten settlements outside the fence. The bad old days ended, curiously during the 1930s amid drought and Depression, when active intervention segregated the two landscapes. (Unfortunately the process then went too far and the feds decided to suppress all wildland fires, not merely quarantine them, helping to stoke today’s outbreaks.) Certainly fire affirms Robert Frost’s observation that something there is that doesn’t love a wall, and it confirms his conclusion that good fences make good neighbors.
Fundamentalists get us burned
There are no absolute assurances that wildfire will not from time to time spill over into settlements, any more than markets won’t fizz and bubble; but we know how to keep such outbreaks from happening routinely. It’s messy, irritating to fundamentalists (both those of the wilderness and of the market), and not cheap. So far, we continue to drop money and fire retardant on the flames. That may not quench the fire but it makes good political theater.
At some point, however, the money will run out completely and it will no longer be possible to pretend that we can rebuild; everything will simply burn to ash. We will have to deal with the landscape itself. The power of fire resides in its power to propagate: you control that power by controlling fire’s environment. So too the power of fiscal contagion requires control over the entire scene.
For the present we’re caught between two nasty fires. It’s time we put some distance between ourselves and both of them. We can’t control the winds, we only know they will blow again.
2007 Fire Season Federal forest policy The 2008 Fire Season
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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.
