Idaho Collaboration: “Lawsuits and appeals are no longer what hold up timber projects. The problem instead is money”

A) A few excerpts from an 12/27/17 article describing a situation where local collaboration has, to date, prevailed over legal suits to stop the Pioneer Fire Salvage Plan. The battle isn’t over but the prospects look good.

1) “Loggers are racing wood-boring insects and decay to salvage as much timber as they can from the 190,000 acres that burned across the Boise National Forest in last year’s Pioneer Fire, before the wood loses its worth.

The U.S. Forest Service planned to harvest 70 million board feet of timber from about 7 percent of the area burned in the massive wildfire. But insects, fungi and rot have deteriorated the standing trees so much that it will be lucky if it can get 50 million to 60 million board feet”

2) “Under the banner of the Boise Forest Coalition, these groups helped the Forest Service write a restoration plan that will use the proceeds from the salvage logging to pay for a variety of projects. On the list are efforts to protect and restore water quality in the South Fork Payette River and area streams; limit erosion; and reopen trails, roads and campgrounds.

This approach put loggers and conservation groups like the Idaho Conservation League on the same side as they helped the cash-strapped agency write up a plan that would meet environmental laws. So when other environmental groups like Wildlands Defense, Alliance for the Wild Rockies and the Native Ecosystems Council sued to halt the project, U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill allowed the logging to continue, noting in November the coalition’s approval of the project.

“We all want to see a healthy forest and clean water and appreciate that the court agreed that the project should move forward,” said Alan Ward, chairman of the Boise County Commission and a member of the coalition.”

3) “Statewide, four timber projects endorsed by collaborative groups over the past two years have later been challenged in court, and all four held up. Fuels treatment in Idaho rose from 53,000 acres in 2016 to 79,000 acres in 2017.

Part of the reason for success has been the use of “Good Neighbor” authority by the state of Idaho. Using a state fund, state foresters prepare timber sales after the Forest Service completes environmental reviews. This has increased how many projects can be offered even as federal staffs become smaller.”

B) A few excerpts from the background story from May 6, 2017

1) “Even before fall snow put the fire out last year, Peterson and John Kidd, his counterpart in the Lowman District, were overseeing rehabilitation projects to prevent landslides, mud flows and severe erosion. Such events can take out the roads that are major recreation arteries into the places Treasure Valley residents go to camp, collect mushrooms, hike, hunt, fish or ride off-road vehicles.”

2) ““It also gives us the ability to have some funding for the reforestation and other things, like culvert replacement,” said Kidd. “If we didn’t do this salvage right away, we would probably be dealing with this for the next 20 years. (Restoration) takes manpower and that takes funding, which we might not have down the road.””

3) “Many of the trees to be harvested are near roads and trails and are considered a hazard to the traveling and recreating public. If not cut now, those hazards might last 10 years.

Morris Huffman, a forest consultant who served on the Boise Forest Coalition, said uncut burned trees could fall and close corridors like Clear Creek Road for years. Clear Creek provides access to Bear Valley Creek, one of the headwaters of the Middle Fork of the Salmon River popular with campers, hunters and anglers.”

4) “In addition to logging and tree planting, the projects include decommissioning and removing unneeded roads; thinning overgrown forests; trail work; spraying to control noxious weeds; road maintenance; and water quality-improvement projects such as culverts and water bars.

5) “Not everyone is eager to see such aggressive action following the fire. There is ecological value in leaving the forest alone after a burn. The Northwest forest ecosystem evolved in fire, and bird species like black-backed woodpeckers, for example, rely heavily on snag trees left standing after a burn.

Jeff Juel, an environmental consultant from Missoula, Mont., who works for environmental groups that oppose salvage sales, argues that the less done after a fire, the more resilient the area is to future disturbances. He opposes the agency’s emergency declarations justified by the need to sell timber to help the local mill and workers. He wants a full environmental review instead of the shortened one the Forest Service is doing.

Jonathan Oppenheimer, government relations director for the Idaho Conservation League, agrees with Juel on the overall benefits of allowing natural renewal following a fire. But he’s a member of the Boise Forest Coalition and worked closely with partners like Roberts and the Forest Service to “make sure that those high-quality and sensitive resources are protected.””

In Search of Common Ground II – It Takes Two: Forest Management and Social Management

Here are two current articles that get some things wrong but if we ignore those items and focus on the big picture that they present rather than on the details, I believe that we will find that we have more in common than we thought.

Between the two articles we see the full picture for PRIORITIZED actions to begin the long battle ahead to recover from national ashtrays, lost lives, lost homes and infrastructure, significantly decreased health of both humans and forests. It is a two pronged battle that includes both sound forest management and social management.

A) Using Forests to Fight Climate Change – California takes a small step in the right direction.

“The state’s proposed Forest Carbon Plan aims to double efforts to thin out young trees and clear brush in parts of the forest, including by controlled burning. This temporarily lowers carbon-carrying capacity. But the remaining trees draw a greater share of the available moisture, so they grow and thrive, restoring the forest’s capacity to pull carbon from the air. Healthy trees are also better able to fend off bark beetles. The landscape is rendered less combustible. Even in the event of a fire, fewer trees are consumed.

The need for such planning is increasingly urgent. Already, since 2010, drought and beetles have killed more than 100 million trees in California, most of them in 2016 alone, and wildfires have scorched hundreds of thousands of acres.

California’s plan envisions treating 35,000 acres of forest a year by 2020, and 60,000 by 2030 — financed from the proceeds of the state’s emissions-permit auctions. That’s only a small share of the total acreage that could benefit, an estimated half a million acres in all, so it will be important to prioritize areas at greatest risk of fire or drought.

The strategy also aims to ensure that carbon in woody material removed from the forests is locked away in the form of solid lumber, burned as biofuel in vehicles that would otherwise run on fossil fuels, or used in compost or animal feed.”

B) Why are California’s homes burning? It isn’t natural disaster it’s bad planning

This Op-ed by Richard Halsey (director of the California Chaparral Institute who sometimes posts on NCFP) is well written and, though I would disagree on some statements in his post, I present those that I do agree on in an attempt to show that there are specific components that are middle ground that we all should be able to agree on and focus on rather than focusing on what won’t work. Once we change our emphasis, hostility between opposing sides should decrease and progress should increase.

“Large, high-intensity wildfires are an inevitable and natural part of life in California. The destruction of our communities is not. But many of the political leaders we elect and planning agencies we depend upon to create safe communities have failed us. They have allowed developers to build in harm’s way, and left firefighters holding the bag. ”

“others blame firefighters for creating dense stands of chaparral in fire suppression efforts—when that’s the only way chaparral naturally grows, dense and impenetrable.”

“”we need to recognize that fire disasters aren’t natural, they’re social. And they require social solutions.”” (quote from University of Colorado geographer Gregory Simon)
–> Pay attention to the statement “fire disasters aren’t natural, they’re social”. My first reaction was “not true” but in the context of the Op Ed, I think that the author is making an appropriate distinction between the words “Catastrophic” and “Disaster” by reserving “Disaster” for those situations where the catastrophe falls mainly on humans.

“We also need to examine the best practices of other fire-prone regions. Communities in Australia often install external, under-eave/rooftop sprinklers, which have proven quite effective in protecting structures during wildfires. (Australians understand that wet homes do not ignite.) Such systems should be standard in all new developments in high fire hazard zones. It is likely they would have protected many of the homes consumed in Ventura’s Thomas fire this week.”

“As we do with earthquakes and floods, our goal should be to reduce the damage when wildfires arrive, not pretend we can prevent them from happening at all. That mindset starts at the planning department, not the fire station.”

C) Relevant Prior Posts with included references:

1) Finding Common Ground
IN SEARCH OF COMMON GROUND
Frustration: Will It Lead to Change?

2) Wildfire
Fuels management can be a big help in dealing with wildfires
Air Pollution from Wildfires compared to that from Prescribed burns
Inside the Firestorm
The Impact of Sound Forest Management Practices on Wildfire Smoke and Human Health
Humans sparked 84 percent of US wildfires, increased fire season over two decades
More on Wildfire and Sound Forest Management
Scientific Basis for Changing Forest Structure to Modify Wildfire Behavior and Severity
Articles of Interest on Fire
The Role of Sound Forest Management in Reducing Wildfire Risk
15 Minute TED Talk: “Forest Service ecologist proposes ways to help curb rising ‘Era of Megafires’”

What is Beyond the “Fog of War”?

There are scary and uncertain times ahead for our forests. There is just too much “Fog of War” going on for the public to sort out and fact-check for themselves. Even the ‘fact-checkers’ should be suspect, until proven reliable and bias-free. The rise of ‘fake news’ has blurred multiple lines, and many people, even in mass media, fall for the hoaxes, satire or misinformation. (Example: An article appeared on the Grist website, showing concern about a recall of “Dog Condoms”, presenting the link to www.dogcondoms.com )

Conservation Triage – How a Math Formula Could Decide Fate of Endangered U.S. Species

The title says it all. Considering that US citizens pay more in taxes than they do for food and clothing, is it any surprise that a lot of us want lower taxes. Here are some selected quotes from an article titled How a Math Formula Could Decide Fate of Endangered U.S. Species

It’s all about the 80/20 rule or, to put it another way, picking the low hanging fruit.

1) “Arizona State University ecologist Leah Gerber presented a plan to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials that would use a mathematical formula to direct government money away from endangered and threatened species she calls “over-funded failures” and toward plants and animals that can more easily be saved.”

2) “Gavin Shire, a spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said in an email to Reuters that the agency is examining the controversial proposal.

“We have worked closely with this group of scientists as they developed this new conservation tool, and while we have not made any determinations yet, are impressed with its potential,” Shire said. “We will be exploring further if and how we may best use it to improve the effectiveness of our recovery efforts.””

3) “The Endangered Species Act bars the government from deciding which animals and plants become extinct. But funding one species over another could let some decline or die out.

“I just don’t think it’s possible to save all species even though I would like to,” said Gerber, a self-described Democrat and environmentalist. “That’s an uncomfortable thing to say and I don’t like it but that’s the reality.”

Gerber said as many as 200 additional species could be saved by directing funds away from species such as the iconic northern spotted owl – whose numbers have declined despite millions of dollars spent on conservation efforts – and toward those with a better chance of survival.”

4) “So-called conservation triage is already being used in New Zealand and the Australian state of New South Wales, but Gerber has developed a specific algorithm for the United States that considers the expense and needs of local species as well as rules laid out by the Endangered Species Act.”

5) “Gerber came up with the idea for a U.S. model while Democratic former President Barack Obama was in office, pitching the concept to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials before her algorithm was developed. Given the proposed budget cuts, some proponents say it may have a better chance of adoption under the Trump administration.”

6) “Despite protected habitat and about $4.5 million, adjusted for inflation, that Gerber calculates has been spent annually between 1989 and 2011 to help the owl recover, federal statistics show its numbers have declined by about 4 percent per year. About 4,800 northern spotted owls are left in North America, according to the environmental group Defenders of Wildlife.”

7) “One proponent is Hugh Possingham, an Australian scientist and an architect of the policy in that country. Now the chief scientist for U.S. environmental group The Nature Conservancy, Possingham wants to see similar policies adopted in the United States.

“I’m always amazed that this is a contentious issue. I’ve had people discuss it with me and end up with a fit,” he said. “But the mathematics and the economics of doing the best you can with the resources you have – I don’t know why that’s contentious at all.”

The Australian state of New South Wales, which in 2013 adopted a strategic prioritization algorithm, decided to keep funding recovery efforts for some species that the model ranked as low priorities, said James Brazill-Boast, senior project officer with the New South Wales Office of Environment and Heritage.

For example, he said, the koala would be ranked low, but Australians would never support letting the beloved creatures, listed as vulnerable by law, become extinct.

Gerber said U.S. officials could similarly decide to continue supporting species that her algorithm might reject – or non-profits could step in to help.

“I don’t think the agency wants to let things go extinct,” Gerber said. “I don’t want to let things go extinct. … But we can actually achieve better outcomes by being strategic.””

Giant Sequoia National Monument

With the general public becoming enraged about Giant Sequoia logging scenarios, here is a picture of some Bigtrees in what used to be the Sequoia National Forest. Chances are, the review will recommend keeping all groves within the Monument, adding some buffer zones and connectivity, then returning a large portion, including logging roads, skid trails, plantations and stumps, back to the National Forest.

The ‘Trumpspiracies’ abound on the Sierra Club’s Facebook fundraising content comments. They make up these elaborate and unlikely situations where the “logging companies” would come in and make wild profits off of cutting Giant Sequoias. Some think that they would be cut to burn for power. More were sure that oil wells and mining would happen once the trees were gone. One insisted that the wood could be exported, milled and made into tables, “destined for the Arabian Peninsula”. Many are comparing this National Monument review to the destruction of historical sites by radical Islam. If you’re going to oppose actual Trump era actions, maybe, just maybe, one should actually use facts?

With Sequoias being a rather sensitive issue, what shall we do, when very soon we will need to thin some of these Giant Sequoia plantations, scattered throughout the Sierra Nevada? Here’s a sample of one on the Eldorado.

Trump Reportedly Wants to Clearcut Giant Sequoias

As per the Sierra Club

“Logging companies are lying in wait, chainsaws ready, for Trump to chop the protections of Giant Sequoia National Monument.

Don’t let Trump give loggers free reign to fell majestic trees. Become a monthly donor to save this precious ecosystem: http://sc.org/2upyrE6 ”

Leave no funding opportunity left unexploited!

Forest “Christmas tree” bill out of House committee

No, not that Christmas tree (they are searching the Kootenai National Forest for that one).

 

This one.  This is the Westerman bill that the House hung all the hopes of active forest management on:  “the Resilient Federal Forests Act of 2017.”  Similar legislation in 2015 passed the House, but died in the Senate.

“To expedite under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 and improve forest management activities on National Forest System Lands, on public lands under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management, and on tribal lands to return resilience to overgrown, fire-prone forest lands and other purposes.”

Just about everything that has been suggested before (and stopped by Obamacrats) is in there to make it easier and attractive to do things.  Categorical exclusions, expedited salvage, expedited project ESA consultation and reduced/eliminated forest plan consultation, litigation restrictions, county payments, less road decommissioning, elimination of eastern OR/WA old growth harvest restrictions, elimination of Northwest Forest Plan survey and manage requirements, O & C land management changes, wildfire disaster funding.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wildlife in Managed Forests

In a previous post titled “The response of the forest to drought” the questions led to the opportunity to bring us up to date on the current state of elk and the role that sound forest management can play. Here are some quotes from various sources some of which contradict what we have heard on this site regarding the need for dense cover:

A) “Wildlife in Managed Forests” – Elk and Deer – 2013, Oregon Forest Resources Institute
1) Page 2 – “Preferred forest habitat age: All forest ages, but most heavily associated with young stands where food is most abundant.”
2) Page 10 – “These results suggest that current commercial forestry practices are compatible with maintenance of ungulate forage species.”
3) Page 11 – ““For land managers who are interested in increasing healthy elk populations, their focus would be better spent on providing forage opportunities rather than cover.””
4) Page 13 – “Forage quality in late spring and summer is key to successful reproduction.” … “Elk prefer and will select certain highly nutritious and palatable plant species when they can get them.
These species, mostly in the forage classes of grasses, sedges, annual forbs and deciduous shrubs, provide a more concentrated source of energy than the less-preferred ferns, evergreen shrubs and conifers”
5) Page 14 – “Limited timber harvest on USFS lands since the implementation of the NW Forest Plan and social, political and legal mandates associated with late successional species have resulted in less early seral habitat on large contiguous tracts of USFS lands.”
6) Page 15 – “Where the objective is to provide landscapes with mosaics of early and advanced seral stages for elk, the effort will have to be ongoing in perpetuity and thus will be most effective if integrated in long-term management plans where habitat needs of elk are tied to forest manipulations”
7) “Land managers whose objectives include providing habitat and forage for deer and elk may want to consider the following silvicultural treatments:
• Where thinning is prescribed, thin timber stands to or below 50 percent crown closure to allow sufficient sunlight to reach the ground surface for early seral vegetation to become established.
• Retain any natural meadows and openings and remove encroaching conifers from these open areas. Note that power-line easements make great openings and often provide habitat for deer and elk.
• In thinned stands, create gaps of 1 to 5 acres on sites with east, south or west solar aspect and slopes less than 30 percent and away from open roads.
• In created gaps, plant a few native shrubs that provide fruit, nuts, berries or browse for wildlife.
• Seed all disturbed soil including skid trails, yarding corridors, landings and decommissioned roads with a seed mix of native grass and forb species that will provide high forage value for deer, elk and other species. These management prescriptions may not make sense for all landowners or all landscapes, but they will work in some areas to help provide habitat for deer and elk.”

B) From the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation we have 13 Bizarre Elk Facts That Most Hunters Don’t Know:
• “old trees are actually hurting elk populations.
“Our forest lands, whether on public or private land, are overstuffed with trees,” he told me over the phone. “The American public just loves trees, but in the forest where the elk live, too many trees block sunlight from getting to the forest floor. We’re not growing grasses and forbs, which are key to elk nutrition.”
What is needed are young forests, also known as early-successional habitats, that allow elk herds to thrive. Opening up tree-choked landscapes promotes the growth of low-lying vegetation, which are beneficial to elk and other wildlife.
“We’d like to see a lot more biodiversity out there so we’re really trying to encourage more thinning and more prescribed burning,” Tom said. “It’s not just for elk. There are a wide variety of bird species, small animal species, and big game animals that really benefit from the habitat work we do for elk.””

C) From the Forestry Source by Steve Wilent – Page 2 May 2014 “Embracing the Young Forest”:
1) “The Northwest Forest Plan’s was to secure late successional stands for the spotted owl … Now the battle is being waged … for … the inhabitants of the youngest forests.”
2) “In the Northeast and upper Midwest we documented 65 species … that were declining because of the loss of young forest habitat.”

To conclude this post let me repeat, one more time, that Single Species Management such as for the NSO and the 14 million acres set aside to “preserve” its habitat is having a far ranging negative impact on countless other species including elk. Single Species Management isn’t even working for the NSO as mentioned many times before (more details to come at a later date in response to a question from Jon Haber in a previous discussion thread on this blog site). Contrary to the opinion expressed by some on this blog site, sound forest management in the form of more small (~40 to ~200 acres) early seral regeneration openings and thinnings with included similar sized patches of stands near the maximum target density more evenly distributed throughout the forest would improve forage while providing cover from prey. Extensive contiguous acreages of dense conifers are counter productive to increasing or sustaining elk populations. Which is to say that those who focus on single species management and especially on late successional habitat (i.e. old growth) have forgotten about the importance of edge effect in wildlife management and the importance of maintaining a balanced age distribution of stands to replace the old growth which, no matter how hard you try, can’t be “preserved” in its current state over the long term. Heterogeneity/diversity is preferable to large contiguous acreages of homogeneity for all species in the long run.

Inside the Firestorm

This is for those who insist that we don’t need to use forest management to reduce the risk of catastrophic loss to wildfire. Several people have expressed unscientific views on this site to the effect that ‘Wildfire is climate driven and no amount of controlled burns and or thinning can have any impact on total acreage burned since it is all due to global warming (drought and high winds)’ Hopefully this will bring them to their senses and open their minds to the possibility that they are flat out wrong.

Several of us have tried to explain that global warming only makes the need for managing stand density even more important. We have also tried to explain that what many see as climate driven firestorms are instead micro climate created by the fire. Hence the need to use the appropriate forest management tools to reduce the risk of an ignition spreading at a rate that will create its own weather and to provide opportunities for crown fires to return to the ground in order to allow the fire to be controlled as is appropriate for the specific situation.

I have rightly or wrongly gotten the impression that some here don’t really respect the research done on wildfire for at least the last 80 years. My reason for saying this is the applause they afford to people who come up with conclusions contrary to the science but don’t bother to reconcile their suppositions/theories, based on cherry picked incidents, with the established and well replicated science.

So here is an article that should give you a better understanding of and respect for the work behind the real science and how it corroborates what some of us have repeatedly stated here and elsewhere so, obviously, the principles described here are not new – They are just getting a whole lot more attention as technology has advanced to the point where tools are now available to make precise measurements on what has only been repeatedly observed before. This is a pretty intense read and well worth reading in its entirety.

1) ‘“It looked,” says Kingsmill, “like a nuclear bomb.”
Undaunted, Kingsmill and the pilot decided to do what no research aircraft had done: Fly directly through the plume.’

2) ‘For decades, scientists have focused on the ways that topography and fuels, such as the trees, grass or houses consumed by flames, shape fire behavior, in part because these things can be studied even when a fire isn’t burning. But this line of inquiry has offered only partial answers to why certain blazes, like the Pioneer Fire, lash out in dangerous and unexpected ways — a problem magnified by severe drought, heat and decades of fire suppression.’

3) ‘“The plume is orders of magnitude harder to study than the stuff on the ground,” says Brian Potter, a meteorologist with the Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory in Seattle who sometimes works with Clements. Indeed, it took a global conflagration much darker than any forest fire to even begin laying the foundations of this work. Kingsmill’s observation about the bomb, it turns out, isn’t far off.’
–> Here the article dives off into the beginning of fire study as it began in the early ’40’s in preparation for the British bombing of Hamburg, Germany on July 27, 1943 when ‘42,000 people died, and another 37,000 were injured’

4) ‘these old experiments, finished by 1970, are still a key source of knowledge about extreme fire behaviors. Until recently, technology was simply too limited to reveal much more about the specific mechanisms by which a fire plume might feed a firestorm, let alone how beasts like fire tornadoes and fireballs form.’

5) ‘His instrument towers, deployed in carefully controlled fires, provided yet more unprecedented and precise measurements: how winds accelerate and draft into an advancing flame front, the heat and turbulence above the flames, and the speed of the rising hot air.’

6) ‘Clements wanted to capture the whole phenomenon — to look inside the opaque mass of an entire fire plume from a distance, and see all of its parts swirling at once. In 2011, he found his lens: a technology called Doppler lidar.’

7) ‘The team’s insight about the Bald and Eiler fires has implications for predicting smoke and air quality — a constant concern for communities near large fires. It also impacted the fires themselves. Even though both fires existed in the same atmospheric environment of pressures and winds, and burned across similar terrain, they were spreading in opposite directions that day — Bald to the south, and Eiler to the north. This denser current of cold air and smoke was actually pulling the Bald Fire in the opposite direction of what was predicted based on wind alone.’

8) ‘Coen works at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, where she studies fire’s inner workings. In September 1998, she spent several hours aboard a Hercules C-130 aircraft as it circled over Glacier National Park. The McDonald Creek Fire was marching up a steep slope at roughly three feet per second. Its smoke obscured the advancing flames, but infrared video cameras mounted outside the plane recorded what was happening underneath. It was only later, as Coen looked through individual frames of that video, that she noticed something strange: At one point, a jet of flame seemed to shoot ahead of the fire. It lasted only a second or two, but left a trail of newly ignited vegetation in front of the fire. Not until Coen calculated the size of the pixels and the time between frames could she appreciate its true significance.
The jet had surged 100 yards ahead of the fire’s front, advancing 100 mph — “like a flamethrower,” she says. It was 10 times faster than the local wind — generated, somehow, by the fire’s own internal tumult.
Coen called it the “finger of death,” and for her it brought to mind the unconfirmed reports of fireballs that occasionally circulated among firefighters.
She had never seen such a thing, but as she examined footage of other fires, she was surprised to find fire jets again and again.’

9) ‘Finney’s slow-motion videos show that these rolling eddies exist in pairs within the fire. They roll in opposite directions, coupled like interlocking gears. Their combined motion periodically pushes down on the advancing front of the fire, causing flames to lick downward and forward, ahead of the fire.
Finney believes that these forward flame-licks are scaled-down versions of the “fingers of death” that Coen has seen in wildfires — possibly even related to the fireballs said to have shot out of buildings during the 1943 Hamburg firestorm.
Coen has actually documented similar flame-rollers in real wildfires using infrared video. But she believes that the finger of death also requires another factor. As bushes and trees are heated by an approaching fire, their decomposing cellulose releases hydrogen, methane, carbon monoxide and other flammable gases in a process called pyrolysis.
Coen and Shankar Mahalingam, a fluid-dynamics engineer at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, believe that rolling currents can mix these flammable gases with oxygen-rich air. “The dangerous situation is when the fire is going up on a hill,” says Mahalingam. “Maybe there are pyrolysis products that have accumulated” in front of the fire and mixed with fire-boosting oxygen. As the flame licks forward into this invisible tinderbox, it ignites a blowtorch. … These same buoyant gases also supply the momentum that drives a fire whirl to spin once it is triggered. And on a much larger scale, they are what pushes a fire plume ever higher in the sky, powering the in-drafts that keep the fire burning below.’

10) ‘what drew Potter’s interest was the water. Concentrations of water vapor rose 10 to 20 times higher than the surrounding air.
Water is a major product of combustion, second only to carbon dioxide. It forms as oxygen binds to the hydrogen atoms in wood, gasoline or just about any other fuel — creating hydrogen oxide, otherwise known as H2O. Burning four pounds of perfectly dry wood releases a pound or two of water. …
And yet water vapor fuels the strongest updrafts in nature, says Potter, from thunderstorms to tornadoes to hurricanes. As moist air rises during these storms, the water vapor condenses into cloud droplets, releasing a small amount of heat that keeps the air slightly warmer than its surroundings, so it continues to rise. “Water,” he says, “is the difference between a weak updraft and a really powerful updraft.”’

11) ‘He believes that water was pivotal in fueling the firestorm that swept through the suburbs of Canberra, the Australian capital, on Jan. 18, 2003.
The fire consumed 200,000 acres of drought-stricken territory that day, isolating the city under a glowing haze of Halloween orange. Remote infrared scans suggest that during a single 10-minute period, it released heat equivalent to 22,000 tons of TNT — 50 percent more than the energy unleashed by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.’

12) ‘When N2UW flew through the plume of the Pioneer Fire in 2016, its instruments registered updrafts of 80 to 100 miles per hour. Yet at that elevation, 8,000 feet above the flames, the interior of the plume was only 3 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the surrounding air, meaning that its buoyant stampede through the atmosphere was powered by a density difference of just about 1 percent.
In other words, given the right atmospheric conditions, a few degrees of warmth and extra buoyancy could spell the difference between a plume that pushes 40,000 feet up, into the stratosphere, powering a vicious blaze on the ground — as Pioneer did — and one whose smoke never escapes the top of the boundary layer at 3,000 feet, leaving the fire stunted, like a weather-beaten dwarf tree gasping for life at timberline.’

13) ‘Clements’s trained eye began to pick out some basic structures: a 40 mph downdraft next to a 60 mph updraft signified a turbulent eddy on the edge of the plume. Hot air pushing up past cooler, stationary air had set in motion a tumbling, horizontal vortex — the sort of thing that could easily have accounted for the plane’s brief freefall. Those blotchy radar pictures may finally allow us to see through wildfire’s impulsive, chaotic veneer’

Yes, professional wildfire researchers, the in air observations of pilots of spotters and retardant dropping planes and the on the ground observations of fire crews that point the researchers in various directions all deserve our respect. They actually put their lives on the line as opposed to those who disdain their commitment and repeatedly validated science.

Contact the author if you want references or check back in some previous postings on this site for some related references. I post this without references because it jives with the known and validated science that I have critically studied since I first started my forestry education in 1963.

The Impact of Sound Forest Management Practices on Wildfire Smoke and Human Health

– Some would have us turn our forests back to a time before any of mankind inhabited North America.
– Some suggest that we should limit our management of forests to that done by native Americans pre European times.
– Some of us see a problem with limiting ourselves to these past practices because of the current population level.
– Some of us even see that properly validated forest science carried out in environmentally sound ways can improve the sustainability of our forest ecosystems and all of the species that depend on them for habitat, store carbon and reduce our dependence on the use of non-renewable, environmentally unfriendly resources which are being extracted from their long term, safe, natural storage underground.

This article (J. For. 115(●):000–000 http://dx.doi.org/10.5849/jof.16-042
Copyright © 2017 Society of American Foresters) “fire & fuels management Aligning Smoke Management with Ecological and Public Health Goals” seems to me to be a good starting point for a much neglected discussion on why mankind has to manage our federal forest better just from the point of protecting human health.

A) Motivation for the study comes from:
1) “mismatches between the scale of benefits and risks make it difficult to proactively manage wildland fires to promote both ecological and public health.”
2) “A recent update to wildfire smoke policy proposed by the US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) recognized the need to restore and maintain more frequent fire regimes through intentional use of fire, while asserting that protecting human health remained the agency’s “highest priority” (Office of the Federal Register 2015). Therefore, addressing both forest restoration and air quality objectives remains a central challenge.”
3) “Hurteau et al. (2014) found that under a business-as-usual climate scenario, this escalation in fire potential is likely to increase wildfire emissions in California by 50% by the end of this century unless agencies take a more proactive approach to fire use.”
4) “… current policies have permitted regulators to curtail fires intentionally managed for resource objectives in response to nuisance complaints by a few individuals, despite the potential for such
fires to have long-term collective benefits (Engel 2013). Because the impact and likelihood of smoke increase the longer that fire is kept out of the system, extensive fire suppression can result in a vicious cycle that becomes more and more costly to escape until the system fails, as represented by extreme
wildfires (Calkin et al. 2015).”
5) “Smoke and wildfires can impact public health in ways other than particulate pollution, including ozone pollution, increased stress during and after wildfires, and strains on medical services and communication systems (Fowler 2003, Kumagai et al. 2004, Finlay et al. 2012). Despite these broader
considerations, public health regulations for smoke typically focus on a 24-hour average of PM2.5. Values that exceed 35ug/m3 are considered unhealthy for sensitive groups, which include pregnant women, young children, elderly individuals, smokers, and people with chronic respiratory problems such as asthma (Delfino et al. 2009, Kochi et al. 2010, Moeltner et al. 2013).”

Please note that this study was not offered as a be all and end all study. In my opinion, the main objective was achieved. That objective being to give order of magnitude numbers to justify further research and further stimulate the process of rethinking current regulations and forest management policies.

B) Known Facts:
1) California: “The wildfire emissions in 2008 represented 68% of all PM2.5 emissions in the state, and they caused notable public health impacts (Wegesser et al. 2009, Preisler et al. 2015)”
2) “An important spatial mismatch results from the fact that large wildfires can create smoke impacts on distant urban populations. The risk to urban populations from regional-scale smoke impacts has increased as California became the most urbanized state in the United States, with 90% of its population residing within cities that have more than 50,000 people and another 5% living in smaller urban clusters (US Census Bureau 2015). Many of those urban areas are situated in valleys or basins that have poor air quality due to human activities as well as natural conditions that often trap pollutants (Ngo et al. 2010, Nakayama Wong et al. 2011). For example, the four metropolitan areas in the United States with the highest levels of particle pollution are all located in California’s Central Valley (American Lung Association 2015). Because many urban populations already experience poor air quality during the summer, they are particularly vulnerable to health impacts from wildfires (Delfino et al. 2009, Cisneros et al. 2014)”
3) “Within the study area, daily emissions from both prescribed burns and resource objective wildfires remained well below 500 tons PM2.5 , whereas the Rim Fire had 20 days exceeding that threshold (nearly half of its entire period of active fire growth) and peaked at nearly 11,000 tons PM2.5 /day on Aug. 26, 2013 (Figure 2). During the late summer, air quality is already problematic in downwind areas such as the Lake Tahoe Basin and San Joaquin Valley”
4) “Ground-level monitoring indicated that these large smoke plumes coincided with highly polluted days in Reno, which occurred on August 23–25 and again on August 28–29, when PM2.5 values exceeded the “unhealthy for all populations” standard (55.5ug/m3) (Figure 4F). Such high levels are such a serious health concern that people are advised to avoid going outdoors. Navarro et al. (2016) reported that very unhealthy and unhealthy days occurred at 10 air monitoring sites in the central Sierras, northern Sierras, and Nevada during the Rim Fire.”

C) Data – Smoke Plume data was used to “compare differences in smoke impacts between resource objective wildfires and full-suppression wildfires within the San Joaquin River watershed in California’s Sierra Nevada, the Sierras that burned between 2002 and 2013, including 10 resource objective wildfires (totaling 20,494 acres), 17 prescribed fires (totaling 6,636 acres), 4 small wildfires (totaling 12,025 acres), and the exceptionally large Rim Fire (257,314 acres). … the limited availability of smoke monitoring data, particularly before 2007, requires a focus on modeled emissions.”

D) Findings: Reasonable Expectations from the use of increased forest management to reduce the impact on human health of catastrophic wildfires include:
1) “Our results indicate that the 257,314-acre Rim Fire of 2013 probably resulted in 7 million person-days of smoke impact across California and Nevada, which was greater than 5 times the impact per burned unit area than two earlier wildfires, Grouse and Harden of 2009, that were intentionally managed for resource objectives within the same airshed.”
2) “The combination of a warming climate and accumulation of forest fuels ensures a future with more large fires and smoke in dry western US forests. We have outlined framework to more directly account for regional-scale smoke impacts from these events using surface monitoring and satellite observations of smoke. Managing large fires for resource objectives can shift the release of inevitable emissions to conditions that minimize large-scale smoke impacts, by controlling fire spread based on available dispersion and monitored impacts and creating anchors for containing future hazardous fires. When well supported by firefighting, air quality monitoring and modeling, and public communications resources, this approach can overcome existing disincentives for achieving ecological and public health goals.”
3) “August 31 … Altogether, medium- and high-density HMS smoke from the Rim Fire on that day covered a large area (251,691 mi2) with a population of 2.8 million people, more than 2 million of whom resided below high-density smoke … In contrast, the Grouse and Harden Fires burned slowly over the early summer of 2009, with very modest emissions until the last week of June … Our analysis of HMS maps indicated that there were only 2 days when medium-density plumes overlaid substantial populations in California and Nevada, amounting to 25,000 person-days”
4) “the Rim Fire burned 55 times more area (257,213 acres) than the combined footprint of the Grouse and Harden Fires (4,695 acres), but our analysis suggests that it had at least 275 times greater impact in terms of persondays, or 5.5 times greater impact relative to area burned.”
5) “Our analyses help to illustrate and begin to quantify many of the potential benefits of resource objective wildfires compared with those of extreme fires:
– 1. Reduced fuels and reduced consumption. … We accounted for this effect within the 10,385 acres of the Rim Fire’s footprint that had experienced prescribed fires or resource objective wildfires since 2002 by changing “typical” fuel loads to “light,” which reduced estimated emissions in those areas by 53%.
– 2. More favorable dispersion and potential for less ozone. As maintenance burns reduce fuel levels over time, managers may be able to burn more safely earlier in the summer and or later in the fall, when dispersion is often more favorable and ozone concentrations are lower (Jaffe et al. 2013). Fires managed for resource objectives are less likely to result in the greater lofting and concentrations of smoke reported from extreme fires, which often deliver pollution to distant, large urban populations in lower-elevation valleys (Colarco et al. 2004, Peterson et al. 2015).
– 3. Greater ability to regulate fire spread. Because wildfires would be managed for resource objectives when weather and fire behavior conditions are more moderate than under extreme wildfires, their slower fire spread can curb daily emissions. In addition, managers can employ the push-pull tactics burn described for the Grouse Fire to regulate daily emissions based on monitored concentrations fire will become increasingly important for reducing the likelihood and extent of large-scale, extreme fires like the Rim Fire (Westerling et al. 2015).”