“Dr. Paul Hessburg, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service, has traveled across the West to share the result of 30 years of research into wildfires and what might be done to prevent them.”
–> My thought: Err! Reduce them – preventing any from occurring is impossible. Other opportunities for disagreement but well worth watching none the less.
Good video presentation of how we got here and the need for changes to be “made in how national forests are managed and the how the public views certain preventative measures”
The 15 minute TEDx Talk video is about half way down in this link
FYI: The following comments are from Dr. Dick Hutto, Professor Emeritus of biology and wildlife biology at UM, and a leading expert on impacts of severe wildlife on wildlife, especially birds.
Dr. Hutto has given us permission to share his comments to Paul Hessberg, which were written in late April 2017.
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It would be interesting to hear a point by point discussion by Hessburg and Hutto. Or even Hutto and someone like me. Otherwise no one will understand why they disagree.
I don’t think Hessburg is saying that treatments will “prevent fires” that’s a straw person argument. He says that we can manage fires by managing vegetation in a way that will change fire behavior. All summer I have been posting examples of success of treatments in changing fire behavior. It is the view of most scientists who work in fire behavior and practitioners. (Do we need an IPCC-like equivalent “scientific consensus” document?)
“Although I acknowledge that prescribed fire and thinning can affect fire behavior in rare instances, such as the one you highlight on the Wenatchee, fires in most forest types burn through every kind of harvest condition—from clearcuts through seed-tree cuts to shelterwood cuts and beyond, as numerous examples show. ”
I would also like to see a logic path (from Hutto or another person who feels the same way), that explains how we know that “how things used to be” will still be the best way to manage, or not manage, landscapes in light of climate change. That seems like a philosophical idea, and not so much a scientific hypothesis.
Fire behavior is characterized by rate-of-spread, flame length, and heat. Firefighters must understand these components of fire behavior to stay safe. For example, a fire’s rate of spread determines how close to position safety zones. Flame length and heat are also considerations in constructing fire lines (although most lines don’t make a meaningful difference in the fire’s footprint). Since the Forest Service’s major function is fighting fires, which requires keeping its employees safe, it’s no wonder that fire behavior is on the Forest Service’s mind. Since the Forest Service can’t change the weather or topography (major components of fire behavior), it seeks to control the only factor it can — fuel.
As Hutto and others have pointed out, weather trumps fuel. In the thickest of old-growth forests, a lightning strike on a rainy day ain’t goin’ nowhere. But a dropped cigarette in cheatgrass (a very light fuel load) on a hot, windy day will spread like wildfire. The first scenario threatens nothing. The second can take out homes and communities.
Most ignitions are of no practical concern as the preponderance of fires would go out on their own. Either the fuels are too damp, the temperatures too low, the winds too light, or the topography too flat to sustain the fire. These are the ignitions that inflate the Forest Service’s initial attack success to its lofty >95% rate. Putting out benign fires is the bread-and-butter of the Forest Service’s suppression actions.
Then there are the two percent of ignitions that escape regardless of initial attack efforts. These ignitions occur where topographies are steep, when fuels are dry, temperatures are high, and winds are fast. There is no vegetation landscape engineering possible (short of paving EVERYTHING over) that will change this basic math — 2% of ignitions create 95% of burned acres. The dry and windy topographies (e.g., tops of draws and ridge lines) will burn the hottest, while the mesic areas (e.g., old-growth canopies near streams) may escape burning altogether. Even under the most severe fire conditions, forest fires burn in a mosaic of intensities.
“Most ignitions are of no practical concern as the preponderance of fires would go out on their own. ”
However, 84% of all ignitions are human-caused. How many and which ones should we let burn for dubious resource benefits?
Regardless of ignition source, how many and which fires should we put out?
Corollary questions: 1) Who should decide; and, 2) Should the public have a say in fire policy decisions?
Status quo answers: 1) Firefighters decide; and, 2) The Forest Service has shut the public out of decision making regarding forest fire policy.
As has been the goal for many years: Priorities are people, property, and resources. The sticky part is deciding which fire ought to be suppressed….
“I don’t think Hessburg is saying that treatments will ‘prevent fires’ that’s a straw person argument.”
Well, according to Dr. Dick Hutto (likely a pretty careful observer) “The overall impression from [Hessburg’s] talk is that we can prevent megafires.”
Also, for whatever it’s worth, just yesterday Rep Cathy McMorris Rodgers sent out a tweet (which was retweeted by the House Republicans) claim that “Preventing wildfires begins with properly managing our natural resources, particularly our forests.”
Let’s not forget that during the middle of the wildfire season, Trump’s Interior Department sent out this press release, titled “Secretary Zinke Directs Interior Bureaus to Take Aggressive Action to Prevent Wildfires.”
In that Dept of Interior Zinke press release about “preventing wildfires” GOP Rep Bruce Westerman (a forester” also said (the grammar error was in the original press release): “I commend Secretary Zinke for recognizing this emergency situation and taking steps to address prevent further loss of life and property due to these preventable, catastrophic wildfires.”
So, I’m not so sure that’s a straw person argument when some people (including politicians voting on public policy and political appointees running entire Departments of the U.S. Government) are making that very claim.
The desire to have pre-human landscapes in a human-dominated world isn’t logical or rational. I see too much generalizing in Hutto’s response. We should be addressing tree density and species composition issues, and ‘doing nothing’ isn’t going to get us where most of us want it to be.
I saw two specific and significant statements in Dr. Hutto’s response that, if there were a scientific consensus, could narrow this discussion a lot.
“The mixed-conifer forests of the middle and higher elevations (which constitute about 85% of forested lands in the West, according to LANDFIRE and other classifications of vegetation types) were born of, and are maintained by, mixed- to high-severity fire regimes. This is important because the latter fires are driven largely by weather conditions, not fuels, so efforts to reduce fuels through thinning or prescribed understory burning are largely ineffective in these forest types.”
“Embarrassing as it is, firefighting is effective at suppressing what would become only relatively small fires anyway!” Or as Andy said, “Putting out benign fires is the bread-and-butter of the Forest Service’s suppression actions.” (I think Larry’s question of whether we should suppress benign fires because they are human caused could be addressed as a second step.)
These statements suggest that there should be a science-based means of determining where both thinning and fire suppression are likely to make a difference. If this isn’t the case now, what are these decision being based on (including contrary science)?
That was not my question!
There are probably more than one “science-based means” which are fuels and fire models. One example is the Stewardship and Fireshed Assessment Process that used FLAMMAP and FARSITE.. models that I think were developed in Missoula of all places! Here’s a link to a post on the SFA process.
I honestly don’t know what Hutto means by “firefighting is effective at suppressing what would become only relatively small fires anyway”. I’m not a Montanan, but firefighting is very helpful with large fires of every size and shape in all kinds of veg types in Colorado.
Sharon: By definition, fire suppression is “ineffective” if the fire becomes large.
By whose definition? Here’s the NWCG definition
“A wildfire response strategy to “put the fire out”, as efficiently and effectively as possible, while providing for firefighter and public safety.”
And, here in California, we have sooo many dead trees and infrastructure. We simply cannot afford to let very many fires burn, free-range. Everything here is flammable, and we do a, frankly, pitiful amount of fuels work and prescribed burns. You cannot just blame the budget because, we sure seem to have plenty of millions of dollars to spend on wildfires. Hey, if a billion dollars a year isn’t enough, then maybe, just maybe, throwing more money at the problem is not going to work. Frequent human-set fires were the norm, before the white man came. Not infrequent high-intensity fires. We’ve allowed mostly pure stands of P. pines to have a dense flammable understory. We haven’t managed those fuels, historically, for decades.
It’s going to take funding and reforms to do what is needed, in my opinion. Too many for Congress to address. The result? More huge, damaging firestorms (and their impacts upon humans), welcomed by some people who insist that “Our forests need larger and more intense wildfires”.
The most destructive fires in California history just burned through hundreds of thousands of acres of private land where neither NEPA nor ESA nor just about anything else ever stopped anyone from doing anything to “prevent” fires on those lands.
And, NO, I did NOT mention Napa or Sonoma. I’m talking about National Forests, in California, of course. We need MORE controlled burns, and not the pitiful and ridiculously-small amounts currently being done by the Forest Service in Region 5.
And what I’m saying is that the most destructive wildfires often don’t have anything to do with national forest land at all. They’re symptoms of the disease of trying to build cities in fire-adapted ecosystems without the slightest nod toward adapting the city to the ecosystem. All the fuels reduction on the planet (short of making the entire Calistoga-Santa Rosa corridor a denuded wasteland) would have done nothing to stop the house-to-house urban conflagration of the Tubbs Fire. The problem isn’t the forests, it’s the cities.
And what I’m saying is that the most destructive wildfires often don’t have anything to do with national forest land at all. They’re symptoms of the disease of trying to build cities in fire-adapted ecosystems without the slightest nod toward adapting the city to the ecosystem. All the fuels reduction on the planet (short of making the entire Calistoga-Santa Rosa corridor a denuded wasteland) would have done nothing to stop the house-to-house urban conflagration of the Tubbs Fire. The problem isn’t the forests, it’s the cities. But that’s not a message people want to hear, because it means they can’t have their pretty views, shake-shingle roofs, tree-shaded yards, etc. So as per Pyne, they’re blaming foresters for what is ultimately an urban planning problem.
The link refers to SFA as “promising.” What are they actually doing? Do project documents in the 85% of the Montana landscape provide scientific rationale for why a site was selected and what the benefits of thinning would be? (How often does it have to do with whether there are merchantable trees that could be sold to pay for the project?) (Is there any documentation of why a fire is suppressed?)
They didn’t try SFA in Montana, as far as I know. Your question was “there should be a science-based means of determining where both thinning and fire suppression are likely to make a difference.”
My answer was “yes, there is, for thinning, using modeling tools developed in Montana, and practitioner experience.”
As far as Montana projects go, every one I’ve looked at has scientific documentation for the site selection and benefits of thinning. If you can find one that doesn’t, let’s talk about it.
Maybe we can watch this court talk about it:
https://forestpolicypub.com/2017/10/30/litigation-weekly-oct-27/comment-page-1/#comment-428322
“Benign Fires”!!!!!!!
Is that defined as benign for the next 10 minutes, hour, 4 hours, day, week or what? I would say that there is plenty to show us that any prognostications of a fire being benign for more than the next day are unprofessional and sometimes 1-4 hours is inappropriate. Lest we forget, winds do shift unexpectedly; fuel load, fuel moisture content and fuel structure estimates in front of a moving fire are not usually the result of statistically sound sampling and any such averages are meaningless. The standard deviation will kill you more often than not.
PRIORITIZE Instead of resorting to gross generalities. On this site, we have discussed the access and physical factors that are important in prioritizing. Yet, in spite of this knowledge, some still seem to want to avoid doing anything where we can by focusing on where we can’t.
Again, turning $6000 lightning fires into $100,000,000 firestorms is not a rational idea. Same for human-caused wildfires.
According to Hutto it’s a false idea. $6000 lightning fires would go out on their own, and $10,000,000 firestorms do not occur in conditions where they could have been stopped.
There are many examples of Let-Burn fires turning into multi-million dollars fiascoes. The West Fork Fire burned 150 acres in nine days, before the winds came up. Only once have I found where a fire went out on its own, in a 25 year career of working in the field.
Yeah, if you let a fire burn long enough, it WILL go out, eventually, when winter comes. At what cost, though? Always ignoring the impacts from and to humans. Always wanting a pre-human landscape.
In 1979, while working for Colorado’s White River national forest, I was assigned the task of determining whether a wilderness fire was natural. It was and became the first “let burn” fire on that national forest. A month later, it went out on its own after burning about two acres of scattered pine and subalpine fir in rim rock. Total cost to the FS? Two employees’ salaries during one evening’s hike into the wilderness.
So, how do you know which is which until it goes out?
See my comment above at https://forestpolicypub.com/2017/10/31/15-minute-ted-talk-forest-service-ecologist-proposes-ways-to-help-curb-rising-era-of-megafires/comment-page-1/#comment-428515