Please add your own clips of interest and your thoughts on them in the comments.
1) The Hotshot Wakeup had an interesting and I believe paywall-free podcast interview with Angeles National Forest Fire Chief Robert Garcia.
Garcia talks about “how do we want to be working in 20 years,” reflects on previous Angeles NF consolidations, and talks about the importance of culture. I know some retirees worry about the future of the FS (or whatever) but listening to him, I think “the next generation’s got it.” I also thought “we’ll do OK no matter the org structure if we focus on the work” and his perspective on “what if a Fire Service happens” was interesting.
Finally, being from LA, for him vegetation management is not about the issues that so occupied the past (timber, grazing) and in some minds and places are still important. It made me wonder how much, in the absence of timber industry, veg management is to some extent already decided by fuel strategies (think 10 year plan and so on). And to what extent those concerns match what FS folks and the public elaborately process during Plan Revisions.
2) Thanks to Dave Mertz for this Zeke Lunder link. He takes a couple of roadless areas and talks about what we’ve said here before- “they’re usually roadless for a reason.” It seems to me that it can be argued either way.. “building roads in them won’t help with wildfire” the point Zeke was making and “no one wants to spend the money to build roads into them”. If I were the FS (and unlikely to be canned) I’d put out a call for forests, communities and timber industry who might want to do tree cutting or road-building in roadless areas, and yard them up and see what’s there.
I predict that any tweaks to the Roadless Rule will generate outsized political reactions while it might be much ado about very little when it comes to specific changes. At least that was my lived experience with Colorado Roadless.
Anyway, back to Zeke’s video. For those of us of a pre-GIS technology orientation, it is just very cool the way he swoops in and out and through time. And it shows how the landownership is mixed in that area.
3. New wildfire technologies (article in Civil Engineering Source)
The available selection of heavy-lift drones, until a few years ago, consisted only of electric-power drones that were subject to the endurance and payload limitations of batteries, says Deslauriers.
“Even though some of these machines might be able to lift up to 50 pounds, maybe up to 100 pounds in some cases, your endurance is in the 7- to 10-minute range,” he said. “So, from the get-go, as engineers, we knew very early that battery technology is probably 5 to maybe 10 years away from having the energy density equal to that of jet fuel.”
In 2020, Atvidaberg, Sweden-based ACC Innovation began the first test flights of what would become its Thunder Wasp GT heavy-lift quadcopter drone. Powered by a single 220-horsepower turbo-shaft engine, the Thunder Wasp can carry up to 880 pounds and cruise at up to 48 knots. Heavy-lift drones are also finding applications in areas such as wind-turbine repair, heavy construction, and emergency relief.
Deslauriers says the aircraft can operate between 60 and 90 minutes before refueling, although an aircraft’s endurance is a function of factors such as payload, altitude, and wind.
4. High Country News story tagline “Thousands of Forest Service firefighters are vacant.”
Now I’m skeptical of anything to do with numbers of employees, except for the extracts pulled by a retiree I trust. Because we have seen in the past “optimal org charts” used- which tend to be wishful thinking. Then there’s the fire folks who were conceivably (?) intentionally not let go of. And the red carded people who may have been let go or VERAd but were asked to come back (did they)? But this story is interesting because it interviewed two people, and then referred to a Propublica piece from July 22.
The story starts with a quote from “one employee”/
This year, some employees were shocked by the blunt remarks made during a meeting with forest supervisors and fire staff officers from across the Intermountain West. “We were told, ‘Help is not on the way,’” said one employee, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of losing their job. “I’ve never been told that before.”
ProPublica’s review of internal agency data found that more than 4,500 Forest Service firefighting jobs — over one-fourth of all the agency’s firefighting jobs — were vacant as of July 17. The Guardian also reported that vacancy rates were highest in the Pacific Northwest and Intermountain Regions, at 39% and 37% respectively.
The Department of Agriculture, which houses the Forest Service, disputes this. “ProPublica’s analysis doesn’t reflect our current fire response capacity,” spokesperson Cat McRae told High Country News in an email. “Their numbers likely come from outdated org charts and unfunded positions.” In an email, ProPublica confirmed that their data excluded unfunded positions. According to McRae, “the Forest Service is fully prepared and operational to protect individuals and communities from wildfires.”
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We know the demand for resources outpaces their availability,” Schultz wrote. He requested that all red-carded employees, including IT and human resource staff, be made available for fire assignments. “We have reached a critical point in our national response efforts, and we must make every resource available.”
Much of the Western U.S. is expected to experience above-normal wildfire activity over the next few months. Already, the Forest Service has asked at least 1,400 people with fire qualifications who had resigned to come back. After all, firefighting is a group effort.
“All those people matter,” said Dave Whittekiend, formerly the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache forest supervisor. “Once it goes beyond an initial attack, it takes all the logistics. It’s like setting up a small city.”
Whittekiend, who retired in May, had also attended this spring’s planning meeting for forest leaders in Nevada, Utah and parts of Idaho and Wyoming, where he heard the same warning about limited help. “It was creating a sense of urgency,” he said. “It was pretty direct: ‘We are seeing changes, and so be careful about how you choose your strategies and what you think you might be able to do with a fire.’”
Whittekiend pointed out that — even before all the layoffs and resignations this spring — the Forest Service sometimes struggled to get through busy fire seasons. Firefighters have been called in from Canada, Mexico and Australia when resources are stretched too thin, and sometimes National Guard or military troops are deployed.
“We’ve never had all the people that we needed in some fire years,” he said. “That’s been an ongoing trend. It probably accelerated when a whole bunch of us said, ‘All right, we’re out of here’” — including employees in overhead positions, like the people who buy food and organize shower trailers and outhouses for fire camps, as well as staffers who take weather forecasts and do safety checks on firefighting operations. More than 10,530 people are currently assigned to wildfires; as of Aug. 1, there are 35 large fires nationwide.
I wonder whether those are FS employees, USG employees, Tribal, State and County employees, prison crews, contract crews, and whatever other kind of people exist. It would have been handy to have a link. I also wonder whether seasonal overhead positions might be hired separately from current existing employees.
Apparently not having enough people has always been a problem…according to ProPublica
But the Forest Service is by far the largest employer of wildland firefighters, and it has long used gymnastic arithmetic to paint an optimistic picture of its staffing. Last summer, ProPublica reported that the Forest Service under President Joe Biden had overstated its capacity. Robert Kuhn, a former Forest Service official who between 2009 and 2011 co-authored an assessment of the agency’s personnel needs, recently said that the practice of selectively counting firefighters dates back years. “What the public needs to understand is, that is just a very small number of what is needed every summer,” he said. Riva Duncan, a retired Forest Service fire chief and the vice president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a labor advocacy organization, said staffing is a constant frustration for managers on the ground. “We have engines that are completely unstaffed,” said Duncan, who remains active in wildland firefighting, having worked in temporary roles this summer. “We have vacant positions in management.”
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Administration officials have maintained that employees primarily assigned to wildland fire were exempted from the resignation offers this spring. But according to another internal data set obtained by ProPublica, of the more than 4,000 Forest Service employees who accepted deferred resignations and early retirements, approximately 1,600 had red cards. (A spokesperson for the Department of Agriculture wrote that the actual number was 1,400, adding that 85 of them “have decided to return for the season.”)
Of course, both things can be true, although it doesn’t sound that way; red-carded folks are not primarily assigned to wildland fire. Heck even I had a red card at one time (long, long ago).
Good on Propublica for getting internal dataset, and getting answers from USDA. USDA wants to paint a story with the numbers, and Propublica wants to paint a story with numbers and interviews. At the end of all this, I don’t know what to think- having had my own problems getting and interpreting numbers. Certainly experts of all stripes, including wildfire, have left the FS, in greater numbers than usual.
For me it always makes sense to watch out for too many long-term fires, especially MFs that need monitoring and may blow up and need resources. And I don’t think it’s bad for the Chief to ask people to go on fires; in the old days it was close to required. Plus it was a good chance to work with different people than those you saw day-today. And get out of the role you might fill in your home office and just be a member of a different team.
Regarding roadless areas, I’d say rather than “they’re usually roadless for a reason” the truth is that many weren’t roadless to begin with and still aren’t actually roadless! One big example is the South Beartooth Highway Roadless Area in Wyoming, which has the Morrison Jeep Trail running straight though the middle of it. That’s the most famous backcountry 4WD route in Wyoming. It’s a designated Forest Service Road, maintained for full size vehicles, it’s over 20 miles long, and almost the whole road is inside a roadless area with no cherry stem. It’s absurd. The Roadless Rule has been a joke from the beginning because many of these areas aren’t roadless!
Well, even in Zeke’s presentation I saw a road… and in Colorado we had roads in roadless areas before we did the Colorado Rule. That was because the maps used were not as good as we have now and the Admin at the time was in a hurry to get it done. If this weren’t a major political football, a reasonable set of people could sit down and draw up new maps, check if any fuel treatments were needed or breaks needed to be put in and so on. They could be like Colorado and subtract roaded ones and add truly roadless acres that had been skipped over in 2001. We might give special dispensation to power companies who wanted to maintain their lines.
Wyoming has a unique and interesting history with the 2001 Rule. I believe that Wyoming asked to be a cooperating agency and the Admin said “no.”
Then for awhile a decision by Judge Brimmer making it illegal. However it was replaced by a review process in the WO that only allowed projects through that followed the Rule. I wondered if this was illegal in itself (to effectively follow a rule that was found to be illegal). Oh well.
Then this is an account of our field trip to the court of appeals.. https://forestpolicypub.com/2010/03/11/field-trip-for-planners-10th-circuit-court-of-appeals/
(Note I was fairly circumspect, as I was working for the FS at the time).
Let’s be clear here, whatever happens in California is generally different than about any other place in the country! I think the presentation of the Dixie Fire effects completely misses the mark unless it can be quantified by fire weather/fire behavior during those events mentioned! Pretty colors on a map, opinion offered, no reason to question, period! Cherry picking.
I’ve seen many Roadless Areas and Wilderness burn; incinerate might be a better word for it. MIST tactics are not conducive to fire suppression, and the energy released when large areas of non-roaded stands burn certainly leads to more aggressive fire behavior. Also, I can unequivocally say, had the Wallow fire not started (at least one of them) in the Bear Wallow Wilderness, that Wilderness would not have burned had roads been available! When Escudilla Wilderness went up, it would have made no difference how many roads were there. Escudilla was a portion of Wallow.
So, yes, there are times when roads do not make a difference; many times – depending on location in the US, they do!
Certainly, there are roadless areas that have old roads in them. I think we are all probably familiar with those. When I worked in the Southeast, I knew of roads in our roadless areas, and that was because there were some hardworking people who managed to get roads into some very tough places back in the day. There probably never should have been a road there in the first place, and unless you know what you are looking at, most people would not even know it was an old road. We have some old roads that now serve as trails in our lone Wilderness Area on the Black Hills NF. I guarantee most people don’t realize they are walking on an old road.
My takeaway from Zeke’s presentation is that the discussion of roads and vegetation management in solving our wildfire problems should be more nuanced. Too often and by too many people, roads and vegetation management (in particular, timber harvesting) are being presented as the answer to our problems. There are a lot of variables in any given fire, and access and fuel arrangement are only two of them. Zeke showed examples of fires where timber harvesting was not a cure-all. I think that most of us who have been around know of areas like that. Areas that were textbook-thinned and fire went through and toasted them. The reasons are usually extensive drought, low RH, extreme wind, etc. These factors are not rare nowadays. They occur often.
There is no silver bullet. Thoughtful vegetation management and timber harvesting, hopefully combined with prescribed burning, can help in some situations, and given the right conditions, maybe in a lot of situations. However, its effectiveness is not as extensive as is often presented by a lot of people. People should just be more honest and upfront about the whole thing.
As Jim says, roads in some situations can certainly make a difference. They can provide ready-made firelines and enable access. But since the majority of fires are human-caused, they also provide access to people who start fires. In the end, the whole roadless thing may be much ado about very little, since, due to difficult terrain, roads might not be built there anyway. Road building in many places may be prohibitively expensive. I guess we shall see.
Thank you for this dose of reality, Dave. “Active Management” never stopped any ignition, but it certainly does have other beneficial effects and opportunities. People on the extremes like to ignore the variables that don’t support their rhetoric. Those same extremists don’t want solutions that are firmly in the middle.
What’s interesting to me about all this is that the Political Symbol of Roadlessness is so far from the on-the-ground reality. Which is what Idaho and Colorado tediously wrestled with. One TWS person told me “I will work with you on this but you should know that the national organization will never support a state rule..no matter what you come up with.”
I wonder what it would take to move this topic (or any other) from Partisan Symbolism to Earth-based Reality?
That’s the million dollar question. Can objectivity be achieved? Everyone just goes to their corners and that’s that. I think Forest Service Research has worked very hard to maintain a reputation of objectivity but even they are attacked when what they come up with does not suit someone’s interests.
I think it’s because many groups want roadless areas to be managed as de facto wilderness. They couldn’t get an outright administrative wilderness designation so they settled for areas that have 90% of the characteristics of wilderness and can’t be removed during forest planning like recommend wilderness areas designated in forest plans. Then they have persuaded most national forests to treat roadless areas basically identical to wilderness anyway. So roadless areas are simply proxies for the endless battle over wilderness, with all the baggage that entails.
I think that a lot of roadless areas have been treated as de facto wilderness. The roadless rule should have made it easier to conduct logical activities within the roadless areas. So making them into basically hands-off areas was probably not the right thing to do, just as administratively getting rid of all of them isn’t the right thing to do either. And if part of the intention is to deliberately remove them from future consideration as Wilderness, that probably isn’t good as well, in my opinion.
What “logical activities” does the Roadless Rule preclude? If the Rule was intended to protect future Wilderness options, it should have allowed things that wouldn’t preclude that.
That point about precluding future Wilderness designation – I actually overheard a little discussion once (before the Roadless Rule) of making it a priority to build roads into some roadless areas to achieve that.
I worked with one old “Planning Forester” who was proud that he ‘roaded-up’ most of the Ranger District. When he first arrived, he pushed for smaller projects which accessed new areas, but cutting only scattered small clearcuts, to pay for the roads. The later clearcuts of the 70s and 80s didn’t have as much roadbuilding, generating more ‘profit’ for the Feds.
As I understand it, for the most part, timber harvesting and road construction/reconstruction are not allowed in roadless areas. I have an experience where we looked into doing non-commercial thinning in a roadless area to address the mountain pine beetle. While we thought that we could do that, the process was laborious, and we didn’t pursue it. Maybe the Rule doesn’t preclude, but it could have made certain actions easier to do. I must admit, though, that I am far from an expert on the Roadless Rule.
Yes, you could do non-commercial thinning and here are the requirements (we spent a lot of time on this during the Colorado Rule, as we had MPB also). You would have to argue that MPBs were uncharacteristic (are they?) or would lead to uncharacteristic wildfire effects. People who didn’t want the project could probably argue in court that lodgepoles die and fall over in jackstrawed masses and ensuing high intensity burns are “characteristic.” But then you would argue that MPBs are worse due to climate change so whatever happens is uncharacteristic. And so on. It also has to maintain or improve roadless characteristics.
Probably more problematic is cutting and leaving the trees. You couldn’t take the material away because no new roads (unless they were machinery distance away from an existing nearby road (or an existing road within the roadless area, but that would make it “substantially altered” which makes it generically OK.
In a thinned site, you might not be able to pile and burn (no openings big enough) or there might be too much material for broadcast, so cut trees would just be sitting on the ground, which might not be good from the fuels perspective. So while thinning might make trees more healthy and vibrant, the dead trees on the ground might not be good. Plus some groups react vehemently to anything in a roadless area.
I went on a field trip with other silviculture folks in the 80’s to Lake Tahoe and they were cutting and removing material using wheelbarrows (it wasn’t a roadless area but they were being sensitive to local concerns). Depending on the topography and understory, you might be able to use off road vehicles to carry material but again it doesn’t seem very practical unless it’s nextdoor to private land or other accessible sites. And I doubt using OHVs would be popular with some groups. Now drones…
**** Below are the exceptions in the 2001 Rule
(1) The cutting, sale, or removal of generally small diameter timber is needed for one of the following purposes and will maintain or improve one or more of the roadless area characteristics as defined in § 294.11.
(i) To improve threatened, endangered, proposed, or sensitive species habitat; or
(ii) To maintain or restore the characteristics of ecosystem composition and structure, such as to reduce the risk of uncharacteristic wildfire effects, within the range of variability that would be expected to occur under natural disturbance regimes of the current climatic period;
(2) The cutting, sale, or removal of timber is incidental to the implementation of a management activity not otherwise prohibited by this subpart;
(3) The cutting, sale, or removal of timber is needed and appropriate for personal or administrative use, as provided for in 36 CFR part 223; or
(4) Roadless characteristics have been substantially altered in a portion of an inventoried roadless area due to the construction of a classified road and subsequent timber harvest. Both the road construction and subsequent timber harvest must have occurred after the area was designated an inventoried roadless area and prior to January 12, 2001. Timber may be cut, sold, or removed only in the substantially altered portion of the inventoried roadless area.
Here are the roadless characteristic and it says “maintain or improve one or more” which you could write that you are doing, but others could argue with in court.
It’s interesting to note that the 2001 Rule is fairly silent on wildfires and what to do about them. Clarifying the ability to do fuel reduction was a big thing in the Colorado Roadless effort.
Thank you for this! Some of this brings back memories, not particularly good ones. I guess I understand what was trying to be accomplished with the roadless areas, and maybe that was all good direction. It just seems like some of it was a bit extreme. It’s interesting now that within our two roadless areas on the Black Hills NF, both of which had mountain pine beetles during the past epidemic, and I look at them now on Google Earth and yes, they were impacted by the beetles, but they actually look better than the areas surrounding them that had the aggressive thinning to mitigate the bugs. Go figure. Another value of the roadless areas, in my opinion, is that they serve as somewhat of a control. What happens in somewhat similar areas without management compared to areas with active management?
I wonder how many (previously) red-carded Temps aren’t fighting fires this year, too.