I like this quote by Chris Topik in the press release here:
“We must collectively and immediately dedicate ourselves to finding a way to effectively support both essential emergency wildfire preparedness and response AND the proactive fuels reduction and forest restoration that are needed to reduce the demand for emergency expenditures in the future. Our current approach to wildland fire and forest management creates a false choice, pitting the viability of one against the other. In reality, we cannot afford to short-change either.” – Christopher Topik, Ph.D, Director, Resorting America’s Forests, The Nature Conservancy
People I know who watched it, said that there was general agreement and a relative lack of partisan demagoguery.
It’s always hard to excerpt one of Char’s pieces, but here goes:
That conviction was woven into the determination to take on the Mann Gulch fire of 1949. Fifteen smokejumpers parachuted near a wind-whipped inferno in the mountains above Helena, Montana, where they joined a ranger who had hiked in to battle the rapidly moving blaze. Trapped near a ridgeline, thirteen died. In its post-fire investigation, the Forest Service exonerated the fire boss’s decision to jump in the first place and his management decisions during the increasingly ferocious and unpredictable burn.
“I really think that the fire we saw when we flew over there was a typical smokejumper fire,” a survivor confirmed. “And if they didn’t jump on that fire they wouldn’t have jumped on half the fires they jumped on that year. So I don’t think it was a mistake to jump. After we got on the ground I think it was a freak of nature that caused the wind to do what it did and to pick those coals up and drop them in the canyon below us.” Because smokejumping had been invented, the agency needed to use this tool notwithstanding any such “freak of nature.”
Unfortunately, those freakish moments have piled up. Between 1949 and 2012, burnovers have killed an estimated 221 of the 769 wildland firefighters who have died on the job.
The 1950s and ’60s were especially harrowing on the California national forests. In 1953, fifteen died in a burnover on the Mendocino NF; the next year, three more were lost on the Tahoe NF and then in 1956 another eleven fell on the Cleveland NF. Ten years later, a dozen firefighters were killed on the Angeles NF, also the site of a 1968 incident in which four perished.
Following the 1994 fire season, in which 14 firefighters were killed in the South Canyon fire on Storm King Mountain near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, the Forest Service and other federal and state agencies embraced a more rigorous safety-first strategy, hoping to limit the number of fatalities.
This year’s tragedy in Arizona suggests that we may not have fully absorbed this painful, century-long history. The problem does not appear to be one of policy but of memory. We don’t seem to know how to recall this deadly past, to keep it front and center, so as to abide by the rules and regulations already in place.
The public moreover must deliberately integrate these deaths into our ongoing education about fire’s essential place in the landscape, whether grassland, chaparral, or alpine. They must also be a required discussion item before every zoning commission or city council vote to permit yet another subdivision in the wildland-urban interface. For make no mistake, we are undeniably complicit in this mounting toll — we sent these firefighters out to do the work that led to their demise even as we have contributed to the increased frequency and intensity of the fires they have battled on our behalf. They die where we live.
To insure that their numbers do not grow, perhaps this time we’ll remember what happened during the Big Blowup and in Griffith Park, at Mann Gulch, South Canyon, and now Yarnell Hill. Perhaps this time we won’t forget what we have always known.
Here are some of my reflections on Char’s piece:
1) From Storm King to now was 19 years; you could argue that, given the kind of work that these folks are doing, and the judgements that need to be made, the track record is actually darn impressive.
2) There is a difference between “not living there in the woods” and “not using certain potentially dangerous tactics when fighting fires around houses in the woods.” I’m not a suppression expert, but they seem to have a variety of tactics. That’s what Kathy Voth questioned in the piece here that The Optimist posted.
3) Even if we stopped any more building, there are plenty of built places left to potentially burn- including Southern California.
4) Flooding of rivers has been a part of the landscape for millennia as well, but we don’t “educate people about the essential role of flooding in the landscape.” In fact, where I grew up, within the KCET listening area, La Ballona Creek was concrete lined for flood control (people are working to restore it, which I think is a good thing).
WATCHDOG: The post where we say nice things about the Forest Service
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18 hours ago • Joe O’Sullivan Journal staff
“The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.” ~ H.L. Mencken
It’s surreal to thank people for just doing their job, because, after all, they’re just doing their job. But there are few consequences to breaking public records laws, and many government entities don’t — or won’t — comply quickly (or at all) to requests for records. Or even public information.
And while Public Records Watchdog focuses on the latter half of the carrot-and-stick approach, I thought I’d throw a carrot out there.
U.S. Forest Service: congratulations, have a carrot.
Last week, two separate Forest Service regions helped get us information for our story on how exploding targets are causing wildfires. The Black Hills National Forest folks helped make available a fire investigator who could speak with authority on the growing number of wildfires started by exploding targets used by shooters.
The regional office that oversees the Nebraska National Forest and Grasslands wouldn’t let us interview a local patrol captain about last year’s Spotted Tail fire near Chadron. But Forest Service spokeswoman Cyd Janssen called us back on deadline and got us the information we needed. Good on her.
[The regional office should answer for why no law enforcement at Nebraska National Forest and Grasslands is allowed to talk to the press about an investigation financed by public money about a fire on public land, and extinguished with fire trucks paid by the public. But that’s for another day.]
The Forest Service also sent me this week a series of Black Hills National Forest logging contracts that I’d requested in May through the Freedom of Information Act. A spokesperson told me that the disc containing the contracts was being held by law enforcement, but the Forest Service worked it out and got us requested documents. Considering FOIA requests often take months or years for federal government agencies to complete, two months for a fat stack of contracts isn’t bad.
We’ll be writing about the logging contracts soon, so stay tuned. In the meantime, open government people, keep the faith. And Forest Service, enjoy your carrot.
Sharon’s note: Anybody who quotes Mencken has earned some warm fuzzies from me. What a difference a forest can make! Good on you, Nebraska and Black Hills!
Following the deaths of the firefighters, there are thoughtful pieces about whether we as a society are doing everything we can to make firefighters (and other people) as safe as we can in the event of ever-present wildfires. These are good and important conversations to have. Jeff is an amazing photographer. Check out his website http://jeffwarnerphoto.com/
An unfortunate part of human nature is the tendency to try to find scapegoats to blame when bad things happen. It could be ethnic groups. It could be “corporations”. It could be those of the other political party. And sometimes there is cause and effect; those groups or people really do annoying things. Scapegoating is when you take a behavior that you disagree with, and turn it into “if we get rid of this group, our problems will go away.”
And to the issues of wildfire, we have “people who live in the woods”. Last Friday, I read this letter to the editor in the Denver Post.
When so many fine young people die, we must ask: Is the price too high? The time when folks could live in the mountains seems to be passing, at least for the foreseeable future. Maybe those who feel they must live there need to work with their private insurance companies to safeguard their property, and not expect the taxpayer to supply firefighter crews and airplanes. The money and the remarkable people who risk their lives are no longer “protecting the forests.” They are trying to save homes and businesses that are just not safe anymore. Perhaps the price is just too high.
Mark Parsons, Berthoud
In the course of recreation Friday and yesterday, (to Allenspark and Estes Park), I traveled through our forests. I encourage those interested to do the same thing in their areas. Because, guess what, not building new homes is not the answer to forest fires. In my area, they’re already there. So let’s take a trip.
I live in Golden, Colorado, within walking distance of downtown. A couple of years ago, a fire came out of the canyons and was stopped short of our subdivision. That fire is in the photo above. We don’t live in the mountains, nor with trees. Still wildfires.
Then as I leave home and progress up Golden Gate Canyon, we see the more classic 30 acre or so parcels with houses. They seem to be pretty much everywhere going up the canyon. At the top, towns and gas stations, convenience stores, fairgrounds, libraries. Going along 119 north, there are more cabins, resorts, campgrounds, church and scout camps, ski areas, towns, restaurants. My point is that 1) it’s too late to depopulate our mountains, 2) people like to recreate in mountains and have infrastructure associated with that recreation, 3) not building new houses interspersed among the old houses might be helpful but will not solve any “house protection” problems.
So..even if folks want to stop new homes and subdivisions from going in…well, that’s an OK desire and may help in some places.
But what we already have still exists. Stopping new development doesn’t seem like it will do much to solve our Colorado Front Range fire problems, as far as I can see. Is this another issue where the solutions differ based on local conditions?
For those of your in the fire-prone West, if you took a trip to your favorite recreational trail from your house, what would you see?
In a time when fire activity and costs are steadily rising, the 10-year rolling average budget formula that the agencies have used to set the annual budget request for suppression expenditures has translated into shortfalls in available suppression funds nearly every year since the mid-1990s. When the budgeted amount is insufficient, the agency continues to suppress fires by reallocating funds from other non-fire programs. This practice is called fire borrowing. This approach to paying for firefighting is nonsensical and further increases wildland fire costs.
The Federal Land Assistance, Management and Enhancement (FLAME) Act was enacted in 2009 to address these very issues. The FLAME Act authorized the establishment of two reserve accounts to provide additional suppression funding for large, emergency wildfire incidents, above and beyond the 10-year average annual suppression expenditures. In addition, any balances remaining in the FLAME accounts were to carry-over into future years so that funds would be available for the inevitable, high cost years and not have to be borrowed from other program accounts. Despite Congressional intent, OMB has forced the agencies to implement the FLAME Act in a manner that makes it ineffective: instead of funding the FLAME account in addition to the 10-year average cost of suppression, the account is funded as part of the 10-year average cost of suppression. Although authorized, no additional funding has been requested for the FLAME reserve accounts above the 10-year average cost of suppression. Thus, fire borrowing has continued to occur.
We are also concerned about the dramatic cuts to hazardous fuels treatments proposed in the FY2014 President’s budget request. For example, the Forest Service treated 1.87 million acres for hazardous fuels in FY2012, but expects to treat only 685,000 acres in FY2014. Our understanding is that these cuts were based on OMB’s continued skepticism about the efficacy of hazardous fuels treatments. We whole-heartedly disagree with OMB on this point.
Here’s an article worth reading..below is an excerpt:
Although it has been raging for a month, the wildfires known as the West Fork Complex in southwest Colorado present a seemingly odd profile of success: They remain only 20 percent contained, yet no significant structures have burned, residents have returned to the once-threatened town of South Fork and firefighters have reported only two minor injuries.
“Containment is not how you measure progress,” said Bobby Kitchens, fire information officer with the Type 1 Incident Management Team. “One day, this will be contained and be out. But now, we’re not concentrating on putting a perimeter around it. We’re just protecting certain points. We don’t have all the dots tied together. Eventually, we will.”
West Fork Complex differs significantly from the way firefighters attacked the flames that ravaged the Black Forest north of Colorado Springs — or any number of other wildland fires, for that matter.
Proximity of valuable resources, such as homes or infrastructure, as well as concerns such as terrain, weather and safety all figure into the methods employed by firefighters in any given situation.
As the dry, beetle-kill pine blew up in the West Fork fires, which have charred more than 110,000 acres, firefighters used helicopters and air tankers to divert the fire from valuable resources and dug a “dozer line” to defend the town of South Fork. In the Rio Grande National Forest, where rugged terrain presents dangerous conditions for ground crews, firefighters have battled the flames judiciously, on their own terms.
“As it goes through dead spruce stands, we’re not going in there,” Kitchens said. “Success is hard to get, and it’s too unsafe for firefighters. We’ll allow it to burn through those stands and catch it when it comes out the other side, at a highway or river. The fire will be controlled. We’re just being different in the way we approach it.”
Aerial photos sketched a puzzling portrait of the Black Forest wildfire, with splotches of charred blackness bleeding across the landscape and giving way, in some areas, to incongruous bands of green.
Amid vast expanses of scorched timber, tragic anomalies: homes reduced to ash still surrounded by healthy trees, speaking to the whims of an inferno whipped by winds and fed by the area’s bone-dry ponderosa pine and gamble oak.
This answers Greg’s question here about the houses burned with green trees around.
Also it appears that fire retardant is being used both by the Black Forest folks (not fed) and the West Fork Complex. You may remember our previous discussions and the quote by Andy discussed here that implied only feds use retardant.
There is a great slideshow here of many aspects of the fire, in at least one you can see retardant use.
Which reminds me of this effort to get more firefighting plane resources being discussed by the Western Governors.
We have been talking about “everything isn’t forest”. So it’s interesting to think about other fuels management techniques and tools. Because I do think we have to keep in focus that 1) some places do have timber industry.. but they might not be able to handle the scope of all the fuels treatments needed,
2) some places don’t have timber industry and
3) some places don’t have trees, or at least, currently merchantable kinds of trees.
Here is an articles in JSFP News on Karen Voth’s work on using goats in the WUI.
Below is an excerpt:
Voth adds, “The goats protect houses, and they easily provide firefighters a safe place to fight the fires from. The goats
can help make it safer for the firefighters and for communities.”
To that end, she reports on an initial project joining goats with an at-risk community of homes nestled in the heart of fire-prone Utah. The Woodland Hills community is surrounded by oakbrush and scrub. Once Voth explained to community members the possible power
of goats to reduce fire danger, they applauded the plan. Voth
coordinated with the town council and their fire department
and soon a herd of 30 goats were heartily tending vegetation
near the homes. Community members helped build the
fencing, took care of basic goat maintenance like watering,
and learned what the vegetation would look like when the
goats were “finished” in an enclosure. That’s when they
would call Voth and her team, who would drive the three
hours to move the goats.
Here’s a link for more information, also check out her work on Cows Eat Weeds.
Spruce Beetle photo from the Rio Grande National Forest (You can click on this photo to make it full size)
A nice Forest Service person sent me this video. Worth watching especially if you’re curious about what it means when the news reports tell that the West Fork Fire is in spruce beetle stands.
I rate it two antennae up!
For those of you who aren’t interested in the biology of the insect (but there are very cool shots of them) you can skip to about 12 minutes in. I gave an extra point for the use of the term “inexorable” which I like, but had to subtract it when they used “resiliency” (resilience is a fine noun and I don’t like making up new words unnecessarily.)
Derek might be interested that even the young trees are getting hit as the outbreak is so intense (14:50 or so)
I also liked the Forest Health Mantra shot at 16:00 in.
A battery made from wood doesn’t exactly scream high-tech innovation – more like something cooked up round the campfire. But a device that exploits wood fibre could be the key to cheap, renewable power.
Lithium-based rechargeable batteries are too expensive to use on a large scale because there is so little lithium available. But sodium is abundant and cheap, so why not base a battery on a sodium electrolyte?
The problem is that sodium ions are many times larger than lithium ones, and they gradually damage a battery’s anode as they diffuse during charging and discharging. Another issue is that using a tin anode in such batteries would offer the highest power storage capacity, but this leads to the formation of a sodium-tin alloy that makes the battery swell, hastening what is known as “structural pulverisation”. The upshot is that a sodium-ion battery with a tin anode can only be charged and discharged around 20 times.
To get around this, Hongli Zhu and colleagues at the University of Maryland in College Park turned to a natural material they knew could more easily carry large ions: soft, porous wood fibre. These fibres include hollow elongated cells called tracheids, which have walls made of a tough material called lignin and which transport water and mineral salts around the organism.
Tin on wood
By depositing a 50-nanometre-thick layer of tin on 2500-nanometre-thick wood fibres, the researchers were able to create an anode that could be charged and discharged 400 times.
The relatively soft nature of the wood fibres effectively releases the mechanical stresses that would pulverise an ordinary tin anode, the team says, resulting in “unprecedented performance for a tin-anode sodium-ion battery”. And because wood fibre is easy to process, it should be possible to use it in the manufacture of low-cost batteries.
The team now wants to engineer bigger batteries for use in renewable storage applications.
Bingan Chen, a researcher specialising in novel battery materials at the University of Cambridge, UK, is impressed. “Using wood fibre as a substrate to lower their cost of sodium-ion batteries is a great, innovative idea,” he says. “But their challenge will be working out how to scale up the manufacturing process to make it commercially viable.”
If we were to think about a three legged stool of dealing with wildfire (or an “all of the above” strategy as in the President’s enery policy), we might think of:
1) what communities do: CWPP’s homeowners’ clearing, places for homeowners to put slash, etc.
2) vegetation treatments (prescribed fire and mechanical treatments) to change fire behavior and make firefighting safer.
3) suppression.
Do you think there is anything else? (Should it be a four legged or five legged thing?)
And does anyone have a few simple paragraphs that articulate #1 in a more articulate and comprehensive way? My usual internet searching activities did not easily find such a description. I will fund the person who locates the best paragraphs with a six-pack or monetary equivalent.
