21st Century Problems

This sounds like it might be of interest…

Here’s a link.

Check out the stories, videos and photos in the Post today. Including “getting more tankers is needed” here,
and “slurry is bad for the environment but continues to be used” here by Bruce Finley.

So far this fire season, air tankers called to suppress wildfires have been dropping the fire retardants (the mix is called LC95A) at a record pace. As of Friday, more than 401,450 gallons had been dropped on Colorado forests this year, including 320,553 gallons on the lightning-sparked High Park wildfire west of Fort Collins, according to Forest Service records.

As it burns along the Cache la Poudre River — designated a Wild and Scenic River by the Forest Service — the High Park fire could overlap habitat for several species of sensitive fish.

Massive fish kills have been documented after fires were put out in northwestern states. A legal challenge by Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics compelled an environmental impact study. Federal biologists concluded that fire retardants alone will not cause extinctions. But the lawsuit led to issuance of the rules this year to minimize harm.

Laye said pilots and ground crews working west of Fort Collins are complying with the rules.

Forest Service fire managers this week acknowledged concerns about toxic fire retardants degrading habitat and watersheds.

Yet the agency also relies increasingly on slurry bombers to protect houses and firefighters from potentially catastrophic wildfires, Forest Service spokesman Steve Segin said.

“Many wildfires burn in remote, rugged areas, and the application of fire retardant can slow the spread of a fire until ground forces can reach the area and begin construction of a fireline,” Segin said. “You can put it on homes. It works better on the ground. It slows the advance of a fire so that ground crews can get in there.”

Firefighters reaching mountain houses also spray chemical foams and wrap smaller structures with “fire shelter” material designed to repel flames. If there are ponds nearby, water pumps are set up to douse flames.

Some homeowners have rigged sprinkler systems. Firefighters also often haul away firewood and trim surrounding trees, rushing to create “defensible spaces.”

The federal government push to make more air tankers available to suppress western wildfires is likely to mean more use of fire-retardant chemicals.

Federal data show that, since 2007, air tankers have dropped an average of 486,385 gallons of fire retardant a year while suppressing wildfires in Colorado, where drought and overly dense forests favor large wildfires.

The Forest Service has been using retardant since the 1950s. These chemicals don’t douse flames as water does. Instead, the retardants cool and coat fuels, depleting fire of oxygen and slowing combustion as retardant salts change how fuels burn. Air tankers target houses and power grids.

This week, fire commanders loaded fire retardants into helicopters, which normally drop up to 900 gallons of water. A layer of retardant can slow fire for about two hours.

However, it was helicopters dropping water on flare-ups this week that saved two homes in the thick of the High Park fire, Segin said. “Like a military operation, it’s a combination of ground and air power coming together at a single point to suppress the fire.”

The maps designating sensitive terrain around Colorado apparently prioritize habitat for greenback cutthroats and the butterflies that live in riparian corridors — two species deemed most vulnerable to the fire-retardant chemicals.

Federal biologists would welcome development of better chemical mixes that could be less harmful and also meet firefighters’ needs, Laye said. “You obviously could use water anytime you would like.”

Here’s my favorite equine interest story.

Note from Sharon: I invite you to browse the Denver Post site and check the coverage. As I’ve said before, I bet fire policy seems different if you are in a part of the country that experiences it. It’s interesting to consider if there would be a difference if this was coverage by the NY Times or LA Times or Washington Post, and if local people there were breathing the smoke and having bad air days (to be sure, that does happen in LA, but national policy is not made there). At church today, there were prayers for the firefighters and evacuees but also the folks who are having trouble breathing in Fort Collins. I guess what I’m trying to convey is that my work world only vaguely interfaces with the people I deal with outside of work (when are campgrounds open) but fire here is as omnipresent as the air we breath. That makes reactions to policies as visceral as (we often debate here) cerebral.

On another topic, no one seems to be saying that aerial tactics are “immoral”; in fact, the concern is quite the opposite- that we don’t have enough capacity for this fire season.

Finally, I see a pattern in “environment” reporting- some technology (solar panels, fire retardant) has environmental impacts (as do all technologies, and pretty much all human and non-human actions), so people are interviewed who point out the problems. One wonders whether any technology would have an appropriate level of impact based on the values of some. Further, I think it’s interesting that we seem to have articles discussing these impacts at different frequencies for different technologies. For example, having read may pieces recently about cool new technologies in health care, I seldom see a companion piece on the environmental effects. It’s something to perhaps become more aware of.

Thanks to Hipnology for this piece in the Economist

Here’s a quote:

As Ms. Poulos and Mr Workman note, a century’s accumulation of dry fuel on public lands makes it too expensive and risky—for people, property, habitats and carbon emissions—to unleash prescribed fires on a scale needed to manage America’s national forests more efficiently. (Including private land, national parks and other government property, forests cover nearly 750m acres in America—a third of the country’s land surface.) On the other hand, letting the lumber companies loose to go logging in the national forests on such a scale would engender a massive public outcry. So, what is to be done to release the water that over-stocked forests squander?

One practical solution, known as “forest to faucet”, is being undertaken in Colorado by Denver Water, a utility serving 1.3m Denver residents. After severe wildfires stripped the local landscape and left the soil exposed, subsequent storms drove so much sediment down the hillsides that the utility is now having to spend $30m to dredge the streams and reservoirs that supply its water.

The lesson the utility has learned is that, even though it is not its responsibility, it is far better to pay to have the upstream forests thinned and cleared—so future wildfires in the watershed are nowhere near as fierce, river flows improve, storms do less damage and droughts become less frequent. Under a five-year agreement, the Forest Service will share the cost with the utility to ensure the watershed is properly managed. Denver Water’s enlightened customers will each stump up $27 over the period.

This public-private approach is the kind the Wesleyan researchers favour. They note that water rights in western parts of America are valued at $450 to $650 per acre-foot and rising. It therefore pays thirsty downstream communities to spend $1,000 per acre (the average cost to the Forest Service) to remove the fire-prone trash trees in upstream forests that affect their water supply. In return for their investment, they get the 2.3 acre-feet of water (worth $1,000 to $1,500), which would have otherwise transpired into the sky, for every acre of forest that has been properly thinned.

What is stopping other communities in America’s arid west from following suit? Nothing, other than a mind-set among many who think that if a dozen trees are good, 100 are better. Meanwhile, to replenish the streams before they dry up, others have to accept that chopping down trash trees to prevent conflagrations, and thereby preserve the forests, is no bad thing. As the Wesleyan ecologists admit, “We lifelong tree-huggers must learn when and where to let go.”

Note that this is a press release…

Let it burn: Prescribed fires pose little danger to forest ecology, study says
http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2012/06/11/fire-fuel-reduction-treatments/

By Sarah Yang, Media Relations | June 11, 2012
BERKELEY —
Fighting fire with fire has been given the green light by a new study of techniques used to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires. And with a rise in wildfires predicted in many parts of the country, researchers say controlled burns and other treatments to manage this risk should be stepped up.

The paper, published in the June issue of the peer-reviewed journal BioScience, and led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, synthesizes 20 years of research throughout the country on the ecological impact of reducing forest wildfire risk through controlled burns and tree thinning. It comes as California braces for a potentially bad fire season, particularly in the southern Sierra where precipitation was half its normal level.
“We need to act, because climate change is making fire season longer, temperatures are going up, and that means more fire in many regions, particularly ones with a Mediterranean environment,” said study lead author Scott Stephens, UC Berkeley associate professor of fire science.
The study authors, which included scientists from the U.S. Forest Service and six research universities in the United States and Australia, relied upon data from the U.S. Fire and Fire Surrogates Study, in addition to a wide range of other studies. Together, the studies represented a broad spectrum of ecological markers, detailing the effects of fuel-reduction treatments on wildlife, vegetation, bark beetles, soil properties and carbon sequestration.
“Some question if these fuel-reduction treatments are causing substantial harm, and this paper says no,” said Stephens. “The few effects we did see were usually transient. Based upon what we’ve found, forest managers can increase the scale and pace of necessary fuels treatments without worrying about unintended ecological consequences.”
A few of the researchers’ specific ecological findings include:

For the first five years after treatment, some birds and small mammals that prefer shady, dense habitat moved out of treated areas, while others that prefer more open environments thrived. The study authors said these changes were minor and acceptable.
When mechanical tree thinning was followed by prescribed fire, there was an increase in the overall diversity of vegetation. However, this also included non-native plant species. The researchers recommend continued monitoring of this effect.
Only 2 percent or less of the forest floor saw an increase in mineral soil exposure, which could lead to small-scale erosion. Other soil variables, such as the level of compaction, soil nitrogen and pH levels, were temporary, returning to pre-treatment levels after a year or two.
Increases in bark beetles, a pest that preys on fire-damaged trees, was short-lived and concentrated in the smaller diameter trees. Researchers noted that thinning out a too-dense forest stand improves tree vigor and ultimately increases its resilience to pests, in addition to fire.

The results of this paper may help inform an analysis of one of the larger prescribed fires in the history of the U.S. Forest Service. Called the Boulder Burn, the proposed treatment covers 6,000-9,000 acres in the Southern Sierra Nevada’s Sequoia National Forest and is tentatively set to begin by late fall.
“This paper is more comprehensive and definitive than any other article I’ve seen,” said Malcolm North, research scientist with the U.S. Forest Service and an associate professor in forest ecology at UC Davis. “In one place, it summarizes the state of the science in fuel-reduction treatments, and to my mind, it shuts the door on those who say that any type of fuels treatment is detrimental to the forest. If done properly where surface fuels are reduced, treatments work. It’s time to get on with it.”

Nearly a century of fire suppression and the preferential logging of large-diameter trees, which are better able to withstand forest fires, have left forests vulnerable to more destructive, albeit less frequent, wildfires, the researchers said. In addition, the lack of fire has hindered nutrient cycling in forests and the proliferation of certain plant species, such as the sequoia, that rely upon fire to promote seed dispersal.
This realization led to the gradual re-emergence during the past 20 years of fuel-reduction as a forest management tool. The goal is simple: Thin or remove dense stands of trees, ground vegetation and downed woody debris in a carefully controlled way before they become fuel for a raging wildfire. When low- or moderate-intensity controlled burns are not an option, fire-prone trees are mechanically removed or shredded on site.
Such techniques are an attempt to emulate the frequent fires common in California for thousands of years. Before 1800, Stephens said, an estimated 1.1 million acres of forest burned annually in California, including wildfires ignited by lightning and other natural sources, and blazes set intentionally by Native Americans as a way to manage or alter landscapes. Most were blazes of low-to-moderate intensity that more than 80 percent of the trees could survive, unlike the catastrophic wildfires of modern times.
“Today, the combination of wildfires and fuel-reducing treatments only touch 6-8 percent of the land that used to burn annually before 1800, and fuel-reducing treatments alone only affect 1 percent,” said Stephens. “That’s a pittance. At that level, it’s just triage rather than fire prevention.”
To approach levels that have a chance of reducing wildfire risk in the long term, he said, the amount of land to be treated in a year would need to increase by 2-4 percent — still low compared to historical levels.
Stephens noted that two-thirds of the fuel-reduction treatments in the western United States rely upon mechanical thinning, which would be much more costly than prescribed burns to scale up. In the southeast region, the use of prescribed fire dominates.
In the West, particularly in California, the biggest challenge to expanding controlled burns is the potential reduction in air quality during treatment, said Stephens.
“We have a choice,” he said, “of dealing with lower levels of smoke from prescribed fires that may only be needed every 15 years or so, and which can be timed for optimum wind conditions, or acute levels of smoke from catastrophic fires that can last for months when they hit.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture-U.S. Department of the Interior Joint Fire Science Program helped support this research.

RELATED INFORMATION

Prehistoric fire area and emissions from California’s forests, woodlands, shrublands, and grasslands (study in Forest Ecology and Management)
Boulder Burn (U.S. Forest Service project site)