Fire and Fuels

Premonitions of the Forest Service Wildfire 10 Year Plan

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Note: this is from Ager et. al 2021. I don’t know to what extent these concepts or maps will be used in the final 10 year plan.

 

Chief Moore said many interesting things in his talk at the SAF Convention and in the Q&A’s that followed.  In this post, I’ll just talk about what he said about the Ten Year Plan for Fire.

Three caveats: first, the formal announcement of the Ten Year Plan is not out yet, so it may have changed since his talk; and second, I don’t have all the information but tried to piece it together from what he said and may have got something wrong; third, I am really lousy at taking notes.  Any mistakes are no doubt mine and not his.  People who attended the SAF Convention can watch the recorded presentation and correct me.

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Wildfire is at a crisis level (remember Chief Moore was formerly the Regional Forester for the California Region, so he has been dealing with some of the worst ones).

He said that 98% of the Mendocino had been affected by wildfire in the last two years. In 2021, 2/3 of the town of Grizzly Flats, including the school and the Post Office were burned.

What can we do?  Reintroduce low intensity fire and strategically place fuels reduction treatments (and maintain them).

With increasingly bad wildfire behavior, small areas of treatments are not enough to help firefighters get control.   So-called “random acts of restoration” aren’t cutting it.

Using the scientific analysis in the Fireshed Registry, they found that 90% of exposure to communities could be reduced with work on 15% of the total land area.   But not only is it important to pick the right areas to reduce risk to communities, but also to plan for maintenance of those treatments over time.

Given that, Chief Moore assigned Brian Ferebee (whom many of us may remember from Region 2) to refine, adjust,  and implement the 10 year plan to address the wildfire crisis.  It’s a small team with representation from many parts of the Forest Service.  They will not be using the old approach- “everybody gets $5”.  In the first two years, they will identify projects where the NEPA has already been done and is a critical match with the Fire Registry/Scenario Planning effort.  Note that Scenario Planning can be used in a variety of ways at a variety of scales, but I think here it’s a shorthand for a certain way (see Ager and his group’s research) of dealing with fire and fuels planning at the national scale. However, that same group has done scenario planning incorporating a variety of objectives at a variety of scales, as we’ll examine in later posts.

If you haven’t been following this literature, you can see there is some overlap between this and the scenario planning for wildfire risk reduction in this and other papers by Alan Ager and his collaborators at the RMRS Fire Lab.  For the purposes of its possible application toward the 10 Year Plan, probably the best paper to read is this one Ager, A. A., C. R. Evers, M. A. Day, F. J. Alcasena, and R. Houtman. 2021. Planning for future fire: scenario analysis of an accelerated fuel reduction plan for the western United States. Landscape and Urban Planning 215:1-12. doi: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2021.104212.   Fortunately, it can be accessed openly here.

From the conclusion section:

Our study demonstrated a top down approach to develop a large-scale prioritization to address wildfire risk to developed areas, and an approach to coarsely assess potential wildfire impacts and spatial in tersections with treatments during implementation. The results of the study are being used by the Forest Service to communicate a strategy to ramp up current levels of hazardous fuel treatments to the legislative branches that oversee the agency. The methods can be used by other national scale wildfire management agencies to develop strategic plans, including the assessment of planning risk (Mentis, 2015), i.e., the range of potential wildfire impacts on implementation of strategic risk reduction programs.

Future work can explore the effect of climate change as part of scenario analyses (Star et al., 2016) including assessment of planning risk for fuel treatment and restoration programs (Peterson et al., 2003). For instance, will extreme variability in future wildfire make the use of risk assessment ineffective as a prioritization method for 5–10-year restoration and risk reduction plans? Wider use of scenario planning models by land management agencies is consistent with systems thinking, data analytics, and prescriptive intervention (National Academies of Sciences, 2019), as a way to enhance foresight into natural resource management outcomes, and as part of addressing wildfire challenges in the near term future.

But back to the 10 year plan.. there will also be a monitoring plan to see how it works and to adapt.. plan,  implement, monitor and use that information to continue to understand and further improve risk reduction efforts.

Previous efforts to not do the “$5 for everyone” approach have foundered on the shoals of any priority setting mechanism (those left out/delayed aren’t happy).. so it will be interesting to see if this one, with a science base, and because the areas with most exposure and in the early years generally have lots of people (hence votes), will be successful.  Given the crisis, though, clearly something different needs to be done.

Finally, the Chief said it would be out soon (at the SAF Convention in early November), so I contacted a source at the FS earlier this week, and the reply was still “a few weeks.” So soon we should see how it comes out.

(Note: this post has been corrected in terms of Ager is at RMRS, and a miscopied quote from the paper and some other edits)

California and Oregon: Wildfires and Carbon Counting

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It’s always interesting to observe differences between Oregon and California. It’s fun because they are both D states so it’s difficult (but not impossible, I’m sure) to partisanize issues.  They both grapple with approaches to climate change.  My hypothesis is that because OSU and UO have been the major universities for so long, and the state capitol is in the Williamette Valley, Oregon has more of a “mesic centric” bias than California.  There’s also a greater history (on the West side and the SW) of timber industry. Meanwhile, at UC Berkeley in the 1950’s, Harold Biswell was arguing for more prescribed fire.

It’s interesting to see how this plays out in the “who’s dishing out most carbon” controversy.  According to the Center for Sustainable Economy here:

A new study by researchers based at Oregon State University and the University of Idaho corroborates Center for Sustainable Economy’s 2015 and 2017 research demonstrating that logging is by far the number one source of greenhouse gas emissions in Oregon and that changes in greenhouse gas accounting rules are urgently needed to ensure that the climate impacts of logging are accurately reported. Both the new OSU study and CSE’s 2017 research estimate annual logging-related emissions to have averaged over 33 million metric tons carbon dioxide equivalent per year (Mmt CO2-e/yr) since 2000. This makes logging by far the largest source of emissions in the state, far larger than the 23 Mmt CO2-e/yr attributed to transportation – the leading source presently accounted for by the Oregon Global Warming Commission (OGWC) and the State’s Department of Energy.

And in this High Country News piece about the same study..

And Law’s research could have regional implications. She is working on a larger scale study looking at how land use affects carbon emissions across the West. Stanford forest carbon researcher Christa Anderson says studies like these are important to understand the impact of land use and forests in the carbon balance of the atmosphere.

Except, well, lots of other people watch carbon in California, for example, in this SacBee story that shows how it’s really difficult to decarbonize, even with a plethora of policies in place, in a State that really wants to. The whole article is interesting from that perspective.

The single-biggest contributor to the state’s emissions was the transportation sector, accounting for 40.7% of all emissions in the state, according to the report.

However, California may see a drop in transportation sector-related emissions for 2020 and 2021. The COVID-19-related shift to work from home resulted in a nationwide emissions dip of 15% for 2020.

“California could expect to see a similar level of decline in transportation emissions through 2020 and into 2021,” the report says, though it adds that that data is not yet available.

The second-greatest contributor to California’s greenhouse gas emissions were wildfires.

“Wildfires have always been a feature of the California environment, but they have been producing more (greenhouse gas) emissions than ever, fueled by the impacts of climate change,” according to the report.

In 2020, emissions from wildfires were greater than emissions from any other sector except transportation, with the August Complex Fire alone producing more emissions than the entire commercial sector.

The commercial and residential sectors also continued to increase the amount of emissions produced. From 2014 to 2019, commercial greenhouse gas emissions rose from 4.8% to 5.8%, while residential emissions rose from 6.1% to 7.9%.

Here’s a link to the study. For carbon counters, this group counted 106 MMTCO2e emitted by wildfires in 2020. Of course, it doesn’t look like other states divide up sectors quite the same way the OSU folks did. Seems like in California, at least, managing fire to reduce carbon emissions might be useful.

Of course, “where the best places, best sectors, and best technology to decrease overall emissions with least impacts to disadvantaged folks, and ideally, least negative impacts to anyone and to the environment” are larger questions than the forest community and our researchers alone can answer. Seems like in California, managing fire to reduce carbon emissions might be useful.

DePartisanizing Issues: Biomass Utilization and Fuel Treatments

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It’s been interesting to watch the mechanics of how an issue becomes partisanized.. or departisanized. Two cheery notes on this wherein what used to be considered that bad R people had are now the same ideas that good D people from states like California and Colorado have.

At a alumni gathering a few years ago at Yale, Gina  McCarthy gave what amounted to a rousing very partisan political speech (personally that’s not why I show up for reunions, but that’s a different topic) that included the concept of biomass being bad for climate as if it were something everyone knows the “right answer” to.

Fast forward a few years and here’s Senator Feinstein saying what we’ve always said here- it depends.. Don’t look at our problems through an “east coastal” lens.

“I write to request that the Environmental Protection Agency use its administrative authority to revise the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) to expand allowable sources for biomass to include vegetation cleared from human-occupied areas where it creates wildfire hazards,” Feinstein wrote in a letter to EPA Administrator Michael Regan. “Since 2010, California has experienced unprecedented wildfires and this change would help reduce risk in my state, improve forest health, and make use of cleared vegetation.”

Here’s what her letter said:

As you may know, Section 201 of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) allows biomass from federal land to be sourced “from the immediate vicinity of buildings and other areas regularly occupied by people, or of public infrastructure, at risk from wildfire.” In 2010, the EPA published implementation guidelines for that category in its final rule, “Regulation of Fuels and Fuel Additives: Changes to the Renewable Fuel Standard Program.” Unfortunately, the implementation of this law did not account for areas with wildfire hazard potential and excluded most of the Western United States where catastrophic wildfires are increasing common. (See attached map, “2020 U.S. Forest Service Wildfire Hazard Potential,” which underscores the risk in the West.)

As this year’s fuel quantities become finalized, I urge the EPA, in conjunction with federal land management agencies, to expand the criteria for which qualifying biomass could be sourced and, thus, eligible for credits under the cellulosic category in the RFS. This determination should be made in accordance with the latest science, and to recognize the exacerbating threat that climate change poses to catastrophic wildfire in the American West.

This one from the formerly “fuel treatments don’t work” Los Angeles Times.. (this is from a political reporter, not an environmental reporter, so..)

Democrats are proposing a potentially seismic shift in how the nation battles wildfires by dramatically increasing funding for efforts that aim to prevent blazes, rather than focusing on the tools to put them out.
Under the social safety-net and climate bill passed by the House and now being negotiated in the Senate, Democrats would funnel $27 billion into the nation’s forests, including a sizable $14 billion over a decade for clearing vegetation and other dry debris that can fuel a fire.

What this article seems to overlook is that there is a substantial chunk of change in the bipartisan Infrastructure bill, and that the BBB $ come with restrictions that may make them less useful than they could be.

Still, the $27 billion would represent the largest investment the federal government has made in its forests, according to Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), who introduced a similar forestry bill this year. Funding for the preventative hazardous fuels reduction — to be spread over a decade — is more than double what Congress spent on such efforts annually between 2011 and 2020, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

Traditionally, the federal government has focused its wildfire spending on suppression at the expense of prevention. The Interior Department and Forest Service are even allowed to unilaterally move money from any of its programs, including fire prevention, to fund more urgent suppression efforts.

“When you combine the effects of climate change with the profound negligence of the federal government in terms of managing its national forests, these places are profound dangers to our communities and to our economy,” Bennet said.

“Profound negligence of the federal government in terms of managing its national forests”.. sounds almost like an R Congressperson from the Sierra, or dare I say, the Western Slope.

How One Forest Had 120 Fires in the Last Two Years but Only Burned a Total of 70 Acres: From Wildfire Today

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I thought that this would be of special interest to TSW readers from SW Oregon. Now everyone might not agree with this approach, but it seems to me that George has some powerful arguments.  Also, we can’t forget that keeping large acreages of trees from burning up is good for carbon.  It’s a story about a forest which has been successful at keeping wildfires from burning up large areas using an approach that beefs up initial attack.   It comes from Wildfire Today in a post by Murry Taylor.  Well worth reading, and here’s an excerpt:

During the meeting Merv made it clear that the Regional Forester in Portland was aware and supported this strong IA approach. Dan wanted Chuck and I to also understand that he had had Merv’s full backing as well. And that he had told his crews that he would back them all the way. So, there you have it, the line authority of Supervisor, FMO, and crew leaders backing each other in the decisions they need to make when working fire.

The RRSNF approach: They didn’t depend solely on agency resources but went proactive with contract crews and engines during times of critical fire danger. They prepositioned smokejumpers from both Redmond and the BLM. They had a 20-person rappel crew and one hotshot crew—the Rogue River Shots. Rappel crews from other forests were called in as needed. This was all part of a preparedness Phase One and Phase Two program created and initiated on their own forest that went beyond the regular (Regional and National) preparedness level programs. It involved prepositioning a Type 1 helicopter, a Type 3 helicopter w/module, rappel crews, smokejumpers, engines, water tenders, etc.

As far as those critics who questioned how much money this cost, Merv George Jr. told us: I’ve spent millions on this forest fighting large fires since I got here. So, I’m not averse to spending money up front. One example is when a contract engine responded to and stopped a half-acre fire near Agness that had the potential to go big. If that fire had gone big, those savings alone could have made it all worth it.

As Merv made clear, we all know that fire needs to be returned to the forest landscape. The Rogue River-Siskiyou N.F. is on pace to have a record year with prescribed fire. But fire does NOT need to be there in summers of record low fuel moistures and record high fire danger, or in the hottest times of the year. These fires must be put out early and fast. If they’re not, then you end up facing August with exhausted crews scattered all over the West, people from other areas and maybe even agencies working fire on your turf, and skies filled with smoke so that air resources cannot be used effectively.

When it comes to safety, this is something Merv George Jr. thinks about a lot. It’s a calculated risk to encourage vigorous IA, since it can mean extra exposure early in most fire suppression efforts. Such actions can put people in harms way. But, to hold back and risk a fire growing large where it can really do a lot of damage for a long duration, is not—in Merv’s opinion—the most responsible choice.

 

California wildfire fallout: Timber industry confronted by too many dead trees, warns of damaged forests- San Francisco Chronicle

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Sawdust pours out of the Collins Pine lumber mill in Chester.
Max Whittaker/Special to The Chronicle

This is a really interesting article. I like the fact that the reporter spoke to a researcher at Oregon State University, and then circled back to the California FS employees working directly with the problem.

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At ground level, three family-held timber companies say the increasingly ferocious wildfires are transforming their businesses.

California’s first million-acre wildfire, the August Complex in 2020, burned through about 40,000 acres of Crane Mills holdings in the Mendocino National Forest. About 42% of those burned acres experienced total losses among young and old trees alike, meaning they will have to be wholly reforested or risk being overtaken by shrubs, Chief Financial Officer Drew Crane said.

The 2020 CZU Lightning Complex fires burned about two-thirds of Big Creek Lumber’s 8,000 acres of mixed redwood forests in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Company President Janet McCrary Webb — whose family members lost 16 homes — said though redwood trees have thick bark built to withstand wildfires, she remains unsure how many will succumb to fire damage and die.

The Dixie Fire burned through about half of Collins Pine’s 95,300 acres around Lake Almanor in Plumas and Tehama counties. The company has found signs the fire was beneficial to some areas, but “about 30,000 acres is gone, black,” said Niel Fischer, Collins Pine western resources manager. More than 64,000 old-growth trees, the kind expected to survive wildfires, are probably dead, he said.

“I don’t want to use the word catastrophic, but it was catastrophic in terms of what it means to the business and what we have to do to recover,” Fischer said. “It shook us as foresters to our core.”

Wildfires are expected disturbances for California’s timber industry and are natural and restorative to these ecosystems. But the severity of fires in 2020 and 2021 is expected to result in significant destruction.

And they have to move fast to harvest the charred trees. Dead and dying trees can be milled for lumber, but it has to be done within about two years before they rot or become infested with insects.

Crane Mills, based in Corning on the western side of Tehama County, is running its mill at full tilt. But the company lost a key buyer of Ponderosa pine in March — there is simply too much wood.

“There aren’t enough loggers, there aren’t enough trucks, there aren’t enough foresters,” Crane said. “A lot of it will go to waste.”

Fischer said it’s not like losing one year’s tomato crop — rather Collins Pine has 10 or 15 years worth of resources “dead on the stump.”

“Dead trees do have value in the forest as long as you don’t have too many,” Fischer said. “We are careful to conserve trees that have died so they’re naturally incorporated into soil and become habitat … but there has to be balance.”

George Gentry, senior vice president of the California Forestry Association, said salvage logging operations can offer an economic boost in the immediate aftermath of a wildfire, but not enough to compensate for the long-term impact he expects will dampen timber harvests “for decades to come.” Gentry estimated 1.6 billion board feet burned this year — more than the 1.5 billion board feet produced each year across the state.

“They’ll do some initial salvage, they’ll do some initial rehabilitation, then they’ll have to pull back,” Gentry said. “If they reduce mill employment, if they reduce purchases, if they reduce anything they’d buy locally, that impact is really significant in rural economies.”

McCrary Webb with Big Creek Lumber said the volume of dead, dying and drying trees throughout Northern California forests should be a concern for all — and she hopes to see more solutions, like an increase in demand for wood biomass energy production.

“That’s one of the issues we see that really the whole state has to grapple with: How can you effectively deal with all this wood?” McCrary Webb said. “A lot of this wood, there’s no place to take it. Some were taking it to landfills. There’s no place for it to go.”

Collins Pine has been a pioneer in uneven-age harvesting, a way to manage commercial forests so they have a diversity of tree species and ages, as in natural ecosystems, Fischer said.

He said that while some portions of the land will rebound, they expect a lot of it will have to be wholly replanted. That “zeroes out the clock” for a forest meant to have both old and young trees, he said. Decades later, portions with same-age trees would be harvested at once — essentially clear-cut, a major shift away from their efforts to steward timber to more closely resemble natural forest ecosystems.

Crane said the August Complex fires were a “seminal event” for his family’s company, forcing it to rewrite its 100-year business plan. It too is facing a shift from uneven age reforestation practices to tree plantations, he said.

“You’re planting an even-aged forest — and I’m not sure how fire-resilient that is,” Crane said.

In 2020 alone, about 1 million acres changed from living forest to dead forest because of wildfires, said Joe Sherlock, regional silviculturist for the U.S. Forest Service in California. The Forest Service manages 8 million acres in California, roughly one-quarter of the state’s forestland.

Salvage timber sales are critical to funding reforestation and preventing dangerous fuel loads from building up and providing tinder for the next fire, Sherlock said. But the sheer scale of severe, tree-killing fires is adding pressure to an already overburdened system. There simply aren’t enough mills to process the trees or buyers to take the lumber.

“I worry about that a tremendous amount,” Sherlock said. “It will be expensive to gather that material up and create a hospitable environment for seedlings. I don’t know whose checkbook we can use.”

Brad Seaberg, who manages timber sales in California for the Forest Service, said this year’s fires are “testing the market” for whether the agency can find enough purchasers for the amount of lumber available on federal land. And a significant number of smaller-scale landowners affected by wildfires have also entered the timber market, he said.

“The scope of what’s going on is overwhelming,” Seaberg said.

But not everyone sees salvage logging as a boon to forest health or the best defense against the next fire.

Ernie Niemi, an Oregon forest economist who has studied timber practices for decades, said salvage logging on Forest Service land comes with steep costs, both financial and environmental. Niemi said dead trees hold greater benefit in the environment as crucial storage for climate-warming carbon dioxide and habitat for woodpeckers, insects and other species.

“Those dead and dying trees out on the landscape are not suddenly worthless from an ecological perspective,” Niemi said. “That big trunk still holds an awful lot of carbon.”

Sherlock said that is true for areas with a smattering of dead trees amid a rebounding forest. But he said large areas of mostly dead forests are less likely to naturally reseed and risk conversion from forest to shrubland. Harvesting dead or dying trees is necessary work, he said.

“You can imagine what it would be like to ignore all of those standing (dead) trees,” Sherlock said. “As the years go by, more and more of those trees will snap off or tip over, all on the ground. Can you imagine a forest with tons of tons of dry wood ready to burn in the next fire?”

An earlier version of this story misstated the volume of timber burned this year and produced annually on average in California. It is in billions of board feet.

AFRC Granted Intervenor Status in Ripley Project Litigation (Kootenai NF)

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Here’s the press release from AFRC:

The American Forest Resource Council (AFRC) has formally joined the Kootenai Forest Stakeholders Coalition (KFSC) and Lincoln County in defending the Ripley Project on the Kootenai National Forest.

On November 22, U.S. Magistrate Judge Kathleen L. DeSoto granted the entities’ joint motion to intervene in litigation against the project to reduce wildfire risks near Libby.

“AFRC is pleased to join our county and collaborative partners in defending this very important project to protect Libby and other nearby communities as well as to promote forest resilience on the Kootenai National Forest,” said AFRC General Counsel Sara Ghafouri. “Action is needed because Lincoln County has the most acres at risk from catastrophic wildfire events than any other county in the state and ranks the highest for the percentages of structures that are at very high or extreme risk from wildfire.”

The Ripley Project area is located in close proximity to Libby, just east of U.S. Highway 2 and south of the Kootenai River.  The project area is about 29,180 acres, with approximately 7,680 acres privately owned and 2,690 acres are managed by other federal or state agencies.

About 40 percent of the project is in the Wildland Urban Interface, where people and property are in close contact with wildlands. Public lands managers have determined the forests are suffering from overstocked conditions, and forest management activities are needed to decrease the risk of fire escaping the Kootenai National Forest onto adjacent private timberlands, which are intermingled within the project area, and Lincoln County property.

This project will be implemented through four timber sales, including two Good Neighbor Authority (GNA) timber sales administered by the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (Montana-DNRC). These GNA sales are part of a joint commitment between the Forest Service and Montana-DNRC to work together to reduce wildfire risk and increase resiliency within the Kootenai National Forest.

The Ripley Project is being challenged by a serial litigant group claiming the Forest Service failed to designate the project area as a “Bears Outside of Recovery Zone,” among other claims.

Some local officials have objected to the characterization of the area as habitat for the grizzly bear, since the corridor between the Recovery Zone and the Ripley Project contain around 7,000 residents, the Libby Airport, and a shooting range and is divided by a state highway.  Management of this area to support bear habitat also raises concerns because it could potentially have the unintended effect of increasing human and grizzly bear interaction.

The Ripley Project has received broad community support, including from KFSC, a collaborative group representing diverse interests seeking to reach consensus on forest management issues in the area.  KFSC’s involvement in the Ripley Project is rooted in the concerns that the people living near the National Forest face significant risk from catastrophic wildfire in the forest remains unmanaged.  KFSC members recently responded to misleading claims about the project through a guest opinion in the Western News.

“Now that intervention has been granted, the parties will brief the merits of this case in early 2022, with a hearing hopefully scheduled in the spring of 2022,” Ghafouri said.  “We look forward to working with our partners and defending this project so it can be implemented as soon as possible.”

The Infrastructure of Infrastructure: Wildfire Commission, Fuelbreak System and Plans for Spending $

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Most of the articles I’ve read on the Infrastructure Bill talk about the bucks, and that’s certainly the most important thing. Still, with the Reconciliation Bill potentially adding more bucks into the spending pipeline, it’s also interesting to look at provisions that talk about structures for spending the money, or what we might call the Infrastructure of Infrastructure. What is also of interest is that while we’ve discussed the potential differences between restoration, hazardous fuel treatments, and fuel break projects, Congress is pretty careful in delineating each pot of money.

1. Developing a Fuelbreak system

Section 40803(i) requires a Wildfire Prevention Study of the construction and maintenance of a system of strategically placed fuelbreaks to control wildfires in western States. Upon completion of the study, the Secretary of Agriculture is required to determine whether to initiate a programmatic environmental impact statement to implement the system of strategically placed fuel breaks.

What we might find interesting about this is that it separates out fuelbreaks… the realm of fire suppression practitioners and fire scientists, and gives them their own space and planning without also needing to consider “restoration” NRV and other concepts (which have a separate pot). As to the programmatic EIS; many NEPA practitioners have not found these to be all that helpful. If litigatory groups don’t like the project, they get two bites at the litigatory apple (one programmatic and one project). There’s also the problem of analyzing and getting through a PEIS with accompanying litigation in five years, let alone any subsequent project NEPA. I still think an all-lands approach at perhaps a multiforest scale, and a site-specific EIS (for strategic fuelbreak establishment and maintenance) would be a better and faster way to go.

2. A Joint Plan for spending the money; hopefully before too much is spent.

Section 40803(j) requires USDA and DOI to establish a 5-year monitoring, maintenance and treatment plan that describes the how both will use the funding in subsection (c) to reduce the risk of wildfire and improve the Fire Regime Condition Class of 10,000 acres of Federal, Tribal or rangeland that is at very high risk of wildfire. Not later than 5 years after enactment, USDA and DOI are required to publish a long-term strategy to maintain forest health improvements and wildfire risk and to continue treatments at levels necessary to address the 20M acres needing priority treatment over the 10 year period post publication of the strategy.

I like how both 1 and 2 acknowledge not only what it takes to treat, but also to maintain.

5) the Wildfire Commission (section 70201)

ESTABLISHMENT.—Not later than 30 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretaries shall jointly establish a commission to study and make recommendations to improve Federal
policies relating to—
(1) the prevention, mitigation, suppression, and management of wildland fires in the United States; and
(2) the rehabilitation of land in the United States devastated by wildland fires.

…
DATE.—The appointments of the members of the Commission shall be made not later than 60 days after the date of enactment of this Act.

The composition is fairly complex but appears to be about 11 feds and 18 others. The two secretaries are joint co-chairpersons. Ideally it will be a good way to highlight problems and improve, whilst avoiding partisanizing the issues-  and yet having enough political oomph to get things done. Below is their list of things to do..

(1) IN GENERAL.—Not later than 1 year after the date of the first meeting of the Commission, the Commission shall submit to the appropriate committees of Congress a report
describing recommendations to prevent, mitigate, suppress, and manage wildland fires, including—
(A) policy recommendations, including recommendations—
(i) to maximize the protection of human life, community water supplies, homes, and other essential structures, which may include recommendations to expand the use of initial attack strategies;
(ii) to facilitate efficient short- and long-term forest management in residential and nonresidential at-risk areas, which may include a review of community wildfire protection plans;
(iii) to manage the wildland-urban interface;
(iv) to manage utility corridors;
(v) to rehabilitate land devastated by wildland fire;
and
(vi) to improve the capacity of the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Interior to conduct hazardous fuels reduction projects;
(B) policy recommendations described in subparagraph
(A) with respect to any recommendations for—
(i) categorical exclusions from the requirement to prepare an environmental impact statement or analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969
(42 U.S.C. 4321 et seq.); or
(ii) additional staffing or resources that may be necessary to more expeditiously prepare an environmental impact statement or analysis under that Act;
(C) policy recommendations for modernizing and expanding the use of technology, including satellite technology, remote sensing, unmanned aircraft systems, and
any other type of emerging technology, to prevent, mitigate, suppress, and manage wildland fires, including any recommendations
with respect to—
(i) the implementation of section 1114 of the John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act (43 U.S.C. 1748b–1); or
(ii) improving early wildland fire detection; (D) an assessment of Federal spending on wildland fire-related disaster management, including—
(i) a description and assessment of Federal grant programs for States and units of local government for pre- and post-wildland fire disaster mitigation and
recovery, including—
(I) the amount of funding provided under each program;
(II) the effectiveness of each program with respect to long-term forest management and maintenance; and
(III) recommendations to improve the effectiveness of each program, including with respect to the conditions on the use of funds received under the program; and
H. R. 3684—827
(bb) the extent to which additional funds are necessary for the program;
(ii) an evaluation, including recommendations to improve the effectiveness in mitigating wildland fires, which may include authorizing prescribed fires, of—
(I) the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program under section 203 of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act (42 U.S.C. 5133);
(II) the Pre-Disaster Mitigation program under that section (42 U.S.C. 5133);
(III) the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program under section 404 of that Act (42 U.S.C. 5170c);
(IV) Hazard Mitigation Grant Program postfire assistance under sections 404 and 420 of that Act (42 U.S.C. 5170c, 5187); and
(V) such other programs as the Commission determines to be appropriate;
(iii) an assessment of the definition of ‘‘small impoverished community’’ under section 203(a) of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency
Assistance Act (42 U.S.C. 5133(a)), specifically—
(I) the exclusion of the percentage of land owned by an entity other than a State or unit of local government; and
(II) any related economic impact of that exclusion;
and
(iv) recommendations for Federal budgeting for wildland fires and post-wildfire recovery;
(E) any recommendations for matters under subparagraph
(A), (B), (C), or (D) specific to—
(i) forest type, vegetation type, or forest and vegetation
type; or
(ii) State land, Tribal land, or private land;
(F)(i) a review of the national strategy described in the report entitled ‘‘The National Strategy: The Final Phase in the Development of the National Cohesive Wildland
Fire Management Strategy’’ and dated April 2014; and
(ii) any recommendations for changes to that national strategy to improve its effectiveness; and
(G)(i) an evaluation of coordination of response to, and suppression of, wildfires occurring on Federal, Tribal, State, and local land among Federal, Tribal, State, and local
agencies with jurisdiction over that land; and
(ii) any recommendations to improve the coordination described in clause (i).

Possible Salvage Strategy for Dixie and Caldor Fires

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Since a battle for salvage projects is brewing, I think the Forest Service and the timber industry should consider my idea to get the work done, as soon as possible, under the rules, laws and policies, currently in force. It would be a good thing to ‘preempt’ the expected litigation before it goes to Appeals Court.

 

The Forest Service should quickly get their plans together, making sure that the project will survive the lower court battles. It is likely that such plans that were upheld by lower courts, in the past, would survive the inevitable lower court battles. Once the lower court allows the project(s), the timber industry should get all the fallers they can find, and get every snag designated for harvest on the ground. Don’t worry too much about skidding until the felling gets done. That way, when the case is appealed, most of Chad Hanson’s issues would now be rendered ‘moot’. It sure seems like the Hanson folks’ entire case is dependent on having standing snags. If this idea is successful, I’m sure that Hanson will try to block the skidding and transport of logs to the mill. The Appeals Court would have to decide if skidding operations and log hauling are harmful to spotted owls and black-backed woodpeckers.

 

It seems worth a try, to thin out snags over HUGE areas, while minimizing the legal wranglings.

Chief Moore Announces New Funding and 4FRI Strategy

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Here’s a link to the press release:

USDA Forest Service Chief Randy Moore today announced new funding and a redesigned strategy for the Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4FRI) during a visit with elected officials in Arizona.

The agency will be committing $54 million dollars in fiscal year 2022 to accelerate the needs for implementing high-priority projects on 135,000 acres over the next 10 years. The funding will also address annual road and bridge maintenance.

“The Forest Service is increasing the scale of our investments into the 4FRI project, and we’re getting started sooner than previously planned,” said Chief Moore. “This strategy will focus our forest maintenance work to reduce wildfire danger in the 4FRI project area where wildfire is most likely to place homes, communities and infrastructure at risk. By placing our treatments in the right places and at the right scale, we will reduce wildfire risk, protect communities, and restore forests.”

The announcement today represents an important step toward the agency’s broader, national strategy to treat landscapes, protect communities and watersheds, and create fire resilient forests at the scale needed to address the nation’s growing wildfire crisis.

“We are committed to reducing the risk of destructive wildfire and protecting communities, and recognize the scale of the need for restoration,” added Chief Moore.  “Industry is vital to our success in this commitment, and we are fully committed to working with partners to achieve our restoration needs at scale.”

 

The key decisions from the 4FRI Restoration Strategy are:

  • Immediately prioritize and expand the highest-priority, partnership projects to significantly reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire to communities on approximately 135,000 acres (i.e. Bill Williams Mountain, Flagstaff Watershed Protection Project, CC Cragin, Sierra/Anchas).

  • Immediately implement current plans which provide approximately 300,000 acres over 20 years to maintain existing industry.

  • Treat 86,000 acres using prescribed fire and non-commercial thinning (over 20 years) on the Tonto and Kaibab National Forests.

  • Conduct a rapid assessment and optimization effort using the best available science to assess approximately 300,000-350,000 acres (over 20 years) on the Coconino and Kaibab National Forests, with treatments assessed to prioritize which acres to treat to reduce the risk of wildfire the quickest beginning in FY2023.

  • Focus on resolving and improving conditions for industry success by addressing factors like cost and risk reduction, incentives, market conditions, availability of raw material, transportation plans, and fire liability risks.

There is also a paper that has more detail.

Accomplishments and Expected Outcomes
The restoration strategy is quicker and more diverse with opportunities for existing and new industry. It uses a variety of scales, different contracts and agreements, over multiple time frames (5,10, 20 years) to expand industry and jobs (1,400 jobs and $56.6M income in FY2021).
Based on pending and completed National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), there is a need to treat approximately 700,000 to 880,000 acres over the next 20 years to meet desired conditions and reduce wildfire risk using a variety to approaches include mechanical thinning and prescribed burning. These acres include the high priority partner projects, providing acres to maintain existing industry and both product and non-product removal areas with implementation tools to be determined. This is in addition to 258,000 acres already completed under 4FRI over the past 10 years.
Considering the total acres treated and planned under this strategy (up to 1.2 million acres) across the 2.4 million acres landscape, the outcome is approximately treating 47% of the 2.4 million acres.
Based on new information for restoring fire-adapted ecosystems in 4FRI for fire resiliency (RMRS GTR 424), blending financial and resiliency objectives are critical to defining the overall outcomes for success. On average only 40% to 50% of a planning area’s acres need to be strategically treated to reduce 80% of the exposure from wildfire. This collaborative effort will help to further understand and define tradeoffs between financial and fire resiliency objectives, while we continue to implement this 4FRI Restoration Strategy

It sounds as if they are breaking the work down into smaller contracts to give opportunities to a variety of industry, and focusing on prioritizing reducing wildfire exposure to communities of all the possible acres that could be treated. The latter seems like a general movement within the FS and part of the national 10 year plan.

LA Times Story: Forest Service Struggles to Complete Prescribed Burns As Doo NPS and BLM

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Hopefully you can access this article. I ran into a paywall on some devices and browsers and not others. The L.A. Times seems to run stories suggesting “fuel treatments don’t work because we can find scientists who say they don’t ” and also “they do work, that’s recognized by the scientific community, but the Forest Service and other agencies aren’t doing enough of it.”

This reminds me of the old story of the two elderly ladies told by Woody Allen:

“There’s an old joke – um… two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ’em says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.”

Sometimes in this article they are talking about prescribed fire (PF) and other times thinning, and both together.  But it is also pointed out by the Eldorado Forest Supervisor that “National forests like El Dorado are now so overgrown that the landscape often must receive one or more rounds of thinning before it is safe to put fire on the ground.”

Despite this knowledge, however, the federal government, which manages about 57% of the forested land in California, has completed only half of the fuels treatments it had hoped to get done in the state for the year — a statistic that profoundly dismayed wildfire experts.
As of mid-September, the Forest Service had completed or contracted out fewer than 37,000 acres of prescribed fire projects in California since Oct. 1, 2020. The majority was the burning of stacks of vegetation that had been piled after thinning, in which crews prune branches or cut down smaller trees, often using chain saws or cranes.

An untreated control unit in the Goosenest Adaptive Management Area in the Klamath National Forest after the Antelope fire
An untreated control unit in the Goosenest Adaptive Management Area in Klamath National Forest is shown after the Antelope fire burned through the area on Aug. 5, 2021. In the untreated areas, “the predominant fire behavior was a crown fire which killed every tree,” said Eric Knapp, research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service.
(U.S. Forest Service)

An additional 6,063 acres of managed land included naturally ignited fires that were allowed to burn — a practice the Forest Service suspended after it came under heated criticism over the summer.

Another 5,000 acres were treated with broadcast burning, which in combination with thinning has shown to be most effective.

“That’s just depressing,” said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, fire advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension. “That’s so little, given how much land the Forest Service manages in California. It is just a drop in the bucket.

“I think it speaks to the need for such drastic change around prescribed fire.”

In total, the Forest Service had, as of Sept. 17, met about 54% of its goal of treating 238,200 acres in the state during the fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30. The target does not discriminate between prescribed burning and other methods of vegetation removal. Those include grazing, thinning, chemical treatments such as herbicide, and disposing of the thinned vegetation, including biomass removal, chipping, crushing and piling.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service, which manage much less forested land in California, didn’t fare any better. The NPS performed a total of 616 acres of broadcast burning in the state so far this calendar year; the BLM plans to burn about 300 acres but has yet to begin.

Officials say the lag in forest treatment is due to several factors, including lack of funding and personnel, but also to fundamental changes in the fire season. They say that drought, climate change and fuel overloading have stretched out the season and narrowed the time frame in which prepared burns can be conducted.

“There’s a lot of structural issues that need to be overcome to burn at the scale that is needed,” Knapp said.

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A unit in the Goosenest Adaptive Management Area that was treated with pine emphasis thinning and broadcast burning
A unit in the Goosenest Adaptive Management Area that was treated with pine emphasis thinning, plus two rounds of broadcast burning, is shown after the Antelope fire burned through Aug. 5, 2021. Initial observations suggest that the plots that were thinned and burned prescriptively fared the best.
(U.S. Forest Service)

The Klamath study, dubbed the Goosenest Adaptive Management Area, is a patch of old timberland that was heavily logged before it was turned over to the Forest Service in the mid-1950s. Before it was privately managed, fires had burned through the area every nine years or so, but by the time researchers began to focus on the area, it had not burned in decades, Knapp said.

The parcel was crowded with young trees competing for light and resources, and they had transitioned from primarily pine to fir, which is less fire- and drought-tolerant, he said.

Scientists were trying to see if they could remove some vegetation to re-allocate the growth to fewer trees, making them grow larger more quickly and restoring the forest to something that more closely resembles what it looked like a century ago.

They put in place three treatments: thinning favoring the reestablishment of pine species; thinning favoring pine species plus two rounds of broadcast burning, in 2001 and 2010; and thinning favoring the largest-diameter trees with no regard to species. Each was repeated on five 100-acre plots. Five control plots received no treatment.

The lightning-sparked Antelope fire burned through all of the plots over the course of four days starting Aug. 4.

“Because we have five replicates of each of these treatments that were all hit by fire burning under oftentimes similar conditions, we can tease out the effect of weather and the effect of fuels,” Knapp said. “It will be a very compelling example of the interaction of fuels treatments and weather in affecting the outcome.”

Initial observations suggest that the plots that were thinned and burned fared the best, the control plots the worst, and the plots that were only thinned made out somewhere in the middle. There was little noticeable difference between the two types of thinning.

“What it shows to me is that under the most extreme fire behavior, thinning alone is oftentimes not enough,” Knapp said. “You have to also deal with the stuff on the ground.”

That’s not to say thinning alone didn’t change fire behavior, he said. Though many of the trees in the thinned plots still died, they were killed by heat, their needles scorched brown. By contrast, the trees in the control plots were entirely consumed by fire, leaving behind only dead, blackened sticks.

That suggests the thinned plots experienced a hot surface fire. The control plots, however, experienced even hotter fire that reached up into the crowns and burned the canopy, likely spitting out embers ahead of the main fire that made it move more quickly, Knapp said. Such variations in intensity and speed could mean the difference between firefighters being able to battle the fire or being forced to retreat.

Traditionally, parts of California would get a rainstorm in late September or early October, and broadcast burning could start a couple of weeks later once the vegetation dried out, Knapp said.

But in the last few years, fall rains haven’t arrived until late October or November. By that time, the sun angle is so low on the horizon and it’s so cool that the rain-soaked vegetation might never dry to the point where these burns can be conducted, he said. And even once the right conditions are in place, fire smoke and air quality considerations limit the number of burns that can be performed at once, Knapp added.

At the same time, fire seasons have grown longer and more intense, so the crews that once transitioned from fighting blazes to setting them are no longer available because they are still in fire suppression mode.

The National Interagency Fire Center reached its highest preparedness level, 5, in July, the earliest point in a decade. The designation indicates that 80% of the nation’s wildland firefighting personnel are committed to incidents.

U.S. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore cited those resource limitations in August when he announced the agency would no longer consider conducting prescribed burns until the preparedness level dropped back down to 2.

“We are in a ‘triage mode’ where our primary focus must be on fires that threaten communities and infrastructure,” he wrote in a memo explaining the decision.

The move underscored the dire need for a full-time workforce dedicated solely to prescribed burning, with positions that are well-paid and attractive, Quinn-Davidson said.

“We need more jobs focused on prescribed fire and fuels treatments that don’t get pulled off to fire suppression,” she said.

Authorities caution that many Western U.S. forests have suffered through so many years of imbalance due to aggressive fire suppression practices and climate change that broadcast burning alone is not sufficient to restore them.

National forests like El Dorado are now so overgrown that the landscape often must receive one or more rounds of thinning before it is safe to put fire on the ground, said Jeff Marsolais, forest supervisor of El Dorado, which has seen no prescribed burning this fiscal year.

“Getting to where we can broadcast burn and having fire burn naturally through the ground like it did 100 years ago, that’s exactly what we’re trying to get to,” he said. “But there’s a ton of work that has to go into restoring the resilience of the forest before we can get to that level.