Fire and Fuels

A couple more fire articles – costs and solutions

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One is an Associated Press overview of the firefighting cost issue.  It’s not research, but it is the way the problem is viewed by many people.  Here is why they say costs are going up:

The U.S. is seeing more and bigger wildfires, and the wildfire season is getting longer. The reasons are hotter, drier weather and a buildup of dead and dying trees because of past fire-suppression practices, said Jennifer Jones, a spokeswoman for the National Interagency Fire Center, which coordinates firefighting nationwide.

The old practice of putting out all fires led to overgrown forests, some with huge tracts of trees that died at about the same time, leaving them prone to large, hot, fast-moving blazes, researchers say.

Some climate and forestry experts say global warming is a factor in the increasing number of fires because it’s contributing to the hot, dry weather.

Jones said another development driving up costs is the increasing number of homes being built in or near forests, a number that the Forest Service estimates is about 43 million homes. Keeping fires away from people, houses, power lines and other infrastructure is more complicated and costly than firefighting in the wilds.

I noticed the absence of “not enough thinning” or “serial litigants.”  Although there’s allusions to both in the last paragraph on legislative solutions (even though they’re not described as a cause):

But one also calls on the Forest Service to manage its woodlands more actively, including thinning dense stands of trees and removing dead trees in an effort to reduce fires. Some argue that pushing management practices is unnecessary and ineffective.

The other features Stephen Pyne discussing what “let it burn” means today in Arizona.  The title:  “Nature is clearing more forest than people can. That may be a good thing.”

It’s complicated, but the gist is this: When lightning-caused fires do not threaten homes, let them burn. That’s an overgeneralization for an approach that takes many factors into consideration such as burn scares from previous fires, weather, drought, fuel, resources, firefighter safety and nearby communities.

Firefighters are frequently “going to managed wildfire, or a box and burn strategy,” Pyne said. Roads, trails and other barriers serve as fire lines. Those lines are the box. The burn clears brush within them. Each box cleared is less likely to be part of a giant fire in the future.

“You’re not just walking away and letting it go,” Pyne said.  The strategy is not new — it has quietly been going on for years, said Zabinski.  “It’s happening quietly all around, but more so the last few years,” she said, because the recent years have brought some drought relief.

The strategy is not without risks because “nature’s complicated. People make mistakes. Things happen,” Pyne said. But without it, “we’ll be playing Whac-A-Mole into the indefinite future. And we’re not going to win.”

 

R.I.P. Saw Brigade

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In another old case …

The Supreme Court has left in place a lower court ruling that prevents New Mexico from greenlighting tree clearing on federal land in the state in the name of fire prevention.

The Supreme Court declined Monday to hear a dispute between New Mexico and the federal government.

The issue dates back to 2001 when New Mexico passed a law saying the U.S. Forest Service had failed to reduce the threat of forest fires by not clearing undergrowth and removing trees on Forest Service land. The law then gave counties in the state permission to do the work.

When Otero County moved to cut trees on land in the Lincoln National Forest without federal approval in 2011, the United States government sued. Lower courts sided with the federal government.

https://www.abqjournal.com/1072087/supreme-court-declines-to-hear-nm-tree-clearing-dispute.html

What is Beyond the “Fog of War”?

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There are scary and uncertain times ahead for our forests. There is just too much “Fog of War” going on for the public to sort out and fact-check for themselves. Even the ‘fact-checkers’ should be suspect, until proven reliable and bias-free. The rise of ‘fake news’ has blurred multiple lines, and many people, even in mass media, fall for the hoaxes, satire or misinformation. (Example: An article appeared on the Grist website, showing concern about a recall of “Dog Condoms”, presenting the link to www.dogcondoms.com )

Thinning for Water in California: Various Disciplines Weigh In

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Sediment basin for KREW (KIng’s River Experimental Watershed) from SNAMP website.
M of T noted in a comment that a force against MT (mechanical treatments) which may be necessary before PB (prescribed burns) is the problem of dealing with non-commercial material that needs to be removed. Her comment reminded me of this article in The Economist.

Thinning efforts are off to a great start but must accelerate, says Timothy Quinn, head of the Association of California Water Agencies. Five times as much forest should be thinned every year, estimates Roger Bales, a hydrologist at the University of California, Merced. To find out how much extra water a thinned watershed produces, the university has placed sensors in thinned and control plots in the Stanislaus-Tuolumne Experimental Forest north of Yosemite National Park. Depending on landscape and precipitation, thinned areas shed 10-40% more water into streams, Mr Bales estimates.

More accurate numbers will be available next year. The hope, says Eric Knapp, a Forest Service ecologist in Redding, is that a new thinning technique will prove to produce even more water when flow volumes from next spring’s snowmelt are known. Some plots are not thinned evenly, but rather by clear-cutting gaps with a diameter one or two times the height of surrounding trees. The idea is to clear an area big enough for a good snowpack to form, but small enough for shade to reduce evaporation and extend the melting season.

California’s governor recently signed a bill that facilitates thinning watersheds. But some environmentalists resist “cutting any tree for any reason”, as the Forest Service’s Mr Murphy puts it. And some think thinning doesn’t produce meaningfully more run-off. That’s the opinion of Chris Frissell of Frissell & Raven Hydrobiological and Landscape Sciences, a consultancy in Polson, Montana. Thinning has become popular in the state, but, he says, it disturbs soil, generating silt that harms aquatic life.

Clearing trees with fire is cheap if all goes to plan but only makes sense in certain areas. Thinning with big chainsaws on wheels can cost up to $650,000 per square mile. This could be recouped with timber revenue if big trees are felled. But the chainsaws are usually only let loose on smaller trees, so taxpayers must cough up.

One solution would be to get water utilities or hydropower producers to fund the thinning. AMP Insights, a consultancy which has estimated the value of water flowing out of the Sierra Nevada, reckons the extra flow would defray the cost of removing trees by 20% and, in wet years, by 60% or more.

Here we have one scientist (Bales) with monitors in plots saying that thinned areas get more water into streams, but (Frissell) possibly at the expense of aquatic life. We’ll explore that in greater depth in the future.

As Brian Hawthorne said earlier, thinning for fuel treatment is not the only reason to thin. Brian also mentioned restoration. Bales and others are thinking about dealing with climate change and water resources, another purpose, involving more disciplines. The scientists in the article come from a variety of disciplines.
Here’s Eric Knapp, forest ecologist.
Tim Murphy is a hydrologist/soil scientist (according to LinkedIn)
Chris Frissell seems to also be a scientist at U of Montana in addition to the consultancy the article mentions. Here’s his information. He is an aquatic ecologist.
Roger Bales works on water and climate engineering and is a professor at U of Calif Merced. Here’s his info.

Wildfire and Fuel Treatment Minus the “Blame Game”

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It seems like one person’s “accountability” is another person’s “blame.” So let’s not use any inflammatory or pejorative words, and talk here civilly (no politicians in this room :)).

We in the interior west must live with fire. To do so we need an “All of the Above” strategy or a “Three Legged Stool”, 1. (community and personal actions) 2.(prescribed burning, mechanical treatments and WFU) and 3.(suppression). It seems to be PB, MT and WFU in which most of the disagreement lies. For a variety of reasons, once a wildfire is ignited, it’s easier to burn areas than if a project to burn them is planned ($ are there, not so much analysis and no litigation (yet)). And since planned fires can avoid environmentally sensitive area, be placed in areas that will help suppression, and put smoke in the air outside of “smoke season,” it seems logical to try to increase these. So what forces work against that?

In terms of forces that work against PB, MT and (to a lesser extent) WFU:

– Funding
– Air quality concerns and regulatory framework (does not reflect that PB will make for less fire season smoke)
– Fear of prescribed fires getting out of control/safety (e.g. state of Colorado stopped PB for a couple of
years)
– Litigation, “bulletproofing” documents and associated related work

It seems to me that litigation is not “the problem,” but it certainly contributes to slowing down and stopping projects that lead to fuel treatment, and is one of many contributing factors. Litigation is particularly interesting because, in contrast to public meetings and comments, and appeals or objections, there is no timeframe. So we can imagine some tweaks that would speed up the ultimate resolution without messing with the legal fundamentals.

If we are to move to an “all of the above” strategy, we need to be able to openly talk about what factors would need to change to “get more fire on the landscape,” as so many have said is a desirable goal. Environmental protection, avoiding prescribed burns that turn into wildfires, and so on, all these are good things with good people representing those interests.

In your opinion:
What other forces are out there working against “more fire on the landscape?”

How can we all work together better to get more fire on the landscape?

Success Story for “All of the Above”- Post Blow Down Actions in Boundary Waters

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Severe blowdown in the Boundary Water Canoe Area Wilderness and adjacent areas.

It might be illustrative (and encouraging!) to look at landscape scale fuel treatment strategies that did work- when all the forces are aligned- and what it takes to get things done and the effects. It’s also interesting to take the discussion (with the same elements, prescribed fire, mechanical fuel treatments, wildfires) away from the western US. Oh, and this one has Wilderness to add to the complexity.

Let’s look at a success for an All of the Above Strategy and how it happened. Remember 1999 and the 500,000 acres blowdown event that occurred in Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness?

The obstacles to preparing and planning for the fire seasons to come were formidable. First, they needed to develop an entirely different set of suppression responses. The sheer scale of downed timber made it difficult to move around in the blow-down. This created conditions that negated the effectiveness of most direct attack strategies. The fire management personnel had to develop a set of ‘check and hold’ techniques. Also, the potential size of a blaze and the threat it could pose to communities and lands outside the forest meant that emergency response would
involve local, State, and federal resources. Extensive planning and coordination was required.

Second, the Forest needed to implement large-scale, landscape level fuel treatments and they needed to do it as quick as possible. This was made more difficult by the fact that most of the blow-down was in the nation’s most popular Wilderness area with a local economy dependent on uninterrupted access to the backcountry. There would have to be new levels of cooperation and communication established with the
local communities that would be the most impacted by the fuel treatments.

The fuel loading was beyond the experience of the land managers and fire personnel on the Superior; and they needed a quick upgrade in skills and training to do able to do the large-scale fuel treatments, primarily large acreage prescribed burns. Again, they had to develop interagency and public/private partnerships that were only loosely organized at the time of the blow-down.

The Forest quickly requested and received alternative NEPA procedures from the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) in the White House allowing expedited salvage logging, mechanical fuel treatment, and prescribed fire in the area around the Gunflint Corridor. This allowed the land
management staff to get a quick jump on the work that needed to be done. The National Forest staff made a conscious effort not to short-circuit any of the regular public involvement procedures. They held tours. They conducted pubic meetings. And, they established a monitoring board to oversee the fuel reduction efforts. But, most importantly, they got to work.

Here’s a description of how it worked and the results in the Cavity Lake Fire in Advances in Fire Practice.
Here’s the a fuel treatment effectiveness report.

Here’s a couple of possible observations of why things worked so well:

(1) Alignment among federal agencies (and state and local)
(2) Sense of urgency
(3) Budget
(4)”Leadership” (this is in quotes because it’s a bit fuzzy wuzzy for me, would like to understand more about what this means and how it plays out).
(5) Focus (a bit like fire suppression, a clear sense of priorities)

I’d be very interested to hear from people who participated in this project and their views.

Watershed, Wildfires and BMP’s – Montana

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Continuing improvements in harvesting equipment have facilitated industry’s ability to meet or exceed the guidelines of Montana’s Best Management Practices. (from Exec Summary of 2016 BMP Report Montana

2nd Law said a while back here “Logging on the other hand, is much more likely (than wildfires) to harm watersheds, especially commercial logging that requires dragging logs and maintaining a road system.” At first when I read his comment, I thought “I wonder why he/she thinks so differently than Denver Water, Santa Fe and Flagstaff about the relative risks?”

I think sometimes the more legally trained/inclined and the more ground resource trained/ inclined have a difference in how we think about things and how we talk about things. I wrote about this before in 2010 here (concrete v. abstract thinkers).. do we go into different lines of work because we think this way, or do we think this way because of the line of work we’re in?) but the above comment reminded me of this difference. (For older FS people, when I worked in RPA, my colleague Susan Mockenhaupt called interactions between Jim Caplan and Mark Reimers, “Thoreau meets Perot”).

For those who think like me, 2nd’s statement is the very beginning of a discussion.
What do you mean exactly by “logging?” Is that what we would call “tree-cutting and piling for burning” or “removal of logs via road systems” “removal of logs by helicopter”? Because we could see all those having different potential impacts on watersheds. But 2nd did specify “dragging logs” and “maintaining a road system” (why would you need to do that compared to temp roads?).

Then my next thought would be:
“wouldn’t that depend on … how much risk to the watershed, which would depend on soil characteristics, steepness of slopes, amount and nature of fuels, and so on…frequency of fires and that depends on…”

To the extreme, that would be why, Asheville’s watershed risks would be different from Santa Fe’s. And of course, wouldn’t that depend on BMP’s how they’re designed, whether they’re used, and how well they work?

So I looked around and found this 2016 report summary for monitoring Montana’s BMPs, since Montana seems to be the site of much watershed controversy compared to the other states we’ve looked at.

From the full report for 2016 here, pp 37-38


Evaluate the general effectiveness of BMPs in protecting soil and water resources.

Conclusions drawn from the field review results since the 2000 review cycle inclusive are very straightforward and consistent; when BMPs are applied correctly, they are very effective in protecting soil and water resources. This combined with the efforts of many loggers, landowners, agencies, and
mills to go above and beyond the standards to minimize sediments has kept overall results high and has 38 brought real improvements on the ground, where it counts. When teams review a site they don’t just look at the actual BMP. They look at whatever the BMP was designed to protect as well. Is there silt entering the stream? Are roads rutted beyond typical usage patterns? And so forth. The idea is to look at all aspects of any particular BMP and see if it is working and if not why not. Teams note if it is a fault of the operation, outside factors, or of the BMP itself. The BMP Working Group reviews the combined results and determines if any changes to the BMPs themselves need to be made.

It seems to me that the choice of a) fuels treatment including mechanical treatments vs. b) accepting wildfire impacts is very much a function of the soil, water, vegetation, and weather conditions, plus the design of the treatment, including effectiveness of mitigation measures such as BMP’s in a specific watershed. Now, you can argue that Montana’s checking process is not an accurate representation of what happens on the ground, but that is a very different convo at a very different scale, (with different people being expert).

“Managers accomplish much with fire”

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Amongst all the whining and ranting about how the Forest Service coulda/shoulda stopped all of this summer’s fires, there is this letter to the Missoulian (Missoulian’s title above), which I’ll reprint in total:

Activity on the controlled burn of the Bitterroot Range is continuing to be successful. The reports show where they are building the containment lines on the southeast edge of the control burn area. They have burned the area past Florence and into the Sweeney Creek and down to Bass Creek with extended blackened lines planned almost all the way to Kootenai Creek.

The incident management spokesman said they want to put the “hook” just on the edge of the old Kootenai Creek burn so they can stop the southernmost end of the fire there. In other words, they have got the area that they want to burn up surrounded by controlled burned areas almost all the way around this end of the Bitterroot Range.

 You can see by the map that the fire is going just almost as planned in that it has completely burned off all the forest up to Highway 12 and now it is heading south past Florence and just has to burn up the center section from the bottom foothills to the top of the Bitterroot Range.

Great work, incident managers. You have accomplished a great deal with this “lightning-initiated” fire.

Do you think this is serious or serious sarcasm?  (I don’t know anything about the author.)  It is pretty much the way the incident reps have described what they are doing to manage a wilderness fire on the edge of subdivisions.  They are not sending troops in to flail at the fire, but fire-proofing the boundary and letting it burn itself out in the interior.  Shouldn’t property values go up all along the forest boundary knowing the fire risk has now been hugely reduced?  (No NEPA!)

Why We Disagree About Fuel Treatments: VIII. Need For Change: Embracing Prescribed Fire

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We’ve talked about people who are doing fuel treatments successfully (the watershed examples here and here). But in some parts of the country, as we will see in future posts, it is really really difficult to do, for a variety of reasons we’ll explore. As folks have described to me some of the difficulties, I’ve asked them “why don’t we just give up with prescribed burning and vegetation treatments? and stick to Firewise + Suppression alone?”. It’s so… hard…

The Forest Service says they want to put more fire on the landscape, but they are not aligned (in at least some areas) to produce those results, other than through WFU. Perhaps EPA is not aligned to produce those results, and so on. As I’ve asked fire scientists, they tend to say things like:

1. You are thereby putting all the pressure on suppression folks, and not giving them areas that can help them. You are removing a key tool from their toolkit.

2. Wildfires can have negative impacts on infrastructure, species, watersheds, people and so on, and..

3. Controlled burns can produce reduction in fuels, plus conditions things for fire-dependent species with fewer (different) risks.

Here’s how Washington Prescribed Fire Council put it:

Rediscover Prescribed Fire

Prescribed fire is the planned, professional application of fire in the right place, at the right time. It is a safe, effective process that has been sidelined for the last 100 years as we suppressed wildfire on a state and national level.

Fire suppression was intended to keep people safer and industry thriving, but over time, has actually resulted in the reverse: unprecedented forest density, stockpiled fuels, and diseased, degraded forests that are more likely to burn hot, fast and out of control. Recent wildfires have been especially devastating for Washington: lost lives, lost homes, shuttered businesses, millions and millions spent.

There has to be a better way, and there is. It’s time to embrace prescribed fire.

Here’s Calfire’s comprehensive list again:

Management objectives:

Reduction of conflagration fires.
Optimization of soil and water productivity.
Protection and improvement of intrinsic floral and faunal values.
Sub-Goals:

Reduce the number and intensity of large, damaging wildfires with corresponding savings of suppression costs.
Increase public safety.
Increase water quantity and maintain water quality from managed watersheds.
Decrease the potential for damage from flooding and siltation.
Protect and improve soil productivity, and decrease erosion over the long term.
Improve wildlife and fisheries habitat.
Improve oak woodlands through fire management and regeneration.
Establish and maintain desired plant communities.
Propagate rare or endangered species of plants, which are fire dependent.
Improve air quality over the long term.
Improve forage and browse for livestock.
Increase opportunities for recreation and improve scenic vistas.
Decrease the risk to firefighters and other responders during wildland fires.
Provide training opportunities for personnel in incident organization, operations, fire behavior, firing methods and effects of weather influences.
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So before we go on, for the reasons outlined here (and other reasons you might add or rephrase) do you agree that it is important to increase (embrace) prescribed burning? Why or why not?

Fire Map Questions

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Last night this graphic showed up on the national news

But of large incidents, this is what we get from NIFC.. here.

Could the difference be that the news story showed all fires, and the other only large fires? But then where on the NIFC website is the “all-fire” map? (Note that the source of that news graphic is also NIFC). Perhaps one of our readers can help?

You can see why a person in central Colorado would be curious about this…