Fire and Fuels

Payson Roundup: 4FRI Contract Bombshell

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This blog has had numerous posts, debates and discussions about the Four Forest Restoration (4FRI) in Arizona, including this article, “Is the US Forest Service killing the last best chance to save the Southwest’s forests?”

Well, the latest development via the in-depth reporting of Pete Aleshire with the Payson Roundup in an article yesterday titled, “Forest Contract Bombshell.” Below are extensive snips from that article:  [Note: emphasis added – mk]

Amid fresh furor, the U.S. Forest Service is considering letting a troubled timber company transfer the biggest forest restoration project in history.

The Forest Service announced on Monday that it has received a request from Pioneer Forest Products to transfer the 10-year, Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4FRI) contract to thin 300,000 acres in Northern Arizona to another, unnamed company.

“We are in the process of reviewing the application,” said Cathie Schmidtlin, media officer for the Southwest Region of the U.S. Forest Service, “to determine whether the transfer of assets is in the best interest of the government. If we determine it is not, the contract would stay with Pioneer. If it is determined to be in the best interest of the government, then the contract liability would transfer to the new owner, who would be contractually obligated to carry out the terms and conditions of the 4FRI contract.”….

At least one of the key groups that helped develop the 4FRI plan immediately responded to the announcement by calling for an inspector general’s investigation of the “potential irregularities” in the award of the contract.

“Many of us saw this one coming right from the start. Pioneer’s business plan read like a fantasy novel,” said Todd Schulke, with the Center for Biological Diversity, which helped develop 4FRI in collaboration with representatives of the timber industry, forest health researchers and local officials like Gila County Supervisor Tommie Martin. “But the Forest Service chose Pioneer despite having more realistic options. Either Pioneer misled the agency about its financial viability or the Forest Service chose to look the other way when there were serious questions. Why?”

Gila County Supervisor Tommie Martin said, “this could be the best thing that has happened to 4FRI — or it could be abysmal business as usual. Anyone who has the financial backing to buy this contract, the willingness to ‘take on’ the whole social functioning/disfunctioning that has grown around it and the desire to fulfill it definitely has my attention … and my respect if they can actually pull it off.”….

The Forest Service awarded the contract to Pioneer more than a year ago. The contract originally required Pioneer to thin about 15,000 acres in 2013 and 30,000 acres annually after that. The plan called for feeding those small-diameter trees into new mills in Winslow to produce biodiesel fuel and a type of “finger-jointed” furniture.

Several months ago, the Forest Service modified the terms the contract so that Pioneer only had to thin 1,000 acres in the next 18 months, amid reports that the company was having trouble getting financing for its proposed mills in Winslow.

The Forest Service statement released on Monday said “we cannot disclose the names of the potential new owner as this information is confidential while the proposed agreement is under review. The first task order of the contract, the Ranch task order located on the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests is progressing satisfactorily and expected to be completed ahead of schedule.”…..

The stakeholders generally expected Berlioux Arizona Forest Restoration Products (AZFRP) to win the bid for the contract, since he had helped develop the approach behind 4FRI.

Instead, the Forest Service’s contract review office in Albuquerque awarded the contract to Pioneer Forest Products. One of the principals in the company was Marlin Johnston, who was a longtime Forest Service official who formerly ran the agency’s regional timber harvest office. In that post, he battled demands of environmentalists that the Forest Service quit cutting the remaining old-growth, fire-resistant trees.

Supporters of the 4FRI approach, like Supervisor Martin, questioned the award of the contract to Pioneer. She noted that Berlioux had not only offered to pay more money to the Forest Service for the contract, but had also agreed to monitor whether the thinning projects had the intended effects on tree growth, fire patterns and wildlife.

Moreover, Martin and others questioned Pioneer’s plan to compete with overseas markets in making finger-jointed furniture and use branches and slash to make diesel fuel, although previous efforts had failed.

By contrast, Berlioux proposed using the trees to make Oriented Strand Board — a sort of high-tech plywood that currently represents a $2 billion industry. Berlioux ran Europe’s first OSB factory.

Moreover, Pioneer principal owner Herman Hauck, 84, hasn’t operated a timber company or mill since Hauck Mill Work Company went bankrupt in 1969, according to an investigation by freelance writer and radio reporter Claudine LoMonaco, published in The Santa Fe Reporter, an alternative weekly. She had prepared a story on Pioneer’s dubious background for the public radio station in Flagstaff, but station officials killed the story.

The Forest Service contracting office declined to release many key details of Pioneer’s proposal and has never explained why it awarded the contract to the company that offered to pay the least.

Forest Service officials on Monday remained tight-lipped. In an e-mail to the Roundup accompanying the release Schmidlin said “this is all the information I’m able to provide at this time. The Forest Service will gladly share additional information in the near future, when the review process is completed. I don’t know how long the process will take.”

The swirl of questions about the contracts have forced the very people who developed the 4FRI approach to become increasingly vocal critics of the Forest Service’s implementation.

Martin, in an e-mail exchange on Monday, said she hopes the Forest Service will now seek expert, outside help. “The FS track record on the business side of this contract conversation has been so poor that unless they get ‘outside’ help evaluating the situation, the proposal and bringing business science to bear  — I’m skeptical of the outcome … even knowing that a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while!”

Moreover, she said “for me there is still the whole social agreement concerning big tree/old tree retention that was agreed upon by the counties, enviros, industry and others that the FS have completely thrown out the window and claim that us wanting to leave them all ‘is not good science.’ Nonsense!”

She said old-growth trees constitute just 3 percent of the trees in the ponderosa pine forest of Northern Arizona, even though the Forest Service management plan calls for increasing that tally to 20 percent. “For instance, the 33,000-acre Rim Lakes thinning portion of the 4FRI proposal by Heber has only an average less than one old tree per acre to start with!”

She said she hopes the Forest Service will now agree to leave virtually all of the trees larger than 16 inches in diameter. “We’re asking that they leave ALL the big/old trees (with few exceptions) — get rid of all the dog hair thickets and get ahead of the fire danger curve — and then go back to the drawing board and see if there needs to be more mosaic, more age/structure classifications, etc. within the treated area. They claim their science shows restoration occurs faster/better with some of the old growth gone — again I say nonsense! First let them show me where they have restored a forest — ANYWHERE — and then we’ll talk about it.”

Schulke made the same point. The Center for Biological Diversity has battled the Forest Service for years attempting to prevent the harvest of old-growth trees in an effort to save endangered, old-growth dependent species like the Mexican spotted owl and the Northern goshawk. But the group promised to go to court to support 4FRI if the Forest Service agreed to leave the remaining old-growth trees.

“Ignoring the collaborative agreement was an outright breach of the social license that enabled 4FRI in the first place,” said Schulke. “Large trees are not only critically important to the survival of an array of endangered and threatened species, they’re also more fire resistant — they help to reduce the risk of catastrophic fires. We fully support 4FRI. But the Forest Service bungling has put communities at risk from the fire unnecessarily. It’s time to demand action.”

Potpourri of Recent Wildfire & Fuel Reduction Studies

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(The following information was written and provided to me by George Wuerthner, author of Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy. – mk)

This study, Wildfire and Fuel Treatment Effects on Forest Carbon Dynamics in the Western United States, while focused on carbon losses and storage in forests, makes the point about probability – i.e. what is the likelihood of any fire actually interacting with fuel reductions? We can’t treat entire forests or even a significant portion of them due to cost and the undesirable impacts associated with logging, so it’s reasonable to ask the question as to whether there is a good chance as to whether a fire will actually burn through fuel reduction treated areas.

In other words since we can’t predict where a fire will occur, we can’t effectively treat forests with fuel reductions – even if they worked well – which they often don’t for a host of reasons including the fact that fuel reductions lose effectiveness over time.

We are spending a lot of federal dollars trying to treat forests to reduce fire spread and severity when the chances or probability that a high severity fire will actually interact with a treated forest is low. This, of course, again makes the case that treatments, if they are done at all, should be strategic and focused on lands near communities and other targeted areas of importance.

Abstract
Sequestration of carbon (C) in forests has the potential to mitigate the effects of climate change by offsetting future emissions of greenhouse gases. However, in dry temperate forests, wildfire is a natural disturbance agent with the potential to release large fluxes of C into the atmosphere. Climate-driven increases in wildfire extent and severity are expected to increase the risks of reversal to C stores and affect the potential of dry forests to sequester C. In the western United States, fuel treatments that successfully reduce surface fuels in dry forests can mitigate the spread and severity of wildfire, while reducing both tree mortality and emissions from wildfire. However, heterogeneous burn environments, site-specific variability in post-fire ecosystem response, and uncertainty in future fire frequency and extent complicate assessments of long-term (decades to centuries) C dynamics across large landscapes. Results of studies on the effects of fuel treatments and wildfires on long-term C retention across large landscapes are limited and equivocal. Stand-scale studies, empirical and modeled, describe a wide range of total treatment costs (12–116 Mg C ha−1) and reductions in wildfire emissions between treated and untreated stands (1–40 Mg C ha−1). Conclusions suggest the direction (source, sink) and magnitude of net C effects from fuel treatments are similarly variable (−33 Mg C ha−1 to +3 Mg C ha−1). Studies at large spatial and temporal scales suggest that there is a low likelihood of high-severity wildfire events interacting with treated forests, negating any expected C benefit from fuels reduction. The frequency, extent, and severity of wildfire are expected to increase as a result of changing climate, and additional information on C response to management and disturbance scenarios is needed improve the accuracy and usefulness of assessments of fuel treatment and wildfire effects on C dynamics.

Another long term study – this one in the Siskiyou Mountains of Oregon – demonstrates that fires are episodic and tightly bound with climate. It also points out that sediment loads increased dramatically after logging began–that has no previous analogue in history.

This paper documents how changing climatic conditions impact fire regimes and frequency. There were long periods without fires as reported in other recent studies and then periodic fire decades as well. In general this paper would support the notion that juniper and pinyon woodlands were not characterized by  “frequent fire/low intensity” fire regimes.

More Colt Summit Than You Can Possibly Imagine

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This is a pain in the patootie, but I noticed that we had run out of “replies” in our previous discussion of why Matthew is underpaid.
So to give him a chance to reply (and if we run out of other Colt Summit space)
Below is my comment # 16 restated so folks can respond. Here it is in its place in the prior discussion.

Your comment is very interesting. I said you were underpaid compared to these other folks. To which your answer was that they are underpaid compared to Plum Creek or DOJ.

But is Plum Creek or DOJ actually relevant in this case? Do you really think that someone is making a lot of bucks off 600 acres of commercial thinning?

I used WELC and thought it was relevant, because they claimed on their website that they had given their services to support FOWS and AWR on the Colt Summit project and claimed “Victory.”

Now suppose there was a group called “Friends of the Wild Collaboratives” who wanted to support Colt Summit. But they don’t have access to WELC or other “free” groups that donate their services. Yet FWC, our group of an equal number of equally legitimate citizens, compared to FOWS or AWR, does not have a seat at the table, because they can’t afford a lawyer.

That’s why WELC is relevant.

As to NRDC, I don’t see the relevant world of “highly paid” versus “no lawyers” simply related to timber sales.
I’m sure others could help, but a simple Google search on NRDC forest service cases yielded this project (no, not a timber sale, but still a project) http://www.law360.com/articles/75487/nrdc-sues-forest-service-over-rockies-gas-project

PS Matthew, in my culture it’s a compliment to say you are underpaid. Just sayin’

Wuerthner: Revisiting Fire History Studies

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(The following piece was written by George Wuerthner, an ecologist, professional photographer and writer who has published over 30 books, including Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy. – mk)

One of the cornerstones of current forest policy is the assumption that western forests are outside of their “normal” density and appearance or what is termed “historic variability” due a hundred years of mismanagement that included logging of old growth, fire suppression, and livestock grazing. This idea has been used to justify logging public lands to “restore” forests to their pre-management era appearance and resiliency. Due to this past mismanagement we are told that forests are “overgrown” “decadent” and ready to burn.

Not to dismiss effects of the kind of management that largely continues unabated today, including on-going logging, grazing and fire suppression, but whether the current forest stand condition is that far from conditions that have occurred infrequently in the past is a matter of increasing debate.  This is especially important because public land management agencies feel the pressure to DO something beyond waiting for nature to do what it always does to “restore” forest conditions.

Timber harvesting is no longer done just to provide timber companies with profits or consumers with wood. Now lumber companies are involved in a much more noble enterprise—they are logging the trees to “restore” the presumed forest “health.”

The scientific basis for “restoration” is based to a large extent on fire scar studies. These studies suggest that the drier forests composed of lower elevation ponderosa pine and Douglas fir burned frequently and thus kept density low with “park-like” open stands of mostly larger trees. Keep in mind the discussion is focused on lower elevation forests since higher elevation forests like lodgepole pine, fir and spruce are characterized by much longer fire intervals, which have not experienced fuel buildups to any significant degree due to fire suppression, grazing, or timber harvesting.

So we often hear how such low elevation dry forests burned regularly at frequent intervals in “light, cool” blazes that removed the litter and killed the small trees, but did little harm to the larger trees.

Like a lot of myths, there is some truth to this generalization, and no doubt in some areas this characterization is accurate. But more recent studies using different methods have started to question this well-established story-line. These studies are finding that the intervals between fires is much longer than previously suspected, and that stand-replacement blazes (where most of the trees are killed) were likely common even in the lower elevation dry forests.

PROBLEMS WITH FIRE SCAR METHODS
The major method for determining the fire history of an area is to find trees with scars created by fires. If the tree is not killed by the blaze, it will develop a scar that can be counted in the tree rings. This record of past fires is then used to determine the “fire rotation” or the time it takes to burn an area equivalent to one’s study area.

There are four major flaws associated with traditional fire scar studies. These methodological flaws contribute to a bias toward shorter fire rotations—in other words, they tend to overstate the effect of fire suppression on forests because it appears that we are seeing more years between successive fires than we did in the past. If the fire rotation were judged to be longer, however, then much of what is being characterized as unhealthy forest may actually be perfectly normal and healthy.

The first flaw is targeted sampling. A researcher walks through the forest looking for areas with an abundance of fire scarred trees. The trees in this area are then sampled and used to determine the fire history for the area.  In the 1930s the bank robber Willy Sutton was asked why he robbed banks. Sutton is reputed to have replied with the self evident “because that is where the money is.” In a sense that is how fire researchers have gathered their data on fires—they sample in places with a lot of fire scars.

The problem with targeted sampling is that it’s non random. It’s like going into a brewery to poll people about whether they like beer. Places with an abundance of fire scars tend to have naturally low fuel loadings and frequent fires. But these sites may not be representative of the surrounding landscape such as north facing slopes or valley bottoms which may be wetter or have higher productivity and, thus, longer intervals between blazes. In fact, the reason non-sampled areas lack significant numbers of fire scarred trees is often because all trees were killed in a stand-replacement fire, but the omission of such areas from fire history studies leads to the false conclusion that stand-replacement blazes are unusual in dry low-elevation forests.

The second flaw is composite fire scars. Most fire studies add up all the fire scars recorded into a “composite” timeline. The problem with this technique is that the more scars you find and count over bigger and bigger areas, the shorter the fire interval becomes and the more risky your assumption that any fire recorded by one tree burned throughout the entire study area, even though some trees didn’t scar in the fire event. Some fire researchers now try to support this assumption by only including fire scars recorded the same year on 3 or more trees, but the trees do not have to be positioned throughout the study area, so even this will not eliminate the upward bias in frequency of fire in a given study area.

In other words, your composite may suggest a fire burned within your study area once every 5 years or whatever, but if most of these blazes burned only a few trees, then it is not accurate to say that the fire burned the entire area.  How frequent are fires that burn most or all of a large study area? These larger blazes may be far less frequent and take 100 years to burn most or all of the study area. Since the critical issue for the forest is the occurrence of the occasional blaze that burns most, if not all, of the entire study area, the fire rotation for those fires in such an area may be closer to 100 years, not the 5 years you get if you include even the tiny 1-acre fires.

The third flaw is an emphasis on the AVERAGE fire interval rather than the DISTRIBUTION of fire intervals. If you read fire studies carefully they will usually note the longest interval without any recorded fire. Often this is a significant period of many decades. Why is this important? Because the average person hears that there were fires, ON AVERAGE, every 5 years and assumes that fires operate like clocks on a regular schedule. In reality, fires burn in episodic groups usually dictated by periodic droughts that are controlled by shifts in offshore currents like the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, thus tend to be grouped together in certain drought prone decades.  The DISTRIBUTION of a fire interval shows clearly that there are always relatively long periods with little fire, even though the AVERAGE fire return interval might be 5 years.

Why is it important that we consider historic distributions of fire intervals rather than average fire intervals? Because the common assumption is that if the fire interval averages 5 years, fires would keep tree density low and reduce fuel build up. However, if it is also typical that there are also extremely long fire intervals of 80 years or more associated with the DISTRIBUTION of fire intervals, then there may not be an “abnormal” build up of fuel or increase in tree density, and nothing is out of the ordinary at all.

Finally the fourth major flaw is that traditional fire-scar studies have not been map based.  Why is a map of the distribution of trees with scars important?  It is only through such mapping that one can determine whether a scarred tree was in the middle of an extensive low-severity fire or at the edge of a high-severity patch.  One must look at the age distribution of the surrounding trees to gain real insight into the kind of fire that the scarred tree recorded.  This is what the more progressive fire ecologists are beginning to do, and they are finding that many fires in dry forest types are severe fires that burn relatively small areas within a larger fire perimeter, just like ALL fire we see burning in the same forest locations today.

Due to these flaws and errors in interpretation, many fire scar histories (but not all) misrepresent the fire regime associated with an area. If the period between fires was occasionally very long, then our forests may not be far out of their historic variability and may be well within that range of variation. If so, they do not require “restoration” because they are not out of balance.

The other major justification for logging is to reduce the chance that a community might be threatened but, as embarrassing as the facts are, there is no evidence that logging conducted miles from a town has anything at all to do with the probability that the nearest houses burn.

The fact that we are seeing more and larger fires fits perfectly with the pattern that is expected under current climatic conditions. In other words, if you have drier weather conditions, with high temperatures, low humidity and high winds, you will get more fires. You will get larger fires.

The prevailing climatic conditions are driving most of the apparent change in fire frequency and severity. For instance, the Southwest is in the grips of a drought that hasn’t been seen in five hundred years. Not surprisingly, there are fires now burning across the region bigger and more intense than any seen in the past.  However, Paleo fire studies confirm that such large fires may not be abnormal when compared to the fires that burned similar severe droughts occurred in the past centuries.

MANAGE FOR ECOLOGICAL PROCESS NOT SOME HISTORIC STAND STRUCTURE
Finally there is too much emphasis on “restoring” stand structure (in other words the presumed appearance) of forests rather than allowing natural ecological processes to occur on the landscape. It is more critical to accept and promote natural processes like beetle outbreaks, wildfires (including stand replacement blazes), and other natural ecological agents than to try to create some presumed historic forest structure that never existed in a steady state (and at taxpayer expense)! If natural ecological processes are allowed to occur on our public lands, then the forest will sort out the kind of appearance and structure that is appropriate for current climatic conditions. Critics will claim that a do-nothing approach outside the WUI will only lead to conversions of our forests to some other vegetation type, but the evidence for widespread type conversions is entirely absent.  Severe fires will restore forest conditions just fine.

All this is not to suggest that all historical reconstructions from fire scar studies are wrong—but it does suggest that most outside the pure ponderosa pine forests of the Southwest (and that’s most conifer forests in the West) are probably biased to some degree. Many of the logging proposals in the West are likely based on flawed assumptions about fire ecology and historic conditions.  And before any “restoration” logging is accepted as necessarily, the underlying assumptions should be carefully evaluated to make sure they are not skewed towards fire rotations that do not characterize the area accurately.

Defensible Space in Wildfire-Prone Areas Can Save Lives — So Why Isn’t it the Norm? by Char Miller

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Here’s one by Char Miller..Below is an excerpt.

Those living in the subdivisions locked within Arizona’s flammable chaparral shrublands are not alone in having been slow to make their homes more defensible. To get at why this might be so, the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station conducted a careful survey of the fire prevention attitudes and actions of private landowners in the Cascades and Blue Mountains of Oregon.

The impetus for this survey is smartly laid out: “Because fire as a natural process operates across ownership boundaries, the Forest Service is taking an all-lands approach to forest management, and is making an effort to cooperate with other landowners across landscapes,” notes Susan Charnley, an environmental anthropologist working for the research station. “There’s very little information about how family forest owners manage their land for fire. We need to learn about how they’re managing their land for the same risks we face as an agency, to see what we might do differently to better address those risks.”

What Charnley and her colleague Paige Fischer discovered is that those whose properties abutted national forest lands and who perceived that there was a clear fire risk in the high hazardous fuel loads on these public lands, tended to be more proactive about making their properties less fire prone. They were also a lot more likely to act if their primary residence was on these forested acres than if theirs was a second home — eight times more likely, in fact.

This a key finding, as vacation homes make up a goodly number of the residences being slotted into fire zones of all kinds, exacerbating firefighters’ abilities to protect lives and property. “Nationwide, the trend has been toward a booming number of nonindustrial private owners, with a shrinking average parcel size,” observes John Bliss, the Starker Chair in Private and Family Forestry at Oregon State University. “Million-dollar homes are being built in the middle of harvested timberland without firebreaks. Many new owners who built their dream cabins live in an urban area and have no background in forest management, let alone wildfire prevention or fireproofing. When wildfires come through, these houses are sources of ignition and catastrophic loss.”

Just so folks remember that all forces of government need to be working together in the fuels reduction effort.. here’s another note from our county that shut down its slash disposal site.

“Fighting Back Fire” from the Denver Post

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From CoreLogic Study
From CoreLogic Study

As I’ve said, I never learned how to do professional media analysis. Still I think it’s worth comparing the Rolodex Factor of the Denver Post story here to that of the NPR story below. These people are livin’ it, rather than modelin’ it. I give Bruce a 9.5/10 for this story.

Below is an excerpt:

Community fireproofing avoids the core issue of building in burn zones and, fire chiefs warn, is powerless against wind-driven super fires, such as the High Park, Waldo Canyon and Black Forest fires that destroyed more than 1,000 homes this year and last.

Yet proponents contend that better community self-protection will minimize destruction.

“If it is a big crowning fire, we know what could happen. But if it is a moderate fire, we will have a fair chance of surviving,” said retiree Jim Lee, 69, who installed a rooftop sprinkler on his house in the woods near Frisco.

Lee also ripped cedar panels off the house and replaced them with nonflammable cement siding and switched roofing to fire-resistant shingles. He cleared a firebreak around the house, and got a special permit to thin dead pines 100 feet into the adjacent national forest.

Lake Dillon Fire Rescue District Deputy Chief Jeff Berino called Lee’s home “incredibly well-defended” — the gold standard as Summit County girds against wildfires likely to ignite on 156,000 acres of beetle-killed forest.

Dealing with Colorado’s wildfire problem more aggressively — by banning new building in burn zones — would probably be impossible, state natural resources officials say.

“It’s extremely hard to say to an individual who has bought land in the mountains that they cannot build on it. They may even have a legal right to develop it,” said Colorado Counties Inc. lobbyist Andy Karsian. “Development in the wildland-urban interface is going to happen. The question is how we find that balance between the personal responsibility for living in an area that will have fire and having good regulations.”

Strategies evolving While fireproofing must not substitute for wise planning, it makes sense, said Scott Fitzwilliams, supervisor of the White River National Forest, which spans an area from Meeker to Breckenridge and is plagued by a beetle epidemic.

“More and more of the risk associated with wildland firefighting is in the protection of homes and other structures,” Fitzwilliams said. “When we have these communities built right up against the National Forest boundary, we have a challenge to ensure we can manage or at least try to fight fire in a safe manner.”

and dealing with existing development:

But fireproofing has limits.

Policy debate”We can make the mountains safe by paving them. That’s not why we live in Colorado,” state emergency management director Kevin Klein said. “What level of protection are we going to to be able to afford and still enjoy what makes many people want to live in Colorado? That’s what policymakers are going to debate.”

Klein serves on a state task force charged with recommending state-level action to help deal with building in burn zones.

Beyond fireproofing houses and towns, “we have to look at where we are allowing new development to occur,” said Summit County Commissioner Dan Gibbs, who works as a wildland firefighter. “I don’t want to be voting for new development in areas where I think there’s going to be a major, catastrophic fire.”

Dealing with existing development looms largely unaddressed. Fireproofing tens of thousands of homes in forests could cost homeowners millions. An indoor water sprinkler system or underground cistern can raise house-building costs by more than $10,000.

There seem to be enough problems in Colorado without invoking future climate change.

A 2012 CoreLogic study of 13 Western states for insurers shows that after California and Texas, Colorado has more high-risk homes than any other state. At a time when dense forests and drought lead to high-speed wildfires, the study found 121,249 Colorado homes at very high risk for wildfire damage.

Texas is number 2 with one national forest. Who knew? Here’s a link to the CoreLogic study. Kudos to Bruce for linking to the source of the data.

Colt Summit- The Next Round

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colt summit table

This is one of our favorite projects to follow, for newer readers. One of the reasons is that there is a narrative that you will hear from some “if only the FS worked with collaboratives, then litigation would cease to be a problem.” I think I even heard that in some of the Chief’s testimony before Congress. Colt Summit is a data point that refutes that narrative.

From the current EA (my bold):

In response, members of the Lolo Restoration Committee unanimously agreed Colt Summit was consistent with the 13 principles of the Montana Forest Restoration Committee and the project would accomplish its restoration, monitoring, and adaptive management goals. Members of the Southwestern Crown Collaborative applauded the project for its responsiveness to their strategy for landscape restoration. Support for the project was provided by the Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks and United States Fish and Wildlife Service; agencies responsible for managing the recovery of grizzly bear, Canada lynx, and other wildlife in the project area.

Last week, the next stage of Colt Summit was released. To summarize, the judge wanted more lynx cumulative effects analysis. As far as I can understand it, the claims that the project would hurt lynx were not upheld, but they just didn’t analyze the cumulative impacts the way (at the scale?) the judge thought was best. (other more legally minded folks are welcome to clarify my understanding). The FS provided it, but it wasn’t in the right format. (I don’t think folks are allowed to ask format questions, but I could be wrong; I’d like to hear the FS story of how that misunderstanding happened).

So hopefully now it is in the correct format. Here’s the link to all the analyses. An amazing amount of verbiage for 600 acres of commercial thinning. As Derek would say, this would probably not be a big deal in Wyoming, Colorado, or South Dakota (I don’t know about points west). If I had to generate a hypothesis, it would be that groups in Montana like to sue more, rather than any difference in environmental conditions. I’d be interested in other hypotheses that explain the data, including this data point. Here’s where WELC claims “Victory!”, perhaps a bit early. It does make me curious who funds them and why they pick the projects they do.

It is the July 2013 Supplemental EA here..

The original Environmental Assessment has been supplemented to assure the Court and the public the Forest Service has provided the hard look that is required; more specifically, to characterize past projects or actions the Court found to be lacking in the original Environmental Assessment and project record. In this SEA, the Forest Service describes past, ongoing, and reasonably forseeable actions and characterizes their aggregate effects on lynx. This characterization is provided at the scale of the LAU because the Forest Service prevailed in its selection of the LAU as the appropriate scale to conduct such analysis Friends of the Wild Swan et al v Austin (D. Mont. 2012) (9:11-cv-00125-DWM, Doc. 50, Filed 07/11/12, pp. 22-23 and 40-43). In response to public comment, activities outside of the LAU have also been examined. In addition, portions of the original Environmental Assessment have been modified to provide a more comprehensive discussion of the project in order to support the supplemental analysis for lynx.

I like that the District clarified and improved some other parts of the document based on what they were hearing. They are trying to do a good job at explaining what they are doing.

However, if the judge is happy with this one, the taxpayer paid for all the supplemental analysis because one group decided to sue. Somehow it doesn’t seem …er… just. And no, because the court system is called “justice system” does not change my impression. It seems like lawyers would say it provides “accountability” for the Forest Service, but there doesn’t seem to be much accountability for the watchers of the Forest Service to the citizens.

In my opinion, a certification-like process would do more for accountability across all forests, be more transparent, improve actions done rather than actions as written, and be less costly for the taxpayer.

Vilsack and Jewell Talk About Protecting Reservoirs from Wildfire

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Organic debris and sediment were deposited in Strontia Springs Reservoir, which supplies drinking water to the cities of Denver and Aurora. This debris came from two watersheds (Buffalo Creek and Spring Creek) burned by the 1996 Buffalo Creek Fire. Associated with this debris was an increase in manganese, which increased the chlorine demand of water treated for municipal usage. Photo by John A. Moody
Organic debris and sediment were deposited in Strontia Springs Reservoir, which supplies drinking water to the cities of Denver and Aurora. This debris came from two watersheds (Buffalo Creek and Spring Creek) burned by the 1996 Buffalo Creek Fire. Associated with this debris was an increase in manganese, which increased the chlorine demand of water treated for municipal usage. Photo by John A. Moody

We’ve talked about the WUI quite a bit in terms of fuel treatments, and I know some of you want to talk about other fire effects. This story in the Denver Post this morning highlights tree thinning and prescribed burning around reservoirs.

Below are some excerpts:

— Top U.S. environmental officials Friday began a push to protect the nation’s federally run water-supply reservoirs against wildfires.

The fear is that worsening wildfires will trigger erosion that damages dams, canals and pipelines, and shrinks water storage, ultimately driving up water costs for ratepayers.

“Climate change is upon us, our ecosystems are changing and it’s up to us to work collaboratively,” Interior Secretary Sally Jewell told state, federal and local participants before signing a teamwork agreement at Horsetooth Reservoir, west of Fort Collins, an area where 11 wildfires since 2010 have unleashed sediment that threatens to clog water facilities.

Full funding has not been secured for work to protect 43 Bureau of Reclamation reservoirs in the West. But teamwork deals linking federal agencies, state foresters and water providers are enabling six startup tree-thinning and prescribed-burn projects in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana and Washington.

“When you’ve got a situation where there’s not enough money to go around, you have to pick your highest priorities,” Jewell said in an interview before the signing. “Obviously, protecting lives and property is important. But watersheds are really important. And I don’t think they’ve been on the radar to the same extent.”

Major wildfires in 1996 and 2002 burned 150,000 acres of Denver’s forested watershed and unleashed an estimated 1 million cubic yards of sediment into Strontia reservoir. Denver Water utility managers say they’ve spent $45 million trying to deal with wildfire erosion, including $17 million for dredging Strontia, a job still not done

I like this quote from Secretary Jewell:

Tree-thinning and prescribed burns around federal reservoirs — before anticipated wildfires hit — can reduce fires’ severity and minimize downstream damage from erosion, Jewell said. “If we get ahead of this, you will be spending less money.”

This statement by Vilsack is particularly interesting..

Changing how fire suppression is funded could help free funds for tree-thinning, prescribed fires and restoration work at federal reservoirs, he said without providing details. “This is about reducing the risk of contamination — sediment and ash getting into the water supply — which increases the cost of treating the water and the availability and the quality of water.”

I think folks tried to change how fire suppression if funded.. the FLAME Act, which didn’t work so well. I wonder what ideas the Secretary has?

If tree thinning is important, than why would you cut the budget from last year for doing this by 37%? Maybe USDI thinks differently and didn’t cut their as much?

For the Forest Service, one story would be that the broader Wildland Fire line item had to average out to 5% for sequestration. Another would be OMB doesn’t believe that thinning treatments work. It’s all very confusing.

For me.. if Secretary Jewell says thinning is important in words, then it should be translated into the most powerful policy document there is.. the budget, for all agencies involved. I guess reservoirs could be good to protect, towns not so much; but as a veteran of Colorado Roadless, I can tell you that some folks who don’t want people living in the woods are not really fond of reservoirs either.

Addendum.. there’s also an AP story in the Idaho Statesman here and here’s a press release.

Here’s some information on the Forest to Faucets partnership with Denver Water, which was spearheaded by folks in the Rocky Mountain Region of the Forest Service, pre-Vilsack.

Let’s Analyze the NPR Story “Fires Will Worsen”

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I found this story interesting on all kinds of levels. Let’s analyze it. I have never been trained in media analysis so here goes, hopefully someone on the blog can add some insight.

ROLODEX FACTOR:

First, I like to look at the “rolodex factor.” Who did they talk to:

Ray Rasker, Headwaters Economics economist. His bio says he has expertise in rural development, and we have talked about the recent report of his previously on this blog.

Elizabeth Reinhardt, Assistant Director, Fire Management. Of these, she is the only one I think is competent to talk about it.

Anthony Westerling, Professor at UC Merced. He is a member of what I would call the “climate modeling industry”. That is his expertise seems to be in models and not in fires as experienced in the physical world.

MODEL THE ROLODEX FACTOR:
Given that Rasker’s group just wrote about “houses in the WUI growing is big problem for fire”, and Westerling is a climate modeler, we can predict “this story will talk about climate as the reason for fires, and people in the WUI.” This story will follow the same trail as the one I posted yesterday here. Uh.. oh.. looking at it it actually sounds like the SAME story. Except in that one Reinhardt is a “fire researcher” (a previous position).

The only mystery is “What will Reinhardt say?” She has been a fire researcher, worked in the climate advisor’s office and now is an AD for Fire Management, in which she will be expected to toe the F&AM line.

WHAT THE STORY SAYS:

Rasker says: In Montana, when it’s just one degree warmer than average, 35 percent more land burns. That costs money.
“The really interesting thing is that when the average summertime temperature is just one degree Fahrenheit warmer, the cost of defending these homes doubles,” he says. Rasker says these numbers are similar in California and Oregon.

This does not sound like an assertion based on data because no one has done the experiment of raising a degree and then watching fires. All it would take is the statement “my colleagues and I have done some modeling and it shows”.. for this to be more honest/em>

He notes that about 84 percent of the private land around national forests is open to development, versus 14 percent of surrounding land that’s already built up with housing developments, resorts and vacation homes.

Given that this is true (it doesn’t match my observations), you would have to understand why, and how that is going to change as the economy comes back. I like that Ray is so confident about the economy, though. Maybe I’ll call my stockbroker. Those predictive economic models have done so well in the past..

Already, the firefighting portion of the Forest Service’s budget is higher than ever. “In 2012 [the share of budget] was over 47 percent,” says David Cleaves, the service’s climate and fire expert. That’s tripled over the past decade or so.

Cleaves says it’s not a crisis now, but “economically, and in a policy sense, you could call it a crisis in the future.” That’s because more money that goes to firefighting means there’s less money available for prevention.

Note that Cleaves didn’t say the last statement. If we use a health analogy, it would be something like “people keep shooting each other and require ER visits, so we need to stop that because it takes money from preventive health programs.” We all know that a budget pot (what is in the same pot) is a policy choice, just as how much money goes into each pot. And suppression and fuels are not the same pot. Anyway, I bet someone has explored the reasons for any tripling of budget for suppression over the past decade. Any reports on this?

Now this is interesting:

Nowadays, the U.S. Forest Service has less money to spend on trimming back or burning undergrowth and trees to prevent bigger fires in the future. Estimates put the area of forest that needs fire prevention work performed on it at over 200 million acres, but the service is only able to treat about 3 million acres a year.

One solution is to let some natural fires burn longer instead of putting them out right away. That gets rid of built-up fuel, and it’s cheaper than mechanically thinning forests or doing prescribed burns. But this tactic isn’t popular with homeowners nearby.

“So many of the places where we have fire are near where people live,” says Reinhardt. “Or, say it’s early in the fire season and you have months of fire season ahead of you, and you just don’t feel like you can take the risk of having a big fire out there in the backcountry.”

It could also be reported that “for mysterious reasons that have been critiqued by a bipartisan group of folks in Congress, the tactic preferred by real life voting homeowners is having its funding reduced by the Obama Administration. They think it’s more cost-effective to have large fires and let them reduce fuels, but those darn people are in the way.” Another thing is that prescribed fire is not so popular with nearby communities. Errr. communities. Remember towns like Idlyllwild are not a part of this story. It is, at this point, framed to be about “homes” and “homeowners.”

Westerling works at the University of California in Merced but he’s been watching the Rocky Mountains a lot. He says spring is coming earlier, and it’s hotter. Many forests there are near their heat and drought limit.

You can’t visit the University of Colorado (or even a Starbuck’s in Boulder) without stumbling over a climate modeler modeling.. the Rocky Mountains. Rolodex again..

And Rasker says there are ethical as well as economic reasons to limit development near forests — the lives of firefighters are at stake.

“It’s a tough thing to see people go in, to have to risk their lives” to defend structures in towns that have been evacuated, he says. “Empty structures.”

Ah.. so we finally get to “towns” and not “homes”. But if we take Ray at his quote, it would then be unethical for firefighters to fight home or office fires if people had been evacuated. But why stop there? It would also be unethical for police to risk their lives in confronting people robbing buildings without people in them…and so on.

Really, it’s kind of a silly quote. Didn’t anyone else notice?
I actually agree that new developments in the backcountry need increased scrutiny. But this story..does not do the issue any kind of justice and leaves out some important things. You could pretty much predict the story by who the author picked to interview. And it’s not clear why they picked whom they did, except for Reinhardt.

Just Move Out of the Woods, Because of Climate Change?

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Idyllwildpanorama This is the town of Idyllwild (Inciweb had no photo links)

I thought, given our discussion here and elsewhere on the framing of the issue as “just move ’em out of the woods”, it was interesting to see, once again, exactly who and what is “in the woods.” Check out this article on the Idyllwild fire:

The communities of Idyllwild, Fern Valley and smaller surrounding communities in the mountains southwest of Palm Springs were under evacuation orders affecting some 2,200 homes and 6,000 residents and visitors, U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman Carol Jandrall.

People were being allowed home long enough to pick up essential items before evacuating as the flames crept over a peak just east of the towns, Jandrall said.

There were 4,100 residences threatened by the fire including homes, hotels, condominiums and cabins, Forest Service spokeswoman Melody Lardner said.

Coincidentally, there was this story on Southern Cal public radio.

I wonder if the Forest Service ever said the below specifically (new fire policy = function of climate change) or this was an interpretation..

Climate change is forcing the US Forest Service to rethink how it fights large wildfires. Global warming has increased the intensity of fires, forcing the USFS to spend more and more of its money fighting them. Now the agency has decided that it should be less aggressive in attacking big blazes, so long as they are not threatening property.

In 1991, the US Forest Service’s spent 13 percent of its budget on fire management. Today, because of climate change, that figure is more than 50 percent, officials say.

The change is visible at the top. Three years ago, the USFS added a chief climate advisor. Agency veteran Dave Cleaves holds the job; he’s been with the Forest Service for more than 20 years. He says forest managers used to consider global warming as a future problem, “but now we’re finding more and more it is an issue of the present and the future.”

Headwaters Economics, a Montana think tank, found that when the temperature is one degree warmer, fires burn on average three times as much terrain. Headwaters economist Roy Rasker said the cost of fighting larger fires could overwhelm local, state and even federal budgets.

The Forest Service already cuts underbrush and thins tree stands to minimize risks. But agency predictions of increasing fire intensity suggest that, even with these tactics, the amount of forestland vulnerable to burning will increase in the years to come, says U.S. Forest Service fire researcher Elizabeth Reinhart.

That reality is changing federal fire management. The Forest Service has been successful over the decades fighting fires with personnel-heavy attacks that aim to shut a blaze down right when it starts. Reinhart and other federal officials say sticking with that strategy is costly, and could overwhelm other necessary work in the forest.

“So in some cases, rather than direct aggressive suppression tactics, we’re able to monitor wildfires to stop its movement in one direction while letting it burn in another,” Reinhart says. “This sets up the landscape to be more resilient to the next wildfire.”

Picture supplied by Larry, below.