American Fire, Tahoe National Forest

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I pilfered this awesome photo off of Facebook. Yet another sobering reason why wildfires aren’t good for humans. Meanwhile, there are an unknown amount of new lightning fires this morning, after a night of intense dry lightning. Also, the same conditions will exist for two more days, with a red flag warning still in effect. Here at home, the morning light is orange, due to other wildfires currently burning. This situation feels really similar to to the 2007 fire season, when many fires burned for more than six weeks. We need forests which survive drought, bark beetles and wildfires.

American-fire

Big Bad Wolves Kill 176 Sheep, Eat 1

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Billie Siddoway, whose brother, J.C. Siddoway, runs sheep near Fogg Hill, posted this warning about the wolf kill Saturday at the trailheads of Pole Canyon and Fourth of July trails.

 

Posted: Monday, August 19, 2013 10:25 am | Updated: 4:38 pm, Mon Aug 19, 2013.

Ken Levy/TVN Staff | 0 comments

U.S. Forest Service officials are asking people to stay out of an area where a large sheep kill was reported over the weekend.

Jay Pence, Teton Basin District ranger, said the sheep kill could attract a lot of people hoping to see predators coming to feed on the carcasses.

Ranchers and others are trying to deal with the situation, and visitors can hamper their activities.

“There are a lot more fun things to look at than dead sheep,” said Pence.

Idaho Wildlife Services confirmed Monday that 176 sheep were killed during a wolf attack near Fogg Hill and the Pole Canyon area early Saturday morning.

The animals belonged to the Siddoway Sheep Company and were grazing in the area about six miles south of Victor, according to a release from Siddoway. The attack, they said, occurred around 1 a.m.

Todd Grimm, director of the Wildlife Services Program, said his office confirmed the depredation Sunday. Many of the animals died from suffocation, since some apparently fell in front of the rest, resulting in a large pile-up.

“This was a rather unique situation,” said Grimm. “Most of the time they don’t pile up like this, but the wolves got them running.”

Only one animal seems to have been eaten in the attack, according to the Siddoway release.

“The sheep are not fenced,” said Billie Siddoway, in an email interview. “They move every few days to a new pasture within a designated area. The sheep are herded and monitored by two full-time herders, four herding dogs and at least four guard dogs.”

Grimm said there is already a “control action” in the area. Since July 3, 12 wolves have been lethally trapped, including nine pups. The goal is to take them all, he said.

“We expect that bears and other scavengers will soon locate the kill site,” said Billie Siddoway.

See the Teton Valley News Aug. 22 for the complete story.

Good Fire, Bad Fire, Costly Fire: Moonlight Fire Claims

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First, I have to say that some of my best friends are economists.
Second, like any scientists, economists disagree. So I’m not expecting that anyone has THE RIGHT WAY to calculate TRUE fire costs.

But we have brought up the costs of fires, plus and minus. As in, how do you balance restoration benefits, with sedimentation flooding and road and culvert repair, etc.

We could debate it all day; but these folks had to actually decide on values for this lawsuit. I’m assuming that in all these calculations there were some subtractions for resource benefits.

Here are Sierra Pacific’s q’s and a’s on the settlement on the Moonlight Fire.

Now lawyers are not economists, just like they aren’t wildlife biologists, so I’m not arguing that they have scientific insight. I’m just saying it’s an interesting approach they took. I realize that, in this case, this is Sierra Pacific’s side of the story. Note: I am open to posting the USG side of the story, I just couldn’t locate one on the internet.

Below is an excerpt:

Why did the Federal Government settle for $55 million plus 22,500 acres of land when it initially informed the parties that it was after nearly $800 million in damages, plus interest?
A: Sierra Pacific believes that its offer of high value environmental property which is difficult to use for timber land forced the government’s hand. For years, the US Attorney’s office
has been attempting to justify its effort to recover excessive damages by pointing to the value of various environmental concerns. Sierra Pacific’s settlement offer to provide the public with environmentally valuable land forced the US Attorney’s to either accept the land offer, or end up demonstrating that these cases are all about collecting excessive damages, as opposed to
protecting the environment. Thankfully, Sierra Pacific’s land holdings allowed it to force this election, but its ability to do that here is certainly no answer for the future, and it’s no answer for the large majority of California businesses and citizens who might find themselves facing the threat of such absurd damage claims in the future.
It’s also important to understand that the pre-fire fair market value of the government’s land and timber affected by this fire was about $115 million dollars. After the fire, government’s land
had a market value of about $96 million, meaning that the fire reduced the value of the property by about $19 million. The government claimed damages of nearly 40 times the diminution in
value of its land and nearly 8 times the pre-fire market value of its land. The federal government argued that it could recover damages far in excess of the fair market value because the land is
owned by government rather than a private party. However, Sierra Pacific has sold and traded land with the federal government based on fair market value for decades. It is only after the U.S.
attorney gets in the business of assessing fire damage that the actual damages (well under $100 million) climb to nearly $800 million.

Sierra Pacific also raised this issue:

Sierra Pacific chose to resolve this case because federal court Judge Mueller ruled on a motion in limine that the defendants could be liable for the government’s damages without having caused the fire. Any ruling that property owners and timber companies are essentially strictly liable for fires that start on their watch – regardless of whether those fires are caused by arson, hunters, or hikers – would have a chilling effect on private landowners’ willingness to allow the members of the public to use nearly 8 million acres of privately owned timberland in California.

I would be interested in “the other side” of this..because it sounds odd the way it was expressed here.

Living with fire: In the dry West, it’s not if a house will burn, it’s when

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Char sent in this “Marketplace” piece; I thought it worthy of its own post. I think it’s an interesting juxtaposition with my own experience of today.

The perspectives are fascinating.. we can imagine a Marketplace done in Colorado..

A wildfire denudes hills of vegetation. Often all that’s left is ashes and blackness. When Richard Minnich looks at a charred landscape after a wildfire, he doesn’t mourn the loss of the plants killed in the blaze. ”I’m not crying at al,” he says. “I’m saying, wow, you solved your fire problem for a while. The energy is gone.”

You would ask the folks in Manitou Springs what they think about denuding hillsides and the ensuing flooding.

“Straight ahead of me, I’m looking at solitary houses on the tops of hills,” Minnich says. “It just ticks me off to see that.”

I’m glad that scientists get to give their personal angry feelings. But I wonder how many other scientists are not quoted.. they could be angry about the impacts of smoke on public health or.. one can imagine a variety of things.

“In Southern California, we have a total suppression strategy,” says Lorine Buckweld, a suppression battalion chief with the U.S. Forest Service. “In other words, that means every fire will be suppressed with as many resources as we can throw at them to keep them small. Because of the threat to the Wildland-Urban Interface.”

The Forest Service now spends more than half of its budget fighting wildfires. Most of which they are spending fighting in and around structures, housing developments and the like, not in and around wilderness areas.

Environmental history professor Char Miller is one of many critics who doesn’t think the public should be footing the bill to protect homes in high-risk fire zones. And he says we’re not factoring in the human cost when we build in these areas.

Duh… if there were no risks to folks, at this point, no one would fight fires. So of course most of the costs are to protect people. But people, towns, open spaces, parks, etc. are hopelessly intermixed in a great deal of the west. Now.. not “we are building”. We have built. We have homes, communities, and open spaces and parks with infrastructure. We can’t go back and kick people out. And there is a legitimate fairness question.. people who build near coastlines, rivers that flood, hurricanes, and earthquake-prone regions.. should we be footing the bill for those? How about those folks around Mt. St. Helens and other volcanoes?

I’m not against some kind of extra charges for some kind of federal insurance for these folks.. but also the others.

And what proportion of the fire bucks are protecting isolated homes.. what proportion neighborhoods and towns, what proportion community infrastructure.. what proportion keeping it controlled so it doesn’t get so big that it can’t be controlled, and burns up power lines, fairgrounds, libraries, and people and animals without time to evacuate, etc.

In general I think extrapolating from California chaparral to the “dry west” (the headline) is a very bad idea.

Is There a “Report A Wildfire” Phone App?

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fire close to start

I had an interesting experience today. Went for a hike with my dog on the local (higher elevation) open space. As the trail turned toward home I saw a little extra whitish tint to a mountain in the background. I knew it was a tiny fire but who to call? do they already know about it? Seems like no one would do a prescribed fire at 3PM in August, but who knows? Who should I call, if anyone?

I walked more quickly to the parking lot, where I saw an Open Space employee, who had called it in through his chain of command. Shortly thereafter, fire trucks pulled in; I asked a guy if there was a road where the fire was and he said there wasn’t.

fires trucks at parking lot

Later I went home and went to the post office; this is what the fire looked like from the post office parking lot.

Fire from Golden Post Office parking lot
Fire from Golden Post Office parking lot

I think you can click on these photos to see the fire more clearly.

So here’s my question is there a “Report a Wildfire” phone app that automatically lets you report a wildfire based on your GPS location? You can imagine it bringing up a map and the reporter locating where they see the smoke, and that information going to the local authorities. You can even imagine a screen coming up saying “this fire has already been reported” or “this is a new report, give us your phone number so we can call you and get more information.” Seems like something like this should exist, but I haven’t found one in my internet search.

Wolf vs. Bicyclist

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Since wolves have been the subject of so much discussion here, I thought you-all might enjoy this item from High Country News:

ALASKA

William “Mac” Hollan, 35, of Sandpoint, Idaho, was riding his bike ahead of two friends on the Alaska Highway, halfway through an epic 2,750-mile trip to Prudhoe Bay, when the unthinkable happened. A wolf emerged from the trees and started nipping “at the bike’s rear packs the way it would bite the hamstrings of a fleeing moose in the drawn-out ordeal of subduing large prey,” reports Rich Landers in the Spokane Spokesman-Review.” Hollan sped up, and whenever the wolf got close, he blasted it with bear spray. But the wolf loped ever closer even as the drivers of four different vehicles gawked but did not stop. When he realized a hill lay dead ahead, Hollan later said, “It was a surreal moment to realize that I was prey” and that there was no way he could beat his pursuer to the top of the incline. As Hollan got ready to jump off and use his bike as a shield, a Hummer suddenly pulled over. “I saw the panicked look on the biker’s face — as though he was about to be eaten,” said driver Melanie Klassen. Another vehicle also pulled up, and as the wolf leaped on Hollan’s bike, pulling at the shredded remains of his tent bag, Hollan jumped into the front passenger seat of Becky Woltjer’s recreational vehicle, shaking and cussing uncontrollably, he recalled. Meanwhile, Klassen yelled at the wolf and beaned it with a water bottle, but it didn’t retreat until other cars stopped and people began throwing rocks. An Environment Yukon spokeswoman called the incident “a new one for us,” although a similar incident happened June 8 in British Columbia, when a wolf gave chase to a motorcyclist. And you thought the Tour de France was exciting.

 

Limerick: In the social media age, voices carry

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I know that some of you readers are, like me, Patty Limerick and Center of the American West fans and you probably don’t get the Denver Post so..

Here is the link and below is an excerpt:

Having lived in Colorado for almost 30 years, I am both pleased and unsettled by the way that this super-sized state duplicates the “echo chamber” workings of a small town.

Here’s a recent example. On Aug. 6, around 2:30 p.m., I responded to a question from the audience at the Rocky Mountain Energy Summit, the annual meeting of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association. The questioner spoke critically of a recent chain of events in which my congressman, Jared Polis, challenged the arrival of a drilling rig in proximity to his rural second home.

Trying to moderate to the intensely critical stance of the questioner, I said that, in my opinion, Congressman Polis had been trying to use his prominent and visible position to call attention to a situation that troubled a number of his constituents. I said that I did not think that his first step — filing a lawsuit — was necessarily the wisest way to achieve this goal. And then I said that I thought it would be a good idea for the association to invite Polis to join us to this conference.

Less than three hours passed before Polis sent me an e-mail. If I had indeed invited him to the conference, he told me, he would try to fit this into his schedule.

When I made my statement, on Aug. 6, to a room occupied by several hundred people, it never occurred to me that I was also addressing the congressman and maybe thousands of others, as information rippled out of the Colorado Convention Center and into the “small town” called Colorado.

Polis’ response to my invitation forcefully reacquainted me with the key lesson of my small-town childhood: Do not forget that your voice carries.

I bet many of our states are like this.

What If We Abstained from Generalization?

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Listening to the Forest Service and new roads discussion, and the points made about generalized statements about “enviros” in our discussions last week, I was thinking perhaps we should adopt an additional civility goal. Maybe as part of our continuous improvement program in civility.

t seems like our first goal was “don’t call people names”. To be hard on the ideas, not on the people. So instead of “Tiffany, you are a termagant”, you could say “Tiffany’s ideas are stinking pile of foolish innuendo enwrapt by lies and malfeasance.” (if my language is archaic, I’m reading medieval history so there is some language leakage).

I think we are fairly good at this, most of the time . The next step, though is to move toward “I don’t think that ecosystems behave the way you suggest, Tiffany, because in my experience….or these publications indicate…”

I’ve been blessed by people helping me with relational counseling at work and home; the literature they use agrees that communication is improved when you are specific, more than general, and use “I” language.

Here’s a work example: “you always give me the worst projects.”
In that case, it is said to be helpful to ask instead “I wanted to work on the XYZ project, why did you assign Frank instead?”

I think this is relevant to our discussion here for a couple of reasons. Let’s take generalizing about a couple of things as examples:

The Forest Service builds too many new roads and they can’t afford to keep up their current road system. So I think,” when I worked for the FS we weren’t building new system roads. Energy people pay for their own roads. Temp roads don’t need to be kept up.. so .. what is this person talking about?”

When David said, “a specific project in Alaska” I figured..”well that could be, Alaska Is Different (the FS mantra)”.

Similarly, when folks say “enviros think”, they, like the FS, are really too diverse to be considered one entity. If I were, say, a member or staff of the organizations collaborating on Colt Summit, I might resist be lumped with Mr. Garrity’s group. Even “some enviros” or “frequent litigators” would be better.

What I think we should go for is something I call “irritating practices and behaviors” without generalization.

So let me give an example. When I worked on Colorado Roadless, there was a group XXXX. For reasons that have been mysterious to me and others, XXXX seemed to be able to influence both R and D administrations in Washington. So any time over the seven years we worked on it, we received the message that we needed to pay serious attention to what they said. The problem was that for each of the however many comment periods, they would “up the ante”. I even had a table that showed 2005, XXXX wrote they wanted Y, so we gave them Y in 2006 they wanted Z so we gave them Z.. and so on all the way to 2011 (when I stopped working on it).

As Roadless was nearing its end, I attended an excellent Partnership Training (about the partnership with the Union). One thing they talked about with regard to employee grievances, was the idea of “negotiating in good faith.” At that point I realized that was what irritated me about XXXX, is that they did not seem to be negotiating in good faith. Unless you think that each opening is an opportunity to get your way.. which is a philosophy that is different from the idea of collaboration. More like international trade than a local stakeholder group.

Now, I could identify XXXX, but I don’t think it’s necessary. If we only were specific to the extent that we not name them by name but name the behavior or practice that’s irritating, but ascribe it to a specific entity rather than globally, I think we would be able to engage and understand each other more deeply. Also we can go deeper into why we find this behavior or practice to be irritating.

The same thing with “science.” Anytime someone says “the science shows” it makes me wonder, because different disciplines, different framings, different species, different areas of the country all may be different. The scientific process, by it’s very nature, tends to raise questions, not to settle them.

I like Roger Pielke Jrs’ quote in the post here that was excerpted below:

The risk of such an approach is reminiscent of the old saw about the drunk and the lamppost – expertise can be used more for support than for illumination.

So what do you think? Can we attempt to abjure generalizations.. about the FS, enviros, science? Can we be specific about scientific studies, and examine why we find the behavior or practices of specific groups to be irritating?

Wildfire Economics: Should the Public be Involved in Determining Damages?

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Cascade Complex Fire at night. Picture taken August 8th, 2007, near Warm Lake, Valley County, Idaho. Photo by US Forest Service, provided courtesy of the Yellow Pine Times. Photographer unknown.

I worked with John Marker, a semi-regular contributor to this blog, and several others in putting together a pre-fire and post-fire analytical tool nearly five years ago. It was widely distributed and presented (and generally well received) to several key agencies and organizations through three fire seasons, but has gone nowhere: http://www.wildfire-economics.org/Checklist/index.html

Our intent was to develop a tool (“the one-pager”) so that local residents, landowners, and newspaper reporters could also be involved in gathering and interpreting data related to short-term and long-term costs of wildfires. By attaching their own values to the analysis it was thought that more realistic and widespread understanding of these events could take place over time and geographical location — both individually and collectively.

Our group formed a non-profit to build the mostly-completed informational website (http://www.wildfire-economics.org/) and to help develop this concept on a practical basis. We made two or three determined attempts to test this approach on and before specific fires at that time, but there was “no funding” available — even from the American Heart and Lung Association! People seemed more concerned with diesel exhausts and smoke-flavored wine grapes in California than in doing anything practical about considering actual wildfire damages to the environment, to their local communities, and to public health.

Now might be a better time for reconsidering this proposal, at least on a trial basis. People have seemingly been catching onto the “natural fire return interval” myth and other agency rationales for this unprecedented spate of catastrophic wildfires, and seem to finally begin questioning the “science” behind federal wildfire management policies the past quarter century (since 1987).

This issue is not going away anytime soon, despite political posturing and the claims of some environmental organizations. It is not a “climate change” issue anymore than it is a “natural process” issue. It is a resource management issue, as shown convincingly by the photographs of Derek Weidensee in this blog, and by the research findings of several forest and fire scientists and historians, including my own.

Unfortunately, the media has only lately begun realizing the flimsiness of the claims of the “natural fire” proponents and much of the public has continued to remain ignorant or misinformed on these issues as a result. Now might be a good time to begin substituting personal observations for past agency and media pronouncements and to begin taking the active management approaches needed to bring these predictable events under control.

There is no real reason to continue down this wasteful and destructive — and largely self-inflicted — path too much longer. Maybe the “one-pager” can begin to serve its intended purpose of helping to bring informed and afflicted citizens to the table.

 

Otter on Owls: Federal plan to save spotted owls is flawed, costly

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Published: August 17, 2013 

Idaho Governor Butch Otter weighed in to today’s Idaho Statesman with the following editorial on spotted owls. I like the analogies between wolves, people, and owls that he presents. The editorial can be found here: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2013/08/17/2710562/federal-plan-to-save-spotted-owls.html

 
By GOV. BUTCH OTTER

Consider Neanderthals. They were shorter, slower and less mobile than their cousins, modern humans. As a result, Neanderthals’ range stayed small and restricted over time while smarter, more adaptable humans spread across the globe. Eventually, the competition was too much for them and Neanderthals died out.

Now consider the northern spotted owl. It’s smaller, less aggressive and more specialized in its diet and habitat than its cousin, the barred owl. As a result, the spotted owl’s range stayed small and restricted over time while the barred owl spread from the East Coast to the Pacific. The competition was too much for the spotted owl, but they didn’t quite die out.

Instead, man intervened.

In 1990, the federal government tried to save the spotted owl by listing it as a “threatened species” and by shutting down logging on vast swaths of Northwest old-growth forests, destroying an industry and the communities it supported. Since that didn’t work, wildlife experts now want to try killing thousands of those bigger, stronger, more adaptable barred owls.

Clearly the Neanderthals could have used some federal experts and Endangered Species Act protections.

Meanwhile, John James Audubon and Charles Darwin are rolling over in their graves.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently announced plans to spend about $3 million to kill 3,603 barred owls in four areas of Oregon, Washington and northern California over the next four years. That works out to almost $833 for each dead barred owl.

Back in 1994, when the Northwest Forest Plan was launched to protect about 20 million acres of federal land from logging in defense of spotted owls, we all were assured that habitat was the key to their survival. We were told that abandoning an economy and a culture that had supported generations of people would pay off with the salvation of an “indicator species” and, by extension, a unique and irreplaceable ecosystem.

It sounded a lot like what’s by now become shop-worn shorthand for the insanity of war: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

As it turned out, that federally protected old-growth habitat did nothing for the spotted owl population, which has continued to decline. That’s a lot more than unfortunate for the timber towns and the families who used to live there. But now the Fish and Wildlife Service has identified the real culprit, and has it in its sights.

A final decision is expected this month on whether to “experiment” with the systematic killing of barred owls, which now outnumber spotted owls by as many as five to one in some locations.

We soon may have armed federal experts roaming through our forests, calling and then killing thousands of one type of owl to save another. You might recognize these folks as the same ones who “reintroduced” wolves to Idaho, and now they’re desperately trying to salvage what a misguided but powerful government policy has failed to achieve for decades.

What could possibly go wrong with that?

Like most federal programs, it figures to be LOPSOD — long on promises, short on delivery. But if it winds up working better than shutting down our forests did, which is a very low bar to clear, should we then start saving a place on the endangered species list for barred owls next?

Butch Otter is the governor of Idaho.

Read more here: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2013/08/17/2710562/federal-plan-to-save-spotted-owls.html#storylink=cpy