The Smokey Wire : National Forest News and Views

Here’s the letter for those interested:

Fire Budgeting letter to OMB June 2013 FINAL

Below is an excerpt:

In a time when fire activity and costs are steadily rising, the 10-year rolling average budget formula that the agencies have used to set the annual budget request for suppression expenditures has translated into shortfalls in available suppression funds nearly every year since the mid-1990s. When the budgeted amount is insufficient, the agency continues to suppress fires by reallocating funds from other non-fire programs. This practice is called fire borrowing. This approach to paying for firefighting is nonsensical and further increases wildland fire costs.
The Federal Land Assistance, Management and Enhancement (FLAME) Act was enacted in 2009 to address these very issues. The FLAME Act authorized the establishment of two reserve accounts to provide additional suppression funding for large, emergency wildfire incidents, above and beyond the 10-year average annual suppression expenditures. In addition, any balances remaining in the FLAME accounts were to carry-over into future years so that funds would be available for the inevitable, high cost years and not have to be borrowed from other program accounts. Despite Congressional intent, OMB has forced the agencies to implement the FLAME Act in a manner that makes it ineffective: instead of funding the FLAME account in addition to the 10-year average cost of suppression, the account is funded as part of the 10-year average cost of suppression. Although authorized, no additional funding has been requested for the FLAME reserve accounts above the 10-year average cost of suppression. Thus, fire borrowing has continued to occur.
We are also concerned about the dramatic cuts to hazardous fuels treatments proposed in the FY2014 President’s budget request. For example, the Forest Service treated 1.87 million acres for hazardous fuels in FY2012, but expects to treat only 685,000 acres in FY2014. Our understanding is that these cuts were based on OMB’s continued skepticism about the efficacy of hazardous fuels treatments. We whole-heartedly disagree with OMB on this point.

Here’s an article worth reading..below is an excerpt:

Although it has been raging for a month, the wildfires known as the West Fork Complex in southwest Colorado present a seemingly odd profile of success: They remain only 20 percent contained, yet no significant structures have burned, residents have returned to the once-threatened town of South Fork and firefighters have reported only two minor injuries.

“Containment is not how you measure progress,” said Bobby Kitchens, fire information officer with the Type 1 Incident Management Team. “One day, this will be contained and be out. But now, we’re not concentrating on putting a perimeter around it. We’re just protecting certain points. We don’t have all the dots tied together. Eventually, we will.”

West Fork Complex differs significantly from the way firefighters attacked the flames that ravaged the Black Forest north of Colorado Springs — or any number of other wildland fires, for that matter.

Proximity of valuable resources, such as homes or infrastructure, as well as concerns such as terrain, weather and safety all figure into the methods employed by firefighters in any given situation.

As the dry, beetle-kill pine blew up in the West Fork fires, which have charred more than 110,000 acres, firefighters used helicopters and air tankers to divert the fire from valuable resources and dug a “dozer line” to defend the town of South Fork. In the Rio Grande National Forest, where rugged terrain presents dangerous conditions for ground crews, firefighters have battled the flames judiciously, on their own terms.

“As it goes through dead spruce stands, we’re not going in there,” Kitchens said. “Success is hard to get, and it’s too unsafe for firefighters. We’ll allow it to burn through those stands and catch it when it comes out the other side, at a highway or river. The fire will be controlled. We’re just being different in the way we approach it.”

Aerial photos sketched a puzzling portrait of the Black Forest wildfire, with splotches of charred blackness bleeding across the landscape and giving way, in some areas, to incongruous bands of green.

Amid vast expanses of scorched timber, tragic anomalies: homes reduced to ash still surrounded by healthy trees, speaking to the whims of an inferno whipped by winds and fed by the area’s bone-dry ponderosa pine and gamble oak.

This answers Greg’s question here about the houses burned with green trees around.

Also it appears that fire retardant is being used both by the Black Forest folks (not fed) and the West Fork Complex. You may remember our previous discussions and the quote by Andy discussed here that implied only feds use retardant.

There is a great slideshow here of many aspects of the fire, in at least one you can see retardant use.

Which reminds me of this effort to get more firefighting plane resources being discussed by the Western Governors.

We have been talking about “everything isn’t forest”. So it’s interesting to think about other fuels management techniques and tools. Because I do think we have to keep in focus that 1) some places do have timber industry.. but they might not be able to handle the scope of all the fuels treatments needed,
2) some places don’t have timber industry and
3) some places don’t have trees, or at least, currently merchantable kinds of trees.

Here is an articles in JSFP News on Karen Voth’s work on using goats in the WUI.

Below is an excerpt:

Voth adds, “The goats protect houses, and they easily provide firefighters a safe place to fight the fires from. The goats
can help make it safer for the firefighters and for communities.”

To that end, she reports on an initial project joining goats with an at-risk community of homes nestled in the heart of fire-prone Utah. The Woodland Hills community is surrounded by oakbrush and scrub. Once Voth explained to community members the possible power
of goats to reduce fire danger, they applauded the plan. Voth
coordinated with the town council and their fire department
and soon a herd of 30 goats were heartily tending vegetation
near the homes. Community members helped build the
fencing, took care of basic goat maintenance like watering,
and learned what the vegetation would look like when the
goats were “finished” in an enclosure. That’s when they
would call Voth and her team, who would drive the three
hours to move the goats.

Here’s a link for more information, also check out her work on Cows Eat Weeds.

While I was clicking on the photos for Andy’s post below, I ran across this video of the floods in Manitou Springs following the Waldo Canyon fire.

The Forest Service, state and county and NGO collaborators are all working very hard to mitigate this.. here are some photos from a recent SAF field trip of their mitigation efforts. I was really impressed how everyone is working together and especially how the water people are stepping up financially.

The good news is that I can post these photos legally, as I took them. The bad news is that I am not a very good photographer. Maybe we can crowdfund Larry to make a trip out here?

Tree-lovers: those dark green patches are scrub oak coming back.