It must have been a slow news day when the Record Searchlight in Redding, California dreamed up their story about problematic burnout operations on last summer’s fires. They found a couple of people who say burnouts are bad, destroy private property, and 50 percent of the acres burned in the Siege of ’08 in northern California were burned in burnout operations. Bullshit.
It could be argued that fire managers in the last 10-20 years have gotten too timid about putting in direct fireline at times, but burnouts are necessary, enhance firefighter safety, and when skillfully executed save money.
Here’s the beginning of the article.
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Record Searchlight
William Bradford had banked on the timber harvested from a stretch of private forest land his family’s owned for the past 50 years as a nest egg.
But the 67-year-old Junction City man watched last summer as firefighters armed with flame-dripping torches, flares and flammable liquid lit his land on fire, eventually scorching 70 of his 80 acres.
Heat from the flames, which licked within feet of his home and crested the tree tops, was so intense it boiled the sap in his trees, killing them.
He estimates the fire ruined 300,000 board-feet of timber, costing him tens of thousands of dollars.
“Basically, they burned my IRA,” Bradford says.
Fire crews on Bradford’s land didn’t set the blaze out of malice. They were using a controversial fire-suppression tactic known as burnouts.
Questioning the strategy
Such tactics have been harshly criticized by many in Trinity County, who argue that in intentionally setting fires to fight fire, U.S. Forest Service crews last summer prolonged blazes for longer periods and helped contribute to the 87 days of unhealthy, smoke-filled air that choked the area.
Some, like Dennis Possehn, a private forester from Anderson, estimate that up to 50 percent of the acreage burned in Trinity County were scorched by intentionally set fires.
He calls for an investigation into burns on private land such as Bradford’s.
And at least one wildfire expert questions whether burnouts even work.
“The idea is fine in principle, but often doesn’t work out all that well in application,” James Agee, a professor of forest ecology at the University of Washington, said in an e-mail.
He said residents told him that burnout operations in the Trinity County fires last summer often burned hotter than the wildfires.
Agee said some burnout operations failed last year because fire managers likely didn’t take weather into account.
The burnouts were lit early in the day when a layer of hot air floating above a layer of cold air kept fire danger lower, but when the inversion lifted in the afternoon the blazes would intensify and spread, Agee said.
That led to new burnout operations the next day.
When Agee and others went out in October to look at the blazes, it was impossible to tell what had been destroyed by burnouts and what damage was caused by the wildfire itself, he said.
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