Mount Rushmore drafts plan for Mountain Pine Beetle

Bill GabbertMarch 1, 2010December 17, 2019Uncategorizedbeetles, Mount Rushmore, Photo by Bill G, prescribed fire2 Comments

Mount Rushmore looking down from the top — Mount Rushmore administrative site, looking down from just below the sculpture . Photo by Bill Gabbert

Mount Rushmore National Memorial has posted a draft plan on how they intend to manage the mountain pine beetle (MPB) epidemic that is headed their way. The problem is real, with the beetles staged just outside the memorial’s boundary on U.S. Forest Service land. While the critters are native to South Dakota and much of the western US, if they wipe out most of the Ponderosa pines near the sculpture in a epidemic caused by years of drought, it will not be a very pleasing sight for the 2.5 million visitors that trek there every year.

The plan calls for thinning most of the 1,200-acre site, spraying some areas, and treating much of the site with prescribed fire. They are asking for $5,653,150 through FY 2014. That works out to $4,710 per acre. Here is a summary of their treatment recommendations.

Spraying high value trees with insecticide to prevent loss within the developed area
Search, mark, and remove infested trees throughout the Memorial
Thin forests along the Highway 244 corridor to create a fuel and bug break
Thin forests throughout the Memorial to varying density and age class levels
Thin a 300 foot MPB and fire break along the south, west, and east boundary of the Memorial
Introduce prescribed fire throughout the Memorial after thinning
Communicate MPB management issues to the public

The memorial has enough funding to begin implementing the plan if it is approved, but they will be asking for more dollars to work on the list above, plus hiring four employees, including interpreters and a public information officer.

CO, WY, and SD to receive $40 million to deal with beetle-killed forests

Bill GabbertFebruary 9, 2010February 9, 2010Uncategorizedbeetles

The U. S. Forest Service is making $40 million available in three states where the mountain pine beetle has infested more than 2.5 million acres. The USFS announced that $30 would go to Colorado, $8 million to Wyoming, and $2 million to South Dakota where about 30 percent of the Black Hills National Forest is affected. The dollars will come from left over stimulus funds and reallocations within the Forest Service. About $5 million will come from funding that the Forest Service has been using to reduce the threat of wildfires.

The $40 million will be used for hazardous fuel reduction, on road and trail maintenance, and on providing assistance to state and local governments.

The USFS said:

The epidemic has had a severe impact on forest health and has resulted in a dramatic increase in the danger of trees falling on roads, trails and recreation areas. In addition, these dead and dying trees greatly increase the risk of fire danger in the communities of the Rocky Mountain Region and elsewhere in forested areas of the United States.

Some campgrounds have been temporarily closed in Colorado and Wyoming because of of the danger from falling trees.

Andy Stahl, the executive director of the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics is concerned that trails or facilities won’t be maintained because of taxpayer dollars being spent on “removing dead trees from remote areas in the Colorado Rockies”. Stahl believes the beetle-killed trees are not the wildfire risk that the Forest Service says they are.

As Wildfire Today reported in November, Steve Gage’s National Incident Management Organization (NIMO) team out of Boise has been tasked to develop plans to deal with some of the effects of the beetle infestation. Some of the objectives of the Team are to manage the removal of hazard trees along roads, power lines and in campgrounds; develop safety protocols for those working in beetle infested area; and develop fire preparedness and management plans to address the increased wildfire threat posed by dead and falling trees.

Mount Rushmore July 4th fireworks canceled due to fire danger

Bill GabbertJanuary 14, 2010December 17, 2019Uncategorizedbeetles, fireworks, Mount Rushmore12 Comments

The annual 4th of July fireworks at Mount Rushmore, which in the past has started fires and littered the ground with tons of fireworks debris, is being cancelled this year. The Mount Rushmore National Memorial is surrounded by 1,200 acres of forested lands within the Memorial’s boundary, but it is adjacent to the Black Hills National Forest’s Black Elk Wilderness, in which most of the trees have been recently killed by pine beetles.

The National Park Service is saying the fireworks are being cancelled because of the risk of fire caused by the fireworks in the beetle-killed fuels. Navnit Singh, chief of interpretation and education at the memorial, said Wednesday:

The condition of the forest is such that, unlike any other year before, there is a greater risk of a wildfire growing into a catastrophic fire, because there’s more dead forest close to the park than any other previous year.

I was the Fire Management Officer for Mount Rushmore and six other parks during the first four years that fireworks were used on Independence Day at the Memorial. I developed a plan that would require that the weather and fuel conditions be within certain parameters before the fireworks could be used. We continued to refine the plan each year, settling on Probably of Ignition as one of the primary factors on the go/no-go checklist, especially after the fireworks started about 10 fires one year. All of the fires were small and were suppressed by the 60-80 firefighters we had positioned in the forest around the sculpture. One year the fireworks were cancelled because of the fire danger.

Mount Rushmore fireworks embers hitting ground — The Mount Rushmore Society conveniently has this photo on their web site, showing the Mount Rushmore fireworks with burning embers hitting the ground. Photo: South Dakota Tourism

In my humble opinion, igniting fireworks over and around Mount Rushmore is no way to treat the memorial, the sculpture, and the natural resources around the Memorial. The fireworks are disrespectful to the significance of the Memorial, they leave millions of pieces of debris that can never be picked up, they start fires, and tie up firefighting resources during a busy period of the fire season.

Wildfire news, November 24

Bill GabbertNovember 24, 2009August 25, 2019Uncategorizedbeetles, climate change, research, UAV, weather

Los Angeles County Fire Chief announces retirement.

P. Michael Freeman today announced that he will be retiring in March, 2010. Chief Freeman has served as Fire Chief with the Los Angeles County Fire Department LACFD for 21 years.

On November 18 the LADFD issued a report about the Station fire that lobbed some criticism towards the U. S. Forest Service for their management of wildland fires.

NASA’s Predator UAV flies burn sites in California

NASA provided this information in a press release:

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MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. – NASA’s remotely piloted Predator B aircraft, named Ikhana, recently conducted post-burn assessments of two Southern California wildfire sites, the Piute Fire in Kern County and the Station Fire in the Angeles National Forest. Ikhana, an unmanned aircraft equipped with an infrared imaging sensor, completed a seven-hour imaging flight on Nov. 19, 2009 from NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.

The Autonomous Modular Scanner, developed by NASA’s Ames ResearchCenter, Moffett Field, Calif., was carried in a pod under the aircraft’s wing. The scanner operates like a digital camera with specialized filters to detect light energy at visible, infrared and thermal wavelengths.

The scanner operated with a new photo mosaic capability requested by the U.S.Forest Service. A photo mosaic provides easier interpretation for the end user, which in the case of an active wildfire, is the fire incident commander.

Traveling northwest of NASA Dryden, the aircraft flew several data collectionroutes over the area burned by the month-long Piute Fire in Kern County that grew to 37,026 acres before it was contained in July 2008. The burn area is located in the Sequoia National Forest and on Bureau of Land Management public land near Lake Isabella.

Ikhana then traveled southeast to fly image collection routes over the arson-caused Station Fire. It burned more than 160,000 acres in the Angeles National Forest northeast of Los Angeles after being ignited on Aug. 26, 2009. The scanner collected images that will indicate the severity of devastation within the fire area. Another use of the images is for the U.S. Forest Service’s Burned Area Emergency Rehabilitation, or BAER.

The Forest Service uses BAER to reduce further damage to land made unstable by fires, rather than replace what is burned. The BAER data are derived using multi-spectral data available from the Autonomous Modular Scanner on the aircraft. The processes can be changed mid-mission to enable improved collection of critical information, either in mapping active fires or assessing post-burn severity.

The post-burn images collected by the scanner were transmitted through a communications satellite to NASA Ames, where the images were superimposed over Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth maps to better visualize the locations. The images then were made available to the Forest Service for initial assessment of the damage caused by the fires and rehabilitation required.

Scientists prove mega-droughts occurred

By studying mineral deposits in caves, scientists have proved that extended droughts, or “mega-droughts” have occurred hundreds of years ago. The researchers took core samples of deposits left by dripping water in caves, and studied them much like scientists study tree rings to determine fire history.

Their analysis in caves in the Sierra Nevada in California determined that one of the droughts they detected lasted 140-years around the year 1100. The pattern of droughts seems to be associated with rapid climate warming.

Bushfires wreaking havoc in Australia

From The Trumpet:

Thousands of homes are threatened by huge wildfires sweeping across eastern Australia. Record temperatures and persistent winds have combined to make this the worst bushfire threat in 100 years in New South Wales, just months after the country’s most devastating wildfire disaster to date.

The record heat has kindled fears of a repeat of February’s cataclysmic fires in Victoria that killed 173 people and consumed more than 2,000 homes. The conditions have prompted authorities to issue the first “catastrophic” or “Code Red” alert—a new level of warning introduced since the deadly Black Saturday fires in February—for parts of New South Wales and South Australia.

“The very hot temperatures we’ve seen across New South Wales right throughout this last week are simply breaking hundred-year records,” said Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons.

In a Code Red warning, residents cannot be forcibly evacuated, but are strongly advised to leave their property because of the dire risk of death, injury and destruction.

Fire expert Kevin Tolhurst said, “What we saw on (Black Saturday) was an extraordinary day from a weather point of view. We are starting to see those sort of days more frequently.”

Bill introduced in Senate to aid in control of pine beetles

From KPVI news:

U.S. Sen. Mark Udall says the insect infestation killing millions of pine trees in the West is 1 of the region’s “biggest natural disasters.”

The Colorado Democrat said Monday he has introduced a bill to give forest managers more ways to respond.

The bill, co-sponsored by Republican Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, would allow the U.S. Forest Service to identify high-priority areas and expedite analysis of proposed treatments.

More than 2.5 million acres of pine trees in northern Colorado and southern Wyoming have been killed by tiny beetles that burrow under the bark.

Forest managers say the outbreak poses wildfire and public safety risks.

A national management team will help the Forest Service coordinate responses to the outbreak.

As we reported on November 11, one of the NIMO teams has been activated to assist in battling beetles.

Fewer inmates could hamper fire suppression in California

The state of California is under a court order to reduce their prison population by 40,000 people, from 150,000 to 110,000. In order to comply, Governor Schwarzenegger is seeking legislation to implement alternatives to state incarceration, such as house arrest or utilizing local jails.

A reduction of this size in low risk inmates will mean there will be fewer prisoners available to staff the state’s Type 2 inmate crews. When working on a fire an inmate earns $1 per hour, much less than a CalFire employee, so replacing the crews with CalFire firefighters is not an option in a state with major financial problems.

The reason the court ordered a reduction in the prison population was to improve the treatment of physically and mentally ill inmates. They labeled the care so poor that it violates an inmate’s constitutional rights.

Nimo Team to be used in pine beetle epidemic

Bill GabbertNovember 11, 2009September 12, 2012Uncategorizedbeetles, NIMO

Pine_beetle_damage — Pine beetle damage. USFS photo

The seven-person National Incident Management Teams were created primarily to manage complex wildland fires, but Steve Gage’s NIMO team out of Boise has been activated to assist in the management of the pine beetle problem in northern Colorado and southern Wyoming.

According to the U. S. Forest Service, the team….

…will coordinate activities among the three heaviest impacted bark beetle Forests (Medicine Bow–Routt, Arapahoe and Roosevelt, and White River National Forests). This team will provide support and personnel to the effort, and in many cases engage Forest Service employees from across the Rocky Mountain Region to assist in mitigation activities.

The NIMO team will immediately begin assessing the current situation, reviewing existing plans, and collecting data to prepare a strategic action plan for work priorities.

Steve Gage

Some of the objectives of the NIMO Team will be to manage the removal of hazard trees along roads, power lines and in campgrounds; develop safety protocols for those working in beetle infested area; and develop fire preparedness and management plans to address the increased wildfire threat posed by dead and falling trees.

While the management of complex wildland fires was the main reason for creating the NIMO program, the year-round teams are also available for All Hazard incidents, fuel management projects, and training. Presently there are four NIMO teams, operating out of Atlanta, Portland, Boise, and Phoenix.

Beetle-killed trees affect fire behavior in Montana

Bill GabbertOctober 4, 2009November 22, 2009Uncategorizedbeetles

The Missoulian has an article about how beetle-killed trees affected fire behavior in Montana this summer. Here is an excerpt:

For [Tyler] Brothers and pilot Matt Conant above the Bielenburg fire, the afternoon of Sept. 26 just wouldn’t quit. Even the smoke was weird.

“For some odd reason, when it got to highway, it would lift up over the highway, and then curl back down,” Brothers said of the smoke column. “People were thinking it was spotting over the highway, eight miles away.”

And then, Brothers saw the Racetrack campground, and two trucks parked there.

The wind was gusting over 40 mph, knocking the helicopter around. The fire was a mile from the campground and moving that way fast. Fire incident commander Jon Agner ordered the helicopter crew to find the campers and prepare them for evacuation. Powell County Sheriff’s Deputy Ron Cain also drove into the woods to lead them out.

The firefighters lost radio contact with Cain. Fire burned over the Racetrack campground. Brothers eventually found Cain, two fathers and two kids three miles farther into the forest, where they were surrounded by beetle-killed trees and no safety zone. Agner was able to drive up the drainage and lead the group down the blackened road.

As evening came on and the fire calmed down, Brothers made another mapping circuit of the fire. This time, he saw a truck parked at a small Forest Service cabin still farther up the Racetrack drainage. A big tree had fallen across the truck’s bed, immobilizing it.

The helicopter crew scouted several ATV trails that wove amongst the lakes at the head of the drainage, but couldn’t find the truck’s occupants before darkness forced them back to base. Forest Service law enforcement rangers had to drive up the road in the dark to find the two campers, cut their truck free and lead them out. The ground was so hot, it scorched the paint on their vehicles.