Map of the San Juan Fire “Rapid Assessment of Vegetation Condition after Wildfire”. The fire started at the south end near “San Juan Flat and eventually burned into many treated areas, represented by cross-hatching, where the fire intensity and rate of spread decreased.
The U.S. Forest Service has put together information about how previous fuel treatments modified fire behavior on the San Juan Fire on the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona in June of 2014. Below is an excerpt from a report, and below that is a video in which subject matter experts describe the effects of the treatments.
Generally speaking, the fuel treatments encountered by the San Juan Fire were effective at modifying fire behavior. Furthermore, these fuel treatment areas proved to be instrumental in providing fire managers with opportunities to contain the fire in a safe and effective manner while simultaneously limiting the fire’s potential negative effects on natural resources, the surrounding communities and their infrastructure.
Fire behavior observed by firefighters at the scene—as well as estimates of fire severity taken after the fire confirm that the treated areas performed as designed by not supporting sustained crown fire even under extreme burning conditions.
As the San Juan Fire transitioned from untreated mixed conifer to treated ponderosa pine, fire behavior also transitioned from intermittent and sustained high-intensity crown fire in the untreated stands to a low-moderate intensity surface fire in the treated stands.
Thus, firefighters were able to utilize the road system within the treated stands to implement their burnouts. These burnout operations limited the forward progress at the head of the fire the day after the fire started.
ABC15 in Phoenix has tips for homeowners in Arizona about how to protect their homes from wildfires, following a wet season that promoted the growth of vegetation.
On January 22 the winners of the Wildfire Mitigation Awards for 2015 were announced. Established in 2014 in response to an overwhelming number of wildfire mitigation program efforts across the nation, the awards are the highest national honor one can receive for outstanding work and significant program impact in wildfire preparedness and mitigation.
The Wildfire Mitigation Awards are jointly sponsored by the National Associations of State Foresters, the International Association of Fire Chiefs, the National Fire Protection Association, and the USDA Forest Service.
The three categories for the awards include:
Community Wildfire Preparedness Pioneer
Fire Adapted Communities Fire Service Leadership
Wildfire Mitigation Innovation
These awards are designed to recognize outstanding service in wildfire preparedness and safety across a broad spectrum of activities and among a variety of individuals and organizations. By honoring their achievements, the award sponsors also seek to increase public recognition and awareness of the value of wildfire mitigation efforts.
The winners of th Wildfire Mitigation Awards are:
Community Wildfire Preparedness Pioneer Awardees
Ann Grant
Nevada Fire Safe Council & Nevada Network of Fire Adapted Communities
Reno, Nevada
Tom Burns
Warm Springs Mesa Neighborhood Association
Boise, Idaho
Ken & Nancy Hasse
Logtown Fire Safe Council & El Dorado County Fire Safe Council
Diamond Springs, California
Judy Winzell
Falls Creek Ranch Homeowners Association
Durango, Colorado
Fire Adapted Communities Fire Service Leadership Awardees
Chris Barth
Bureau of Land Management
Montrose, Colorado
Colorado Springs Wildfire Mitigation Section
Colorado Springs Fire Department/City of Colorado Springs
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Mechanical fuels reduction as well as controlled burning are priorities for the Florida Forest Service, one recipient of the 2015 Wildfire Mitigation Awards. Photo credit: Florida Forest Service
Florida Forest Service—Okeechobee District
Okeechobee, Florida
Jerry McAdams
Boise Fire Department
Boise, Idaho
Gregory McLaughlin
New Jersey Forestry Services-Forest Fire Service
Trenton, New Jersey
Eric L. Mosley
Georgia Forestry Commission- Oconee District
Milledgeville, Georgia
University of Nevada Cooperative Extension’s Living With Fire Program
Reno, Nevada
Thomas Spencer
Texas A&M Forest Service
College Station, Texas
Wildfire Mitigation Innovation Awardees
West Region Wildfire Council
Montrose, Colorado
Saws and Slaws
Boulder County, Colorado
Travis Lipp, Jerry Derr and Lieutenant Tim Weaver
Bureau of Land Management; Meade County, South Dakota; Rapid City Fire Department, Rapid City, South Dakota
Mitigation and Prevention Department
Texas A&M Forest Service
College Station, Texas
Irene Jerome
Grant County, Oregon
Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization
Kamuela, Hawaii
Caloosahatchee Forestry Center
Fort Myers, Florida
Flagstaff Fire Department – Wildland Fire Management Division
Flagstaff, Arizona
Pam Wilson, Executive Director
Firewise of Southwest Colorado & Local Firewise Council
Durango, Colorado
Wildifre mitigation projects currently funded under the Natural Resources Conservation Service and Forest Service partnership.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced today nearly $37 million in investments to mitigate wildfire threats to landowners and communities. This is the second year of a partnership between the U.S. Forest Service and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to help improve the health and resiliency of forest ecosystems where public and private lands meet.
Joined by partners at an event in Idaho, Under Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment Robert Bonnie unveiled the 15 Chiefs’ Joint Landscape Restoration Partnership projects for 2015. Located across the country from Washington to Vermont and Arizona to Ohio, NRCS and Forest Service will invest $10 million in new projects to improve conditions on public and private lands. One new project is in the Upper North Fork region near Gibbonsville, Idaho designed to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire to communities along a portion of the Highway 93 corridor.
“By leveraging the technical and financial resources of both agencies, this coordinated effort is helping to restore lands across large landscapes regardless of whether they are on public or private lands,” Bonnie said. “Our successes from the 2014 projects demonstrate that these partnerships make a difference on the ground and we are grateful for the cooperation of several partners.”
Bonnie noted that in some cases these new projects build on last year’s efforts. The partnership made investments in 2014 that will result in conservation improvements to over 266,000 acres. NRCS and Forest Service will provide an additional $27 million to continue work on 2014 projects.
In addition to NRCS and Forest Service investments, partners are contributing more than $5 million in the 2015 projects over three years in financial, technical and in-kind services. These 15 new projects, coupled with the 13 announced last year, will help mitigate wildfire threats to communities and landowners, protect water quality and supply, and improve wildlife habitat for at-risk species in high priority landscapes across the US.
For example, USDA support in 2014 enabled Tim Fisher of the Oregon East Face of the Elkhorn Mountains Partnership, to open up the tree canopy on 232 acres of private land which will reduce the risk for wildfire, help with soil erosion, and allow the trees to grow taller and stronger making them more marketable.
“Our agencies are being proactive to make sure conservation work flows seamlessly from private to public lands, ensuring crucial wildfire and water concerns are addressed and allowing people, like Fisher, to preserve their family lands,” NRCS Chief Jason Weller said.
“Strategic investments across landscapes help create resilient forests, grasslands and watersheds while sustaining communities,” said Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell. “Treating lands to reduce wildfire threats is a smart investment that will protect vast areas of land and potentially save of millions of taxpayer dollars.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has released its final environmental impact statement (EIS) relating to grant applications totaling $5.67 million to fund proposed hazardous fire risk reduction projects in the San Francisco Bay Area. The EIS evaluates the potential environmental effects of proposed vegetation management projects designed to reduce wildfire risk in the East Bay Hills of Alameda and Contra Costa counties and at the Miller/Knox Regional Shoreline in Contra Costa County. The final EIS was filed with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on November 26th and will be published in the Federal Register this Friday, December 5, 2014.
Between 2005 – 2010, the University of California Berkeley, the City of Oakland, and East Bay Regional Parks District submitted a total of four grant applications to FEMA through California’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) for federal financial assistance totaling $5.67 million to implement hazardous fire risk reduction projects. Based on the wildfire hazard characteristics of the East Bay Hills and the Miller/Knox Regional Shoreline, and the prolonged state-wide drought which has further intensified fire risk, FEMA has concluded that a need exists to reduce hazardous fire risk to inhabitants and structures in these areas.
The proposed grants were submitted to FEMA by the State of California on behalf of the named sub- applicants and are as follows:
PDMC-PJ-09-CA-2006-004 Oakland Regional Fuel Management Project (City of Oakland). Total project cost = $4,000,000; federal funding application = $3,000,000
PDMC-PJ-09-CA-2005-003 University of California Fire Mitigation Project – Claremont Canyon (UCB) Total project cost = $418,143.00; federal funding application = $291,000.00
PDMC-PJ-09-CA-2005-011 – University of California Fire Mitigation Project – Strawberry Canyon (UCB). Total project cost = $404,040.00; federal funding application = $282,828.00
HMGP DR-1731-0016-0034 – East Bay Regional Park District, Brush Fuels Management Project. Total project cost = $3,025,210; federal funding application = $2,268,908
Burnout operation on the Slide Fire. InciWeb photo.
Forest treatments to reduce hazardous fuels made it easier to contain two wildfires in Arizona this year, according to Wally Covington, the director of the Ecological Restoration Institute, and a Regents’ professor of forest ecology at Northern Arizona University. In an op-ed at LiveScience, Mr. Covington said the fires had the conditions, and the chance, to burn hundreds of houses and destroy some of the state’s most coveted recreational tourist attractions, but they didn’t.
He is referring to the 21,000-acre Slide Fire and the 7,000-acre San Juan Fire which started in May and June, respectively. While they still grew into large fires, Mr. Covington said they could have become very damaging megafires, if not for the fuel treatments previously conducted on the Apache-Sitgreaves and Coconino National Forests.
Below is an excerpt from the article:
…The San Juan fire also provided lessons about how treated areas did what they were designed to do: slow a fire’s advance and restore a forest’s natural ability to self-regulate. How a wildfire behaves when it reaches a treatment area is a good test of how those treatments work. Fire crews and incident management teams reported that when the fire burned into areas that had been thinned, it burned with low severity and on the ground, not in treetops. The dry, frequent-fire forests of the West evolved with this type of fire, a slow-moving, low severity surface fire that would remove young trees and revitalize understory grasses and forbs. Anecdotal evidence from the San Juan Fire also suggests that the previously treated areas allowed fire crews to safely conduct burnout operations, thus enabling them to manage and control the fire.
Goats at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. Instead of mowing, the company rents 200 of them for a week at a time to remove weeds in a field. Google photo.
Yes, that is a new term to me also — “prescribed goat grazing”. I am familiar with the concept, just not the name. Back in the 1980s the Laguna-Morena Demonstration Area east of San Diego tried it as a demonstration project. A goat herd was used in brush covered remote areas near Pine Valley, California, and they did a great job in a confined space of reducing the amount of fuel that would be available for vegetation fires. They will eat almost anything.
A paper has been published titled, Goat grazing as a wildfire prevention tool: a basic review, by Raffella Lovreglio, Ouahiba Meddour-Sahar, Vittorio Leone. One thing the authors did not cover in detail was the cost of building goat pens, and fencing around areas that will become their pastures. On a relatively small scale or in a semi-urban area, that may not be a substantial consideration, but if you are attempting to treat thousands of acres and moving the goats every few weeks, you’re talking about a large investment in building and possibly moving fences. If it is possible to not fence their “pastures” (using dogs to keep them in the right place) and only provide a pen for when they are off duty at night, it would be less costly.
Below is the summary and conclusion of the paper, and after that their chart showing the strengths and weaknesses of using goats for fuel reduction.
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“Prescribed goat grazing has the potential to be an ecologically and economically sustainable management tool for the local reduction of fuel loads, mainly 1h and 10h fine dead fuels and smaller diameter live fuels. These fine dead fuels can greatly impact the rate of spread of a fire and flame height, both of which are responsible for fire propagation.
Far from being a simple technique, prescribed goat grazing is more complex than simply putting a goat out to eat a plant; it requires careful evaluation of the type of animals and planning of timing. The technique also requires further research, since information about grazing for fuel reduction is anecdotal and there is only limited scientific information currently available, mainly for the Mediterranean area ([64], [44]).
The economically sustainable use of prescribed herbivory could be used for:
Maintenance grazing of fuel breaks with mixed goat-sheep flocks;
High impact browsing where prescribed burns are not possible (high cost service);
Specialized impact browsing in timber plantations (medium/high cost service);
Follow-up on burned areas (short term).
Goats are the most cost-effective, non-toxic, non-polluting solution available; they are greatly appreciated by the general public and they are an environmentally friendly and effective method of nearly carbon-neutral weed control which deserve further attention and applied research.”
The U.S. Forest Service has produced three new videos about defensible space around structures and the benefits of fuel reduction projects which can slow the spread of a wildfire.
