When lightning ignited the Pagami Creek fire in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness on August 18, the Superior National Forest made a decision to not suppress it, but to herd it around as necessary to keep it within a reasonable maximum management area while allowing natural processes to do their thing. After 12 days the fire burning in the northeast corner of Minnesota had only grown to approximately 130 acres, and fire management officials may have thought things were going well — until September 12 when everything went to hell. Strong winds gusting up to 35 mph spread the fire 16 miles to the east. And now, $5.7 million and 93,000 acres later, you have the third largest fire in the history of Minnesota, meteorologists are tracking the smoke as it passes over China, and the local newspaper, the Ely Echo, has written a scathing editorial criticizing the decisions the U. S. Forest Service made.
I spent a lot of time on specialized “fire use” incident management teams managing these types of fires. It IS possible to manage a fire, herding it around, without fully suppressing it. But there are dozens of variables that have to be scrutinized by extremely knowledgeable, experienced, smart people to pull it off successfully. Something in the equation was missing on the Pagami Creek fire, and it just points out how difficult a limited suppression strategy can be to perfectly execute over a period of weeks or months. Sometimes you make good decisions or you are lucky, and the weather makes the team and the agency look good. Other times, mistakes in judgement are made and the weather blows them up into a hundred thousand black acres, and smoke columns are tracked across China.
Thanks go out to Chuck and Mary
