Jennifer Brown has produced another excellent film about wildland fire management. For this one she concentrated on the Last Dance wildfire in the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge in the Everglades in south Florida. It features an informative interview with Jon Wallace who was the Incident Commander of the fire shortly before he transferred to a new job as Deputy Regional Fire Management Coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Atlanta.
Land managers should commission quality film making like this more often — it can result in improved public understanding and support for what they do.
Anheuser-Busch and the 15 craft breweries in Fort Collins, Colorado depend on clean water to produce their beer.
In 2012 the High Park Fire west of the city burned 87,000 acres and 259 homes. One resident was killed, $38 million was spent on suppression, and the insured losses totaled $113 million. But much of the damage occurred just after the fire was contained when summer thunderstorms washed ash and debris into the Cache la Poudre River, turning it black. Fort Collins and Greeley obtain much of their drinking water from the river and temporarily turned off their water intakes. Flooding in 2013 after 15 inches of rain in Rist Canyon created more problems.
Anheuser-Busch is contributing $110,000 to help The Nature Conservancy protect the watershed in the Poudre River watershed. The funds will enable the organization to improve forest conditions on a demonstration area, allowing for treatment testing and informing future larger-scale restoration projects to reduce catastrophic fires and improve water security for the people of these communities. The plans include thinning and prescribed fire.
Below is an excerpt from an article at Mother Nature Network:
…The Nature Conservancy’s prescription instructs those who wield the chainsaws on which trees to leave untouched and which trees to cut down. For example, old trees, trees with flat tops, and those that have visual nesting cavities or favorable conditions for nesting are left alone. Old species are left untouched, too. Trees are left in small clusters to give safe haven to squirrels who might become prey if they came down on the ground to get to their next tree.
The trees that are the most undesirable are Douglas firs. The prescription calls for removing 90 percent of them that are less than 10 inches in diameter. Why do Douglas firs get the chainsaw? The same thing that makes the species great-looking Christmas trees also makes them “ladder fuels” in the forest. They carry fire from the grass into the treetops via their low branches. Once the fire gets up into a tree, it then gets into other trees, even those that are adapted to fire with a lack of low branches and thicker bark. Before humans started suppressing forest fires, Douglas firs would be taken out in natural low-intensity fires and the more fire-intolerant trees would often remain. But now, it’s not unusual for all trees to burn in a forest that has become overly dense…
Below is an excerpt from an article at the Rural County Representatives of California website.
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“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has released its draft amendments to the Exceptional Events Rule, and have included as a companion a draft Guidance on Preparing Exceptional Events Demonstrations for Wildfire Events that May Influence Ozone Concentrations (Guidance). The Guidance provides methodology for air agencies to differentiate wildfire events from other planned fire events, such as prescribed burns, and to make the preparation and demonstration for these events more efficient.
The Guidance has been released in response to concerns by stakeholders, including RCRC, that the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for ozone finalized earlier this year will essentially eliminate the use of prescribed burning as a method of fuels treatment in forest management projects. The Exceptional Events Rule (Rule) allows for local and state air agencies to demonstrate events that they feel should be excluded from air quality data in their regulatory decisions. Comments on the Rule amendments and draft Guidance are due by January 19, 2016, and can be accessed here.”
Fire in the Lake San Antonio area of Monterey County, California, August, 2009. Photo by Vern Fisher.
The following article was contributed by Frank Carroll.
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Only You…
For the United States Forest Service and the other major federal, state and local wildland fire agencies, the music is playing the band. It worked OK for the Grateful Dead. It’s a different story when it comes to developing and conducting wildland fire policy.
It may surprise no one to discover that wildland fires are bigger, more costly, more damaging, and more out of control than in any decade before the present, all the way back to 1910. There was so much large fire on the ground in the 2015 fire season we ran out of superlatives to describe how big and bad they were. In many cases the fires burned together forming “charismatic megafires” of untold destruction, sometimes because we had no choice.
Author Stephen Pyne, in an often brutally honest book about where we’ve been and where we’re headed with fire management in America, observes that fire is managing us; we’re not managing fire (Between Two Fires 2015).
What began in the late 1960s as a scarcely heard warning siren that wildfire should be left to its own devices on certain wild lands (prescribed natural fire or “let burn” fires pioneered by the National Park Service) became, by 2000, a five alarm screaming wail heard round the world. Our best laid plans have come to naught. We are caught in a blizzard of falling ash, awash in a river of flying embers, and blinded by the smoke. It is clear that no human power will stop the rising tide of flames in wildlands and Red Zone suburbs where 10 percent of our homes are, no matter what the cost.
How we got here is a tale worth reading. Where we’re headed is into the fog of war, but not without guideposts and markers. Based on the very sound idea that fire should play a natural role in natural resource management, agencies and scientists spent the past 50 years trying to work out how to get it done. And they had help. The Nature Conservancy can field its own firefighters and burn its own ground. Environmentalists looked for ways to burn without having to pay for the work of preparing and herding fires, and without the expertise to help. Their grand experiment in the theology/ecology of hope over the last 50 years accelerated the fuels problem. The fuels situation is also exacerbated in places where logging results in activity fuels with resulting backlogs needing treatment and feeding wildfires.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service prescribed fire on the Arapaho National Wildlife Refuge, October 16, 2015. FWS photo by Eric Haberstick.
A wildfire resulting from an escaped prescribed fire on October 16 burned about 600 acres on the Arapaho National Wildlife Refuge, 3 miles south of Walden, Colorado. Three structures were destroyed — a barn, pump house, and mobile home used as a storage building. Firefighters from several federal agencies and Jackson County Fire Department contained the fire at 6 p.m. October 17.
9NEWS reported that two heavy air tankers, a single-engine air tanker, and heavy helicopter all made retardant drops on the fire.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) officials are convening an interagency review team with expertise in wildfire suppression, prescribed fire planning, and data analysis to investigate the escape.
Firefighters ignited the prescribed fire Friday morning, planned at 370 acres, to remove decadent vegetation, reduce wildfire risk, and improve wildlife habitat. That afternoon, although conditions fit within the required burn parameters according to the FWS, the project escaped containment lines. Firefighters reported witnessing a firewhirl.
The video below was shot by Erik Haberstick for the FWS.
Alpine Hot Shots ignite the Norbeck prescribed fire in Wind Cave National Park, South Dakota. October 21, 2014. Photo by Bill Gabbert.An article at Capital Public Radio claims that the U.S. Forest Service will not let a forest ecologist talk about an article he co-wrote titled “Reform Forest Fire Management”. The two-page opinion piece about making forests less prone to wildfire appeared in Science, and was written primarily by USFS and university employees.
Below is an excerpt from the article at Capital Public Radio about the controversy:
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“The US Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station won’t let forest ecologist Malcolm North talk about the study he authored in the journal Science.
The agency even unsuccesfully requested that Science editors hold the article or remove North’s name and affiliation from the peer-reviewed study. The paper “Reform Forest Fire Management” says suppressing every fire in overgrown forests is not only expensive but dangerous and ill-advised.
Strong words perhaps, but UC Berkeley Fire Scientist Scott Stephens, who co-authored the paper, says they are not controversial.
“I read the paper many times,” says Stephens. “I just didn’t see something jump, like this would be something that would really cause great problems.”
The study considers ways to make forests less prone to wildfire, by thinning trees in overgrown forests, using controlled burns or allowing natural fires to burn under the right conditions.
US Forest Service policy actually supports those actions, but the authors point out such efforts rarely occur. In the decade ending in 2008, only 0.4 percent of ignitions were allowed to burn as managed wildfires…”
