In the previous post we called “landmark” the recent decision issued by Judge Morrison C. England of the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of California, regarding forest thinnings on the Plumas National Forest. By landmark we mean the decision establishes new precedents (long overdue) in our legal system.

Judge England’s logic is impeccable. He found that catastrophic fires destroy endangered species habitat and endanger human habitat, too. He also found that thinning forests in the right way helps make forests resilient to fire and fires easier to control. Judge England wrote in his decision:

DFPZs [Defensible Fuel Profile Zones, i.e. properly thinned areas] have hence been proven effective in reducing fire intensity, controlling fire spread, and protecting ecological resources like habitat…

Fire protection through vegetation management in these areas is therefore important both from the standpoint of wildlife and humans. For wildlife, unchecked wildfire may completely destroy habitat. For humans, both lives and property are at stake…

On the evidence of the evidence before it, the Court believes that a greater danger of irreparable harm exists in not vigorously addressing the over-forested conditions that are present within the Plumas National Forest. This danger is not speculative but very real, as evidenced by the large wildfires that ravaged the Plumas this very summer…

The long-term benefit of preventing stand replacing fires which completely destroy habitat is preferable over any short term benefits derived from retaining dense forest structure preferred by old growth species…

The England Decision establishes the legal doctrine that saving a forest from catastrophic destruction is better for wildlife (and people) than incinerating said forest, even if actual, human, forest stewardship is required to save it.

To the average lay person this sounds like ordinary common sense, and so it is. Our legal system, however and sad to say, does not normally run on common sense, at least in regards to forests. Hence the England Decision is a major breakthrough.

Continue reading this entry »

SOS Forest operatives report that the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise will be featured in a story on CBS’s 60 Minutes this coming Sunday. The subject of the story is allegedly forest fires and global warming.

As tempting as it might be to do a pre-review, we are not going to. We will instead watch with an open mind, and then cut the blankety-blanks to shreds afterwards.

From the NPS Morning Report (here) and Dave Olson, Boise National Forest Public Affairs Officer:

CBS To Report On Global Warming And Wildland Fire

On the evening of Sunday, October 21st, the CBS News show 60 Minutes is expected to feature a story on wildland fire and the impacts of global warming. 60 Minutes airs Sundays at 7 p.m. ET/PT — check your local listings for the broadcast time in your area.

Facilitated by the staff of the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) External Affairs Group, the story features interviews on the fire line with Tom Boatner, the Bureau of Land Management’s chief of fire operations in his role as the chair of the national Multi-Agency Coordinating Group, and Jeanne Pincha-Tulley, chief of fire and aviation management on the Tahoe National Forest in California, who serves as a Type I incident commander for California Team 3. Both individuals were interviewed by Scott Pelley, who has been a 60 Minutes correspondent since 2004. Previously, he served as a correspondent for 60 Minutes II and as chief White House correspondent for the CBS Evening News. Upon returning from Afghanistan, Pelley traveled to Ketchum, Idaho, to visit with Boatner, Pincha-Tulley and fire staff on the line at the Castle Rock fire.

David Gelber, the director of Pelley’s feature noted that interest in the subject of global warming and wildland fire was prompted after reading articles by Tony Westerling  and Thomas Swetnam, director of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona. Swetnam was also interviewed by Pelley on-site at the tree ring lab in Tucson.

Across the board, the fire community conveyed the full spectrum of wildland fire management, focusing on the increase in the size and number of fires over the years, the impact of fuels buildup on fire-prone and fire-adapted landscapes, changes in fire behavior, the concerns and complexities of managing wildland fire in the wildland urban interface, the role of fire in various landscapes and the changing needs and methods of managing fire. It should be noted that the final story may take on a totally different perspective!

The CBS news feature was supported by the interagency fire community via hours of consultation, research and on-site coordination and support of numerous staff across multiple disciplines.

The initial inquiry calls were made by CBS News in mid-June, followed by on-site visits to NIFC in late July and visits to two fire incidents located in Idaho, the East Zone Complex and the Castle Rock Fire.

60 Minutes has finished in Nielsen’s top ten programs a record 23 consecutive seasons and averaged 13.6 million viewers each Sunday evening over the 2005-06 season. Depending upon the football game that precedes the show, there is the potential for up to 22 million viewers.

(Special thanks to Roberta D’Amico, NPS Fire Management at NIFC for overall facilitation and Dave Olson, Boise National Forest Public Affairs Officer for coordination on-site.)

Modern medicine saves lives. This is a fact widely acknowledged by our society. Sometimes it happens that parents of an ailing child refuse medical treatments which would save the child’s life, a “moral” decision based on cultish religious reasons. It also happens that authorities often step in to remove the parents’ custody rights and treat the child in defiance of the parents’ wishes. Such cases may be rare but are often given prominence in the Media when they do occur.

So too, modern forest stewardship, and in particular restoration forestry, can save ailing forests. By restoring thicket forests to their historical norm of open, park-like conditions, and in addition restoring historical anthropomorphic fire regimes, forests can be saved from catastrophic incineration and conversion to brush.

When dense forests burn, the fires kill every tree, old and young alike, by intense heat of combustion or by subsequent bark beetle infestation. Restoring historical conditions sustains forests by protecting them from total mortality canopy fires, by maintaining fire-resilient old-growth trees, and by enhancing the capacity of forests to grow trees to old ages.

Continue reading this entry »

The proposition is oft stated that catastrophic fires are good for our forests. The reasons given are that fire is “natural” and inevitable, that the forest trees and plants are adapted to fire, and even “dependent” on fire, and that fire “rejuvenates” the forest.

That proposition lacks nuance. No two fires are alike. Fire A is not Fire B. No two forests are alike, either. Conditions vary, phenomena vary, and effects vary. The outcomes of catastrophic fire are not random, however, although they do have some elements of chaos.

Chaos is a pre-deterministic pattern disruption. That is, the outcomes depend on initial conditions.

Given the initial conditions of a fuel-laden, thicket-type forest, catastrophic fire has a tendency to largely eliminate that forest from the landscape, and replace it with a different ecosystem. The new ecosystem develops new patterns, determined by slope, soil, exposure, etc., but almost invariably the new ecosystem does not have trees.

Modern catastrophic forest fires kill all the trees. Young and old-growth trees alike succumb in the intense heat. Modern fires also sear away the shrub and herbaceous layers, and leave a carpet of ash and charcoal, with patches of exposed mineral soil. No living biomass remains above ground.

Continue reading this entry »

Last July on the Lewis and Clark NF the Ahorn Fire blew up, trapping 35 firefighters in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. The firefighters, and 17 backpackers they rescued, hiked out, bushwhacking 16 miles through thickets of lodgepole pine and spruce while the fire chased them, raining burning embers and burning alongside them.

The firefighters chose to walk out after witnessing one of their helicopters crash. The pilot escaped uninjured, but the firefighters refused to board the second helicopter.

The Ahorn Incident was reported by Karl Puckett of the Great Falls Tribune (here). Some excerpts:

A day in hell: Ahorn fire burns into firefighters’ memories

By KARL PUCKETT, Tribune Staff Writer

It really was the day all hell broke loose — July 14. Day 4 of the Ahorn fire west of Augusta.

The fire stood at 170 acres, and the smokejumpers and hotshots had the fire 60 percent contained.

… Ian Bardwell, the trails and stock manager for the Rocky Mountain Ranger District in Choteau… said the 35 smokejumpers and hotshots were feeling good about the situation when the Ahorn decided to run.

Continue reading this entry »

The Yellow Pine Fire, a complex of fires that occurred this summer in Idaho (see here) has burned over 750,000 acres (1200 square miles) directly atop the Idaho Batholith.

From the Digital Atlas of Idaho (here):

The Idaho Batholith is a composite mass of granitic plutons covering approximately 15,400 square miles in central Idaho. The outer perimeter of the batholith is irregular and in plan view it has an hourglass shape. It is approximately 200 miles long in the north-south direction and averages about 75 miles wide in an east-west direction.

Batholiths are made of granite and are prone to mass wasting. From the Wikipedia (here):

Batholiths exposed at the surface are also subjected to huge pressure differences between their former homes deep in the earth and their new homes at or near the surface. As a result, their crystal structure expands slightly and over time. This manifests itself by a form of mass wasting called exfoliation. This form of erosion causes convex and relatively thin sheets of rock to slough off the exposed surfaces of batholiths (a process accelerated by frost wedging). The result is fairly clean and rounded rock faces. A famous example of the result of this process is Half Dome, which located in the world-famous Yosemite Valley.

Not only is the parent rock easily weathered, batholitic (granitic) soils are highly erodable. From an article in Erosion Control Magazine, March/April 2001 by Roberta Baxter (here):

In central Idaho, the Clear Creek fire [on the Salmon-Challis NF] burned more than 200,000 acres, “the largest fire in 2000.” … In some areas, the Forest Service has shored up roads so they won’t be washed away or undermined by erosion. Along the Salmon River the vegetation burned, so the river fills with mud after a rainstorm.

Increased erosion after a fire results from removal by incineration of the ground cover, including the tree canopies that intercept direct rainfall. In addition, cooked soils have more water repellency, which reduces water infiltration, increases runoff, and thereby also increases erosion. Studies have shown that sedimentation in streams can increase by a factor of seven (or more) after a fire (here):

Forest Fire Effects on Hillslope Erosion: What We Know

by Peter R. Robichaud, USDA- Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Moscow, Idaho

DeBano et al. (1996) demonstrated that following a wildfire in ponderosa pine, sediment yields from a low severity fire recovered to normal levels after three years, but moderate and severely burned watersheds took 7 and 14 years, respectively. Nearly all fires increase sediment yield, but wildfires in steep terrain produce the greatest amounts. Noble and Lundeen (1971) reported an average annual sediment production rate of 2.5 t ac-1 (5.7 Mg ha-1) from a 900 ac (365 ha) burn on steep river breaklands in the South Fork of the Salmon River, Idaho. This rate was approximately seven times greater than hillslope sediment yields from similar, unburned lands in the vicinity.

The upshot? The Yellow Pine Fire denuded hillsides and cooked soils across hundreds of square miles of the Idaho Batholith, and the erosion this coming winter is going to be colossal, stupendous, and beyond anything ever seen in Idaho’s history.

The mud will come flowing down creeks and streams in the South and Middle Forks of the Salmon River, increasing turbidity and burying spawning gravels. Top soil will become silt. The denuded hillsides will become riverine mud banks.

The Payette and Boise National Forests will flow to the sea, or at least to the nearest slack water.

Logging has been enjoined on the Payette and Boise NF’s for many years due to the potential for increased erosion. Even delicate, partial-cut, Healthy Forest Restoration Act projects have been kiboshed. Those projects were slated to cover only a few hundred acres, anyway. The 1200 square miles roasted this summer dwarf the handful of micro-mini-nano projects rejected by “environmentalists.”

Wait until they see what megafire does to the environment. Or maybe they won’t see, because they don’t wish to look.

Roasted forests, fried wildlife, cooked soils, and mud in the creeks; this is the “forest health” imparted by the USFS to the public lands on the Idaho Batholith. You could say the environment has “taken a bath,” but that would be a bad pun and a gross understatement.

The forests of the Payette and Boise National Forests will never recover from the “healthy” treatment received this summer.

But just you watch. The enviro nuts will soon be out in full force declaring the blackened, dead forests are beautiful, and full of snag-loving wildlife, and the sediment-filled streams are just fine, and everything is just ducky, and why don’t we do it again next year?

That’s what passes for forest management in this our post-modern age: nutball declarations at total odds with reality, but in perfect concert with political power broking.

You lose, the forests lose, the rivers lose, the near-by communties lose, but the politicians and their supporters will win. Hooray for holocaust, vote for me.

Meanwhile, the Idaho Batholith will shed tears, and millions of tons of soil.

The GW Fire is now 60 percent contained at 7,500 acres. Over 840 firefighters and command personnel are finishing the mop-up and will begin to demobilize soon. The trucks, helicopters, air tankers and bulldozers will be driven, flown, or hauled away.

What will remain is the GW Burn, a blackened, charred, mostly dead tract of former old-growth forest with ancient heritage.

The wasteland of the GW Burn connects the Lake George Burn with the Cache Mountain Burn and completes the incineration of the upper-slope Metolius watershed forest. The scar of incinerated old-growth now extends from Warm Springs in the north to the South Sister, a scorched earth sear of over 150,000 acres. The following Burns make up this destroyed forest landscape (this list is missing a few smaller ones):

Cache Mountain Fire (2002) - 3,894 acs

Eyerly Complex Fire (2002) - 23,573 acs

B and B Complex Fire (2003) - 90,769 acs

Link Fire (2003) - 3,574 acs

Black Crater Fire (2006) - 9,400 acs

Puzzle Fire (2006) - 6,150 acs

Lake George Fire (2006) - 5,740 acs

GW Fire (2007) - 7,500 acs

Total - 150,600 acres in six fire seasons

The GW Fire was the last piece of the puzzle and completes the awful picture.

Some lower-slope forest remains near Camp Sherman, clearly slated for incineration in the next year or two. Recent Angora-style “thinnings” along the Camp Sherman Road have left a dense canopy over-topping unburned piles of red slash, a virtual guarantee of 100 percent mortality via firestorm soon.

For a larger image click (here, 434KB)

The entire Metolius watershed forest was anthropogenic: created and maintained by human-set, stewardship fires. Thousands of years of regular, frequent, seasonal, human-set fires engendered an open, park-like forest of scattered, gigantic, old-growth ponderosa pine trees (and Douglas-fir trees at the western edges) towering above prairie-like understories of bunch grasses, wildflowers, lily fields, and berry patches that stretched for miles.

No area of the Metolius watershed hosted more human activity than the area of the GW Burn. The Santiam Pass ’southern route’ was the main trafficked way in the Central Cascades for the last 6,000 years, at least. The first Euro-American route, the Old Santiam Wagon Road, followed the main Indian road through the area that is now the GW Burn.

[Sidenote: Mt. Mazama exploded about 7,700 years ago, buried Santiam Pass in 20 feet or more of volcanic ash, and obliterated signs of earlier use. Archaeologists have discovered “campsites” as old as 11,000 years at nearby Paulina Lake, however. So-called “campsites,” that are actually caves with deep middens showing continuous use over thousands of years, might be better termed “homesites.”]

An old-growth hearth tree in the vicinity of Santiam Pass. Travelers built their warming/cooking fires up against big trees in those ancient days. For a larger image click (here, 394KB)

The GW Burn marks the last of this special heritage forest. There is none left to burn, on the east side of the Pass. The western extensions and routes have a few (not many) unlogged and unburned patches of original forest left. That is, some relic trees still stand, and few patches of ancient montane prairie remain here and there, west of the crest.

Local residents are still concerned about wildfires emanating from the Federal Estate. The hazard has been reduced but not abated, and sprouting brush will soon fuel new fires.

The local residents have good reason to be concerned. In 2002 the Cache Mountain Fire destroyed 2 homes and 13,000 homes were evacuated, and the Eyerly Fire destroyed 37 structures. Residents have been evacuated during the B&B Fire (2003) and the Black Crater Fire (2006), as well as the GW Fire, still smoking.

 In 1996, the Skeleton Fire damaged destroyed 30 homes near Bend, six years after the Awbrey Hall Fire (1990)  burned 22 homes, in a platted subdivision, inside the Bend Urban Growth Boundary.

The Awbrey Hall Fire was an arson-caused fire in the unkempt and holocaust-ready Deschutes NF northwest of Bend that roared ten miles into town on medium-light west winds. The homeowners whose houses burned down were blamed for their losses because they didn’t have “defensible space” to withstand a firestorm generated on unmanaged Federal land. The Awbrey Hall Fire led to the invention of the concept “Wildland-Urban Interface,” or Whooie, as a means to penalized private citizen victims and distract attention away from the true criminal perps, the USFS.

No homes burned down in the GW Fire. No modern homes, that is. Plenty of ancient “campsites” burned, though, and were obliterated beyond recognition or recovery.

It is almost as if Mt. Mazama has erupted again and wiped the past, our human past, off the face of the Earth forever.

A fire started yesterday in the Deschutes National Forest, perhaps inappropriately named the GW Fire. The fire is near Mt. Washington, but is closer to Cache Mountain, the site of the Cache Mountain Fire of 2002, and the B&B Fire of 2003, and not far from the Black Crater Fire, the Lake George Fire, and the Puzzle Fire, all of 2006.

The GW Fire is not in designated wilderness. It is closer to Meadow Lake, Blue Lake, and Suttle Lake, east of Hoodoo and west of Black Butte, near the Old Santiam Wagon Road over Santiam Pass. The GW Fire is 1,200 acres at last report.

In previous years in this area, fires of this magnitude have blownup and threatened the communities to the east, including Camp Sherman, Black Butte, and Sisters. Last year a Type 1 IMT was dispatched immediately to the Black Crater Fire, because the imminent danger required full response.

This year the Central Oregon Type 2 IMT has been dispatched. Not a Type 1, but the good news is the COIMT (here) is one of the best firefighting teams in the nation, and in our judgment better than most Type 1 IMT’s.

The CO2’s (as we fondly refer to them) under IC Tom Goheen jumped all over the Ball Point Fire earlier this summer and snuffed it at 1,237 acres, in the process saving some of our favorite forests and probably the towns of Friend and Tygh Valley, too (see here). They also corraled the Wsa Fire after the Tribal crews watched it for month, until it blew up and the CO2’s had to be called in.

We have a lot of confidence in the CO2’s. In addition to their experience and skill, the GW Fire is in the Santiam Pass region, and there’s not much green forest left to burn there. The Deschutes NF, under the leadership of morons, has burned nearly every acre they “own” and much of the neighbors’ too. But the CO2’s are NOT the Deschutes NF and they do their firefighting thing as well as anyone and better than most.

The CO2’s also have some of the best public affairs specialists of any IMT regardless of type. The GW Fire is not up on InciWeb yet, but when it is up, the info reports will be straightforward, factual, and well-written.

See (here) for a photo from the B&B Burn looking south towards the Cache Mountain Burn and the general vicinity of the GW Fire.

From the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center (here):

GW Fire

Status: Active 
Lead Agency: USFS 
Location: 15 Miles West of Sisters, OR in the Mount Washington Wilderness
Latitude 44° 20′ 35″ (44.3431)   Longitude 121° 48′ 22″ (-121.8061)  
Fire Start Date: 2007-08-31 
Acres: 300.00   [latest report is 1,200]
Square Miles: 0.46  [more like 2 sq mi]
Percent Contained: 0 
Threatened Structures: 0  [nearest is probably Suttle Lake Lodge]
Expected Containment: unknown 
Cause: Lightning

Status: Will transition to the Central Oregon Type-2 Team tomorrow afternoon. In-brief is at 0630hrs. 
Total People: 54  [will increase with transition to COIMT]
Terrain: Medium difficulty 
Safety: Burning out of the Wilderness 

This Info Updated 2007-09-01

This picture of the blogging forester was taken two days ago in the B&B Burn (2003).

For a larger image click (here, 990KB)

The Nature Conservancy and the Wilderness Society, in paid cooperation with the Wildland Fire Leadership Council, wants you to admire the beauty in this scene. They think they can convince you that dead, burned forests, such as the Deschutes NF pictured above, are lovely to behold (here, here, here, and here).

They take their cue from Cascadia Summer in 2003 (here):

The forest looked amazingly beautiful… [in] stark contrast to the lush green forests we were used to seeing along Fall Creek, but beautiful nonetheless. Ferns had already begun sprouting back up through the ash. Scorched Doug Firs and cedars sparkled in the sunlight…

Afterwards we chose a serene spot in the burn next to the creek and spoke of the energy we received from the forest. Then we jumped into the creek and promised the forest that we would use that energy to defend it at all costs from the greedy timber companies now drooling over the opportunity presented to them by this natural disturbance.

The trip to Clark seemed all the more appropriate with Bush coming to Oregon to ram his “healthy forest initiative” agenda down our throats. With a fire “spontaneously” occurring near Camp Sherman, where Bush was going to have a fundraiser and push his deforestation agenda, one has to wonder if this isn’t the future…

Many recent controversial “salvage” timber sales have officially been declared unsolved arsons.

The fire “near Camp Sherman” that the eco-terrorists/arsonists referred to was the B&B Fire, which roasted and destroyed 90,000 acres of the Deschutes NF. The aftermath, four years later, is pictured above.

It is not beautiful. Note that the blogging forester is not smiling.

Mike, a few more pix for you.
 
Some of them are “Urban Lots” that are owned and “managed” by the California Tahoe Conservancy and USFS in order to “protect the sensitive,” mingled within the developed, as required by the TRPA to “Keep Tahoe Blue.” (But that’s a whole other story about abuse of property rights, regulatory takings, and sub-legal eminent domain.)
 
While homeowners near the Angora Fire provided defensible space as much as possible, and as much as they were allowed, most “public” lots had barely achieved any proper treatment.
 
It has been speculated that these neglected government parcels acted much like wicks, thereby fueling much more fire into the neighborhoods.

This theory is contentious, as preliminary forensic analyses have reached opposite conclusions:

Trees burn = Homes burn?
Homes burn = Trees burn?
 
Another typical WUI Fire and After Burn Boxing Match. I hope that the obvious will be knocked into many heads.

Tallac

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Tallac, it does seem rather obvious that the forest fire burned the homes. The forest fire happened first, then the homes burned, not the other way around. There is a logic to that; the Arrow of Time only points one way.

However, it is not surprising that the anti-human, anti-forest crowd is perplexed by the Arrow of Time. It is a deep concept.

Mike

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