Brins BAER: Update on the Aftermath
July 27th, 2006
The Brins Fire BAER site is up (we lamented the Brins Fire previously here). This is one of the best BAER websites we have ever seen.
The Brins Fire BAER (Burned Area Emergency Response) Team assembled June 29 and a meeting was held with cooperating agencies and key community contacts to discuss the BAER process and proposed schedule. Over the next 7 days (June 29 to July 6) the team evaluated physical attributes, slope, vegetation, soils, burn severity, and specific implications of the burn area. The team identified “values at risk”, emergency funding needed, and recommended treatments for the burn area.
The Team has already noted that critical resource values were damaged, and that more threats were generated by the fire. Impacted resources are numerous and include plants, animals, people, structures, roads, and the entire hydrology of the area.
More reports and analyses will be issued by the Brins BAER Team in the future. We hope the Team will note that all the damages and continuing risks emanate directly from the lack of stewardship by the residents and agencies: their de facto abandonment of the landscape. We hope they also figure out that their confusion and inertia are reinforced by their lack of appreciation for the thousands of years of stewardship that preceded them.
We never give up hope.
Here are some of our own SOSF updates:
We are still puttering away on our Back to the Rim and Landscapes of Lewis and Clark series. More to come on both.
The Black Crater Fire is now up to 400 acres and projected to go to 5,000 or more. Evacuations of local communities are being planned, again. It’s the same old drill: No Touch, Let It Burn, Run For Your Lives. The USFS is engaged in Kevorkian forest management west of the Continental Divide. (We have no idea what they do east of it. Probably not much better is our guess.)