SHARE THIS SHOW:
ON THE BLOG:
RECENTLY ON TOL:
TOL Our Town
- A tumblr site dedicated to the people and places that make up Oregon and Southwest Washington.
TAGS:
It's wildfire season in Oregon and crews from Ashland to Olallie Lake are busy battling the blazes. The men and women on the front lines may be working together to fight fire, but they often work for different agencies with different goals. Tensions arise around when to suppress a fire that could threaten homes or private land and when to let it burn and benefit the forest ecosystem. It's intense work that requires as much strategy as sweat, where one misstep could turn a 30-acre fire into a 3,000-acre inferno in a few hours' time.
When do fire crews get called in? Who determines the strategy for fighting a fire? What's the responsibility of private landowners near public land? We'll explore these questions with people who spend their time on the front lines.
Photo credit: Joseph Robertson / Creative Commons
-
"When do fire crews get called in?"
Back in the 1950s and earlier, the law was that if you were an adult male driving down the highway near a forest fire, you could be stopped and immediately drafted to help fight that fire.
-
The Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF) has protection responsibilities for private and non-federal public forestlands lands in Oregon. Most private forestland owners see their holdings as an investment or as providing other benefits that would be lost of their land burned. For that reason, ODF’s approach to wildfire is to minimize damage to the lands we protect at the lowest cost within the context of providing for firefighter and public safety.
Federal land management agencies such as the Forest Service and BLM have a broader range of choices; from full, aggressive suppression to allowing a fire to burn for to provide resource benefits and/or to minimize suppression costs.
Tension between these two policies arise mainly when a fire is burning on, or threatening multiple (i.e., state & federal) jurisdictions or is threatening to do so. A decision to implement less than full suppression tactics can become a transfer of risk from one party to another.
ODF recognizes and accepts the role of fire in forest ecosystems. There is a need to re-introduce fire especially in our fire-dependent forests. However, there is a right time and right place to do that. Allowing a fire to burn uncontrolled, in the middle of August, in almost any location is not appropriate, because despite all the fancy modeling, the unexpected does happen on a regular basis. Instead, federal agencies be given funding to expand their use of prescribed fires so they can decide where and when to burn an area.
Some will argue that we should not suppress fires because it is too dangerous for the firefighters. Wildland firefighting is an inherently dangerous business. Suppressing a fire while it is still small is much safer than a larger fire. A smaller fire requires fewer resources (people) and thus less exposure to injury than a large fire. A few individuals can suppress a small fire while a larger fire may require hundreds or thousands of people to suppress. Most firefighter injuries/fatalities are not the result of burnovers. The leading cause of injury or fatality is traveling to or from the fire followed by heart attacks and aviation accidents.
George Ponte
Manager, Central Oregon Forest Protection District, ODF
(541) 460-3025 -
George summarizes the situation very well...the federal and state agencies do have different missions when it comes to fire management, and this can set us up for conflict when a fire threatens to cross from public (federal) to private (state-protected) lands. Our job at the local level is to continue to try to understand and respect the our respective missions, so that we can continue to work together.
I use fire modeling and a careers' worth of experience in fire management to help federal land managers make good decisions about managing large fires - decisions that make good use of taxpayer dollars, are safer for fire fighters, and in many cases, are better for the land. This often means using existing roads and other fuel breaks to stop a fire instead of building miles and miles of firelines with bulldozers and fire crews...which can mean that the fire gets bigger and lasts longer as it comes to the roads. It's almost as if we were working to stop a fire where it wants to stop instead of where it is very difficult to do so.
Fire is a natural process in much of our western forests - and in Wilderness areas, allowing natural processes to occur is part of our direction from the American public. The state Department of Forestry has no such mission. Using roads on the perimeter of Wilderness areas to stop a fire can be a very cost-effective and safe way to doing this. We showed this very well on a fire in northeastern Oregon last year, when we managed a fire for 60 days (from August 1 to October 1) that eventually restored 14,000 acres of Wilderness, saving an estimated $2-3 million in fire suppression costs, and injuring no one...that was a success, one that the American taxpayers should be proud of.
Bill Aney
US Forest Service, Regional Fuels Specialist and Long Term Fire Analyst
(971) 235-2004
-
For George and all the others who shared their phone numbers today: for your own protection, you inspired me to write this.
-
Hello Think Out Loud
You should interview my daughter in law, Sara Jensen, during your show. Sara now lives in Estacada and is the lead author of the book "Living with Fire":
(http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520255890).
You can get her phone number if you wish by calling me at 503-658-4047. I'm sure she would be a valuable source of scientific information about this controversial and crucial subject.
Bob OBrien
Portland State University
-
bobobob -
Would that you had posted earlier! I'd already booked a full show by the time I saw this, but Sara sounds like a great resource for future shows. I'll make sure to connect with her.
And Sara, if you're reading this, call in! We'd love to get your $.02 on the air, time permitting.
-Rebecca
-
If one choses to live in Hurricane Heights, Tornado Alley, a flood plain or tsunami zone, or they live near a forest, they ought to be prepared to have their lives uprooted by natural and human causes.
One can only do so much to protect property from fire. Life has risks so plan accordingly. If one lives in a hazardous place their insurance premiums should reflect the relatively higher risk.
Did indigenous Americans fight fires or did they get out of the way and let them burn? Seems like we need to absorb pages from their wisdom. They lived here 10,000 years before we arrived. They obviously developed methods for dealing with fire. Of course there weren't as many of them as there are of us, but we might adapt if we magically attain some common sense.
It's rather difficult for a rain forest to burn when there are a whole lot of wet and mossy trees keeping the climate cool and rainy. Seems that if we cut down a bunch of trees, build enough condos, strip malls and parking lots, we create general conditions for non wetness.
Fires become more frequent and destructive as things predictably dry and shrivel up over several hundred years of human-ecosystem imbalance. Global climate might be warming up because we've cut down a lot of forests that were keeping the planet cooler. But we all know global climate change isn't real.
-
After the Tillamook Forest burned three times, all of which were human-caused, there was a huge outcry from the public to protect Oregon's resources from these types of unwanted wildfires. As a result, the Keep Oregon Green Association was formed and, is today, 70 years later, continue to raise the awareness of wildfire causes and to educate Oregonians about behaviors that prevent human-caused wildfires in Oregon.
Careless humans cause over 70 percent of the wildfires that occur on Oregon Department of Forestry-protected lands in Oregon. It's an even higher percentage on some federal lands. Backyard burning, equipment use , camp and warming fires, and smoking lead the causes.
There is a much greater demand for recreation in the forests, and more and more people are moving into the wildland/urban interface (WUI) where the trees have been encroaced upon by houses. People love to live in the forests. But they MUST take responsibility to protect their properties by using good behaviors that prevent fires. Otherwise, not only homes, but LIVES, will be lost.
Mary Ellen Holly, President/CEO
Keep Oregon Green Association
www.keeporegongreen.org
-
Last year the rate of Oregon Timber Harvests was the lowest since the Great Depression. Ironically despite enviormentalist concerns, we have more forrested land than we did 100 years ago. We are not making new forrestry roads. Timber regulation like the Spotted Owl ephisode is strangling an industry that built Oregon.
Every year billions of tons of BioMass are added in forests: leaves, pine needles, branches, and wood. If we do not sustainably harvest the wood, we are living in a mountain of Gunpowder that will be consumed in a terrible fierce acute firestorm that will rival Hurricane Katrina in disaster. Fuel, air and a spark; wait for a prolonged dry summer and a hot dry sustained wind.
The fire battle is lost if we do not preemptively harvest selectively and reduce huge fuel piles gradually. Great Forrests become Great Fires, that no enviormentalist would condone.
-
One of the problems that a caller touched on was the organization of fire resources with contract crews. Contract engines and crews are private businesses and depending on the fire season, these organizations may not make enough money to pay the bills and then "go under." In the past, all fires were fought by agency resources, but over the years the taxpayers have cut funding from these agencies and made them rely more on contract equipment and resources.
The dark side of this relationship is that employees of contract crews have an incentive for wildfires to happen... most of our fires are human-caused.
Do the math.
-
Greetings,
Before retirement, I led a local wildfire planning effort that included landowner education and database development in the Columbia River Gorge. An Oregond Department of Forestry colleague referred to this region as a "wind tunnel lined with flammable material."The following obervations are probably known by those in wildland and structural fire. I offer them for the public for their consideration.
Fire exists when adequate fuels, oxygen and heat are present. the fire triangle.
Residents in our wildland-urban interface tended to be blase' or even opposed to taking easily implemented steps that can reduce wildfire risk to their structures.
Information on these steps is abaialbe from Extension offices, Conservations Districts, Oregon Department of Forestry and Washington Department of Natural Resources offices.
WUI resident concern about wildfire increases greatly after nearby fire incident. An eduational moment
Wind driven fires may last less than a day, but can develop so quickly that significant damage occurs before resources can be marshalled or that available resources are overwhelmed.
WUI residents who fail to take steps to protect their own properties are their own worst enemies. Firefighters will not deploy to an area that cannot be protected or that has no escape route. Better to lose a multi-million dollar estate than to have one fire fighter suffer injury or loss of life. This a no-brainer.
The structural volunteer fire chiefs and wildland fire managers our project worked with at the local, state and federal levels are smart, hardworking, can-do men and women. They fully understand the risks involved and the constaints on their abilities.
Developing Community Wildfire Protection plans can bring local communities together and access grant funds for fuels mitigation. To be successful, the plan writing process needs to be completable within 6 months and to deliver a solid usable document. Local volunteer firefighters, and state and federal cooperators have short tolerance for ineffective process.
Be safe.
Wecanoe2
-
I fought fire for five seasons as part of my work with BLM and the Forest Service, the last two in and around the Eagle Cap Wilderness in the Wallowa Whitman Forest. Fire suppression was generally good duty. Hard, dirty, adventurous--rewarding for the camaradarie, the 'nobility' of the work, the fire pay. But, honestly, most of the fires we worked in the wilderness area should have been allowed to burn. Most were not going anywhere. We cut one lone snag on the top of ridge over the Imnaha, rolled it in the snow, and tried to finish as many of the excellent smoke jumper rations as we could before packing out.
The many years of following the Smokey the Bear ethic lead us to be part of the problem with the heavy fuel loads we now see in the forest.
A large fire burned the south end of Ollalie Lake, one of our favorite spots on the Mt. Hood. It was a crown fire and burned hot--baking the duff...it's a beautiful snag riddled bleakscape but it has nothing to recommend it in comparison to the diverse alpine forests that surround it and echo its previous life. Now another fire is burning in another very favorite spot not far from there.
These burns will return to a state similar to the lush forests around them, but not in my life time, so for us they are a sad transformation...not unlike losing a favorite pet or neighborhood woodland to a subdivision.
It makes me want to say, "stop that one if you can" it's just too beautiful to lose. Nature has no such sentimental standards. Nature has a different standard and different scale of time and sense of place. Like so many situations where we "engage", "improve" or "meddle" in nature--depending how we might view our intention--we never know the full impact of our actions until many generations later. Who has such a well polished glass that they can look into the future and confidently see the new forest for the trees?
-
Tom, thank you for the eloquent pictures you paint. Earlier in this thread Jacob also mentioned the fuel build up from fire suppression policies contributing to future fires. We touched on this in a past program about thinning forests; we'll certainly will keep it in mind for a deeper future look.
Thanks, Emily
-
Comments are now closed.
Homeowners, realize; global warming is real, future fires will be stronger; suppression will fail. Adapt into a fire adapted species; if living in fuels.
An option to revert to, when supression will fail. Position ground. Command critical site. Train-ready to execute an "ESCAPE FIRE" form "SAFETY HARBOR AREA".
"BLACK DONUT OF DEATH" a survival technique to parry extreme fire storms, make them pass, and do no harm. Agencies, & interface dwellers.
We see thousands of homes lost over and over again, this says: suppression forces know how to deal with easy fires. Current wisdom "Defensible Space" contributes to an increase in speed of a huge fire going up to and destroying homes with plenty of defensible space.
Defensible Space needs augmentation with three circular control lines around the critical site. Train society, when to revert to, Escape/survival method; before fire storm destroys critical site.
The Company "DRAGON SLAYERS INC. located in Nehalem, Or. Pioneered, developed this concept.
Last year in Victoria, Australia a fire storm swept through and killed 173 people, destroyed over 2,000 homes. These people were all following "Defensible Space" doctrines, and were set up with suppression tools. We tried to tell them, that this would fail. It did and stands as a clear warning of what we are headed toward.
Grass is the main killer of homes and people. It stands as the easiest fuel type to mitigate, yet the fire agency people cannot understand when to drop traditional suppression concepts, and revert to something that works.
My phone number is 503-812-6974 cell, 503-368-7099 home.
Web sites are: www.homelandterrorism.com www.dragonslayers.com www.wildfiretools.com
troop emonds