Category Archives: Wildfire

News that a prescribed fire in Florida escaped control and burned 36 homes reminds me of a fire the Forest Service lit ten weeks ago near my home in central Oregon. To create a fuel break, the fire was set across a county road from the community of homes that forms the denser part of Camp Sherman.

Click on any image for a larger view.

Western forests are different from those in Florida, whose long growing seasons allow the rapid accumulation of flammable materials. The typical forest forest around Camp Sherman is ponderosa pine over knee-high (with some waist-high) shrubs, often with a few ponderosa pine seedlings in the mix. It takes many decades for enough fuels to collect to make these forests susceptible to major fires; according to a Forest Service report, less than 15 percent of national forests are of a type that needs frequent light fires (described as “historical fire regime I” in the report) and have had their vegetation significantly altered by management (“condition class 3”). Continue reading →

Amazingly, a large wildfire is still burning in California as the year nears its end. Supposedly the largest California wildfire in recorded history, the Thomas fire has burned nearly 300,000 acres and more than 1,000 homes and other structures.

A firefighter looks at the Thomas Fire on Christmas day.

While the Thomas fire is not quite 100 percent contained, any additional acres it burns will not much change the year’s total of 9.6 million acres burned, which is almost 50 percent more than the previous ten-year average of 6.5 million acres. The extent of burning in California (more than 1.2 million acres) and the Pacific Northwest (more than 1.0 million acres) fueled controversies over public land management in general. Continue reading →

If you live in a fire-prone area, which includes most of California, it is not a good idea to allow ivy and other plants to cover the sides of your building, as this winery and this church did near Santa Rosa. Both were lost to last week’s wildfires.

Similarly, if you are a legislator in a fire-prone state, it is not a good idea to outlaw fire-resistant developments. As now-retired Forest Service researcher Jack Cohen relates in the above video, one requirement for making your home fire-safe is to have no large flammable structures within 100 feet of the home. That pretty much means people should build on one-acre or larger lots. Continue reading →

Today is National Eclipse Day, and thanks to the Milli, Nena Spring, and Whitewater fires, I’m likely to be viewing it through a lens of smoke. So this has me thinking about wildfires and wondering if it is true, as some claim, that environmentalists are ultimately responsible for the increase in acres burned in the last decade or so.

Partly due to pressure from environmentalists, federal land timber sales declined by about 80 percent in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the ten-year rolling average of the number of acres burned grew from about 3 million acres in the 1980s and 1990s to 6.5 million acres in the 2000s and (so far) 2010s. Is this a coincidence or did the cessation in timber cutting lead to the growth in wildfires?

Those who blame environmentalists argue that timber cutting and related activities allowed forest managers to minimize fuel loads in the forests. When those activities stopped, the fuel loads grew and fires became hotter, larger, and harder to control. Continue reading →

The internet and phone service were both down in Camp Sherman yesterday afternoon and evening, which is when I would normally write the next day’s Antiplanner. So instead I took some night photos of the Milli Fire, which was burning on about 256 3,500 acres a few miles from here.

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Next Monday, Camp Sherman will enjoy 90 seconds of total eclipse. Local residents are torn between hoping for clear skies and hoping that smoke from the fires obscures the view so the millions of eclipse-watching tourists go somewhere else.

It’s fire season again, which means we are once again treated to stories about how the Forest Service is running out of money and about how it all must be due to climate change. Both of these claims overlook fundamental points about fire policy and firefighting.

As of August 16, the BLM had spent $2.2 million controlling the 88,000-acre Cornet Fire on the Vale District in Oregon. The Forest Service had spent two-and-one-half times that much on a fire that was just 515 acres in size. BLM photo.

The Forest Service frets that rapidly rising firefighting costs are hurting the budgets of other Forest Service programs. However, as the Antiplanner has pointed out before, Forest Service firefighting costs have risen rapidly mainly because they can: the agency has a virtual blank check to spend on fire. As a result, the agency spends far more fighting fires than Department of the Interior agencies, which have never had a blank check.

Continue reading →