Category Archives: Wildfire

Although there have been large wildfires in California and Texas, this has been a mild fire year so far in Oregon. As of September 21, 123,000 acres had burned compared with a total of nearly 650,000 in 2007.

Fall weather is upon us, with nighttime temperatures well below freezing, and there haven’t been any lightning storms recently, the usual cause of fires around here. So I was a bit surprised last Thursday to see a large plume of smoke on Green Ridge, a few miles from my home in Central Oregon’s wildland-urban interface (WUI).

It turns out that last Wednesday, September 24, the Forest Service set a 31-acre prescribed fire. The fire escaped Thursday and burned (as of October 1) nearly 1,200 acres on Green Ridge. According to the latest report (which is updated daily), the Forest Service has put more than 500 firefighters and five helicopters, plus several more aircraft, to work fighting what it calls the Wizard fire (after a local waterfall).

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The Antiplanner’s curmudgeonly complaints about the media’s treatment of wildfire last week were a little unfair. Somehow I failed to notice that the L.A. Times had an excellent five-part series on fire a few weeks ago.

Part one looked at the high cost of fire. While fuels were mentioned, they weren’t the most important reason. Instead, the article said, “Drought is parching vegetation. Rising temperatures associated with climate change are shrinking mountain snowpacks, giving fire seasons a jump-start by drying out forests earlier in the summer. The spread of invasive grasses that burn more readily than native plants is making parts of the West ever more flammable.”

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As previously noted, the Antiplanner recently moved to Central Oregon. In fact, I moved into what the Forest Service calls the WUI (pronounced woo-eee) for wildland-urban interface. In other words, I live within a few hundred feet of public forest land that is likely to burn any year now.

So I naturally take note when a big lightning storm two nights ago was followed yesterday by helicopters carrying giant buckets of water to local wildfires. And since it is fire season, we are now inundated with the inevitable myths about wildfire.

First, National Geographic presents a video promoting bigger Forest Service budgets. “Fires today are hotter than ever,” says the video, because past decades of fire suppression have led to more fuels in the forest. Second, on a related topic, Reuters reports that climate change is threatening Alaska’s forests.

Click to see a larger chart.

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Of the nine people killed in the northern California helicopter crash last week, seven were firefighters in their teens and twenties and two were pilots in their 50s and 60s. When I look at the photos of the firefighters — most of them under 25 years old — with their ironic smiles and (to this ex-long-haired-hippie’s eyes) goofy hairstyles, I can’t help but wonder whether we really needed to be fighting this and other northern California fires.

Iron Complex Fire on the Trinity River.
All photos by J. Michael Johnson, NPS.

I am not the only one who wonders. Former firefighter Timothy Ingalsbee points out that this particular fire, known as the Iron Complex, was “far from any community or infrastructure.” There was no social or environmental benefit, he believes, to justify spending $55 million (so far) and risking firefighters’ lives trying to suppress this particular fire.

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The Union Pacific Railroad has agreed to pay the Forest Service $102 million — the largest wildfire settlement in history — for causing a fire in California’s Feather River Canyon. Though railroad employees were almost certainly responsible for the fire, the UP could have used some better lawyers or, better yet, some economists among their expert witnesses.

Normally, if you start a fire that gets out of control, you are responsible for paying suppression costs — in this case, $22 million. But this time, the judge also ordered the railroad to pay the estimated damage to “public scenery and recreation and habitat and wildlife,” which added $80 million to the total. On top of that, the UP may have to cover the Forest Service’s costs of reforesting the burned acres.

At first glance, this sounds just. Except it isn’t clear to me that the fire actually did any damage to scenery, recreation, habitat, or wildlife. On top of that, if the Forest Service is so concerned about such damage, why didn’t it do something to fix the problems as soon as the fire was put out? In fact, it did nearly nothing for years.

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It is too early to do a post accendium on the southern California fires, but not too early to suggest some lessons that should be learned. According to Monday’s report, the fires spread across nearly 474,000 acres and burned 2,700 structures (at least 1,700 of which were homes).

Fourteen deaths have been associated with the fires. Four of the eleven fires started on national forests, four on state lands, two on county lands, and one on a military base. Government agencies collectively spent more than $63 million to suppress the fires.

So what can we learn from these fires?

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