It’s the height of summer, which means the Antiplanner is thinking about hiking in nearby national forests before they get filled with smoke from wildfires. This year has already seen 3.4 million acres burn, mostly in the South and the Rocky Mountains. That’s slightly more than average, but big fires in the Pacific Coast states have yet to come.
A friend of mine forwarded to me a copy of a letter from a retired logger to his Congressional delegation criticizing the Forest Service and other federal land agencies for their firefighting tactics. He remembers when firefighters engaged in “direct attack,” meaning they drove or hiked to the edge of the fire, built a fire line (which means removing all vegetation from an area that is at least several feet wide), and then worked to keep the fire from crossing that line. Firefighters still build firelines today, but, he observes, they typically do it “miles (in places 10 or more) from the actual fire.”
That has been my observation as well, and I believe the change came about as a result of Colorado’s South Canyon Fire, in which fourteen firefighters who were engaged in direct attack were killed in what is known as a “burnover.” Basically, the fire jumped across the firelines and surrounded them. Continue reading
