Burning 3 Acres Per Second

On Monday morning, September 7, the Beachie Creek Fire had burned 776 acres in the Opal Creek Wilderness of the Willamette National Forest. The fire was in a steep, inaccessible landscape, so the Forest Service had been fighting it mainly by dropping water from helicopters.

Dropping water on the Beachie fire on September 2, when it was supposed to be only 23 acres in size. Click image for a larger view. Forest Service photo.

Monday afternoon saw winds as high as 75 miles per hour blowing burning embers from the fire miles to the west. Over the next ten or so hours, the fire burned an average of three acres per second, growing to 132,450 acres. Residents of Gates, Mill City, and Mehama who had gone to sleep knowing they were comfortably 4 to 7 miles from the fire front were awakened and hastily evacuated in the middle of the night. The now-renamed Santiam Fire destroyed hundreds of homes and killed at least two people.

Video taken by a deputy sheriff Monday night in Mill City, Oregon, which had been five miles from the fire Monday noon.

A few days before the fire blew up, the Forest Service posted the below photo of two agency employees gazing at the helicopter dropping water on the fire. The photo was captioned, “A Teachable Moment.” This makes me wonder: who was being taught and what did they learn?

“A Teachable Moment.” Click image for a larger view. Forest Service photo.

When wildfires are detected, the initial attack is made by local firefighters. They are able to suppress 95 to 99 percent of all fires, but when fires grow beyond their capabilities, they call in the National Incident Management Organization. This group has more expertise and access to far more resources. They stay on the fire until it is completely contained and not likely to grow, after which they turn it back over to local firefighters.

The Beachie Creek Fire was ignited and detected on August 16, and local firefighters attempted to work on it until August 21. They then called a national incident management team, who reported the next day that it had covered 10 acres.

A few decades ago, the national team would have had smokejumpers parachute in and fight the fire on the ground. But current firefighting ethics call for protecting the lives of on-the-ground firefighters. So the Beachie Creek team elected to have helicopters drop water on the fire, instead risking aerial firefighters, at least five of whom have already died this year. The fire’s reported size remained 10 acres for the next week, then went up to 23 acres on August 29.

Despite this increase in size, the national incident management team felt the fire was under control and transferred command back to local firefighters on August 30. Yet the Weather Service was already predicting that a high pressure front would lead to severe winds on September 7.

By September 2, the fire had grown to 150 acres and local firefighters called in a national team again. They put at least three aircraft, probably all helicopters, to work on the fire, which nevertheless grew each day, reaching 776 acres by the morning of September 7. That’s the day it blew up.

Should the Forest Service have put firefighters on the ground instead of relying on aerial attack? Should the national incident command have continued fighting the fire rather than turning it back to local firefighters on August 30? Was dropping water from helicopters really effective or did it merely put pilot lives at risk? Knowing that high winds were expected on September 7, shouldn’t they have done something more? Was any of the $1.3 million the Forest Service spent on the fire before the blowup worthwhile?

These are tactical questions, and I don’t want to be an armchair fire incident commander second guessing the decisions made by Forest Service and other firefighters. But I do feel comfortable raising strategic issues about wildland fire.

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For at least a century, forest landowners in the South have burned their pine forests every four or five years. But the Forest Service, which had a literal blank check for fire suppression from 1908 to 1978, long opposed prescribed burning, even going so far as to count prescribed fires as wildfires in its records until about 1955 (which is why the record shows so many more acres burned in those years — most of those acres weren’t really wildfires, just Forest Service spitefulness).

I know and respect Timothy Ingalsbee, but there’s a problem with the simplistic prescribed-fire solution. Forests in the South are mostly on flat lands that tend not to suffer regular droughts. They can be burned for a few dollars an acre almost any time of the year and are easily contained. Forests in the West are often on steep slopes and suffer annual late-summer droughts, so prescribed fires can cost hundreds of dollars an acre, are difficult to contain, and can only be safely done a few days of the year.

The Forest Service is currently spending $430 million annually reducing hazardous fuels on about 3 million acres per year. The amount would have be at least tripled to regularly treat the entire 190-million-acre National Forest System, and even more to deal with the 400 million acres of land managed by the Department of the Interior.

This doesn’t count the cost of suppressing prescribed fires that get away and turn into wildfires. The Cerro Grande fire that burned 400 homes in Los Alamos in 2000 was originally a prescribed fire, as was the Green Ridge Fire that burned near my home in 2013.

Then there are those who say that these fires are a sign of global warming and evidence that we need to stop relying on fossil fuels. The implication is that the fire problem could be solved if only we could stop climate change. In fact, though fires have set records in northern California, in the rest of the country they have burned less than the 10-year average number of acres up to this date. The West has always had late-summer droughts, and fires like Beachie Creek are nothing new. Indeed, a fire in Washington state burned 178,000 acres on the same day as the Beachie Creek blowup.

Although the huge numbers of acres reported in the 1930s and 1940s are inflated by prescribed burning, after deducting prescribed-fire acres there were still a lot more acres burned in some of those years than in recent years. So I’m not convinced that global climate change is responsible for this year’s fires or that forcing people to stop driving SUVs, as Mother Jones thinks we should do, will solve any problems.

My own prescription is very different. Residents of the West have to recognize that we live in a fire zone where roughly 1 percent of the natural landscape is going to burn each year no matter what we do. Instead of blaming these fires on forest managers, we need to take responsibility to protect our own property and not rely on the Forest Service or other adjacent landowners to protect us.

That means the roofs and other parts of our our homes and other structures must be made of fireproof materials such as asphalt shingles, not cedar shakes. The walls can be wood, but our landscaping needs to follow defensible space or firewise principles so that, if it catches fire, it won’t generate enough heat to light structures on fire. The homes themselves should be at least 100 and preferably 150 feet apart so that, if one catches fire, the radiant heat from that fire doesn’t light up its neighbors.

Research by Forest Service fire scientist Jack Cohen has shown that such defensible space is both necessary and sufficient to protect structures from wildfire. It’s necessary because all the prescribed burning in the world won’t save your home if a burning ember from a lightning-caused fire 8 miles away lands on your lovely cedar-shake roof. It’s sufficient because it will protect your home even if neighboring forest landowners don’t do any prescribed burning or other fuel treatments at all.

To tell the truth, I’ve become a little lackadaisical about this. My home in central Oregon was built according to defensible principles, with a gravel or paved walkway around much of it. But I’ve allowed some shrubs to grow too prolifically and some tree branches to touch the sides of the house. After seeing the Beachie Creek Fire grow by 3 acres per second, I’m going to be more vigilant before next year’s fire season. Those who fail to do so will have themselves to blame if their house is destroyed by a wildfire.

Even more careless are those who make California land-use policies that aim to confine residents to compact cities. Urban-growth boundaries and zoning codes that mandate numerous homes on each acre even on urban fringes are asking for those homes to burn in wildfires. Cities need a buffer of low-density homes on one-acre lots to protect them from wildfires.

If all homes and other structures in the wildland-urban interface met defensible-space standards, the Forest Service and other federal agencies might still need to do some fuel treatments to prevent fires started on federal lands from burning private forests. But much of the $430 million that the Forest Service spends each year on hazardous fuels would not be needed, nor would much of the $2.5 billion or more that it spends on fire suppression.

Will the Beachie Creek and other large fires this year turn out to be a “teachable moment”? Or will the Forest Service and other federal agencies continue to spend $3 billion or more per year pretending to do fuel treatments and suppress fires while private property owners continue to leave their homes and other buildings vulnerable to wildfire? Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure I know the answer.