The National Park Service is under fire for treating a wildfire on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon by “managing it as a controlled burn.” The fire, of course, escaped “management” and burned down the 87-year-old Grand Canyon Lodge along with scores of cabins near the lodge.
Although an Interior Department spokesperson responded by saying that “the allegation that this fire was managed as a controlled burn is not at all accurate,” I’m more inclined to believe the earlier reports from Arizona than a claim by someone in Washington DC. I suspect the official meant that the fire was not deliberately started as a prescribed fire, but the allegation is that, when the fire was started by lightning, Park Service managers decided to “let it burn” to help restore the natural fire ecosystem and didn’t start aggressively fighting the fire until it was too late to save the lodge.
However, whether the fire was initially managed as a controlled burn is not the real issue. Nor is the implicit claim in the above video that earlier use of aerial drops of fire retardant could have saved the lodge. Instead, the real issue is: Why did the Park Service not apply firewise principles to the lodge?
The roofs of the lodge and the cabins surrounding it were all made of cedar shingles, making them highly susceptible to fire. Private homeowners throughout the West are being encouraged, and in some cases ordered, to replace cedar shingle roofs with fireproof roofing materials. The Park Service, however, thought it was exempt from such advice.
In fact, the Park Service claims that the National Historic Preservation Act requires it to keep wooden roofs on the North Rim buildings. Though most were less than a century old, those buildings were considered “historic” and the agency forbade the concessioners who managed the lodge from installing fireproof roofing.
During the war in Viet Nam, an American army officer once supposedly said of a South Vietnamese city, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” In the same way, the Park Service has decreed that it is necessary to allow historic buildings to be burned to the ground to save them. The Park Service itself recently installed new wooden roofs on some cabins and other buildings near the North Rim Visitor’s Center.
This makes me wonder about the future of other historic lodges, some of them much older than the Grand Canyon Lodge. On the south rim of the Grand Canyon, El Tovar is 120 years old. Yellowstone’s Old Faithful Inn is 121 years old. Many Glacier Hotel in Glacier Park is 110 years old. Mount Rainier’s Paradise Inn is 109 years old. Crater Lake Lodge is 104 years old. Bryce Canyon Lodge is 100 years old. As near as I can tell, all of these, along with several other hotels and lodges in various national parks, have wooden roofs.
Old Faithful Inn was saved from the 1988 wildfire because, just the year before, the Park Service had installed a “deluge” sprinkler system that soaked the roof when fires came near. But water systems are not always reliable during an emergency (and arguably are no more historic than a non-flammable roof).
There are several brands of synthetic roofing materials that are designed to look like wooden shingles but are non-flammable. It is time for the Park Service to get serious about historic preservation by applying fireproof roofs to national park lodges and other historic structures.
I wonder if the National Park Service retained the lodge’s original paper-based reservation and accounting systems. Did the phones have cranks?
US west was dotted by thousands of water towers built along railways to top off steam locomotives. In dry climates every culture used to store rainwater.
Invented in 1990s Maryland Rain gardens and bioswales stored and consolidated rainwater. An inch of rain over 1000 square foot roof equals 623 gallons. 10,000 sq ft hotel roof and cistern could store 100,000-200,000 gallons.
The National Park Service spent years in various green initiatives, propane replacing diesel for air quality. Solar power and wind for its buildings. Even new showers and toilets to reduce water consumption but nothing to address water development or regenerating supply.