Smoke Gets in My Eyes

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).

The Forest Service says it was aware of weather reports predicting windy conditions on Thursday, but it is possible that whoever was monitoring the fire failed to be in the right spot when those winds arrive. Naturally, the agency promises a “full investigation.”

The local district ranger says that Forest Service personnel are “feeling very bad right now” that they let one of their fires escape. I’d feel bad too if I made such a highly visible mistake that will cost the taxpayers millions of dollars. They’ve spent $2.2 million on it so far and the cost is growing by more than half a million a day.

The Forest Service held a public meeting about the fire last Sunday. The Antiplanner spent the day looking for huckleberries in the wilderness (see the first three photos), but received reports about the meeting from several community members. The agency’s presentations focused on what they were doing to suppress the fire and they obviously did not want to talk much about what caused it. But they noted that the fire was started in a research natural area and that they had been experimenting with prescribed fire in this area for many years. In fact, this is the fourth time this particular 31 acres was burned in the past two decades.

“In all that time, we’ve only had two fires escape from the research natural area,” the Forest Service observed. That isn’t very reassuring, as the natural area is just 1,140 acres. The entire Deschutes National Forest covers 1.6 million acres, so if they prescribed fires over the entire forest as frequently as they do in the natural area, they would be losing 140 fires a year.

They handed out a 3-page “fire effects monitoring report” dated the day they set the fire. The report says the objectives of the prescribed fire were to “add natural habitat restoration,” “allow the reintroduction of native vegetation,” “reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire,” and “provide for research opportunities to better comprehend management strategies associated with hazard fuel reduction.”

“Fire behavior remained low to moderate throughout the burn period,” says the report. They lit the fire at noon and by 4 pm, “cloud cover, cooling temperatures, and raising RHs minimized fire behavior to creeping and smoldering with open flames being isolated to larger stumps and logs.” The report concludes that “unit objectives were achieved.”

A cynic might observe that they had forgotten to include “don’t let the fire escape” as one of the objectives. But beyond that, all of the stated objectives — habitat restoration, reintroduce native vegetation, reduce wildfire risk — are long term in nature, so the conclusion that they had achieved those objectives was definitely premature. Basically, the only thing they had really achieved at the time the report was written was lighting a fire.

When someone asked why they put a research natural area so close to a residential area, the Forest Service responded the natural area was established in 1931. That isn’t much of an answer as this community dates back to the 1880s, and the Forest Service itself began leasing national forest land for cabins in 1916.

If I had been there, I might have asked why they were burning a research natural area in the first place. The purpose of research natural areas is to provide baseline data for what forests look like in the absence of any management. They probably would have answered that past decades of fire suppression were a form of management and they were merely trying to restore the original natural conditions. But they are merely guessing about what those natural conditions and fire frequencies were like, so the area no longer provides true baseline data.

People also wondered why the Forest Service felt comfortable lighting a fire when it advertises that local fire dangers are “high.” Since July 15, the industrial fire precaution level has been II, meaning no one can run power saws or certain other equipment in the woods after 1 pm each day. There also strict limits on outdoor burning of leaves and other debris. But the regulations apparently don’t rule out deliberately lighting fires just before 1 pm.

If you use fire as a tool, sometimes those fires are going to escape. If you do it right, the benefits of the prescribed fires exceed the costs of the escaped fires. While lighting fires when the fire danger is “high” might be questionable, when the danger is “low,” the forests are too wet to even start fires, and Forest Service fire personnel say that there are too few weeks in the year when the danger is “moderate” for them to burn as many areas as they think need to be burned.

I suppose the one objective of the fire that has been achieved has been to create “research opportunities . . . associated with hazard fuel reduction.” We will see if anyone learns from those opportunities.