Despite rain in the valleys and snow in the mountains, wildfires are still smoldering in Oregon and people are still trying to blame those fires on the lack of government spending on logging or prescribed burning. Yet increased logging wouldn’t have stopped western wildfires this year, a number of researchers told reporters in an article jointly written by the Oregonian, Oregon Public Broadcasting, and Propublica.

“The belief people have is that somehow or another we can thin our way to low-intensity fire that will be easy to suppress, easy to contain, easy to control,” retired Forest Service researcher Jack Cohen told the reporters. “Nothing could be further from the truth.” Continue reading →

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 →

Today is National Eclipse Day, and thanks to the Milli, Nena Spring, and Whitewater fires, I’m likely to be viewing it through a lens of smoke. So this has me thinking about wildfires and wondering if it is true, as some claim, that environmentalists are ultimately responsible for the increase in acres burned in the last decade or so.

Partly due to pressure from environmentalists, federal land timber sales declined by about 80 percent in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the ten-year rolling average of the number of acres burned grew from about 3 million acres in the 1980s and 1990s to 6.5 million acres in the 2000s and (so far) 2010s. Is this a coincidence or did the cessation in timber cutting lead to the growth in wildfires?

Those who blame environmentalists argue that timber cutting and related activities allowed forest managers to minimize fuel loads in the forests. When those activities stopped, the fuel loads grew and fires became hotter, larger, and harder to control. Continue reading →

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?

Continue reading →