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FIRE SEASON EDITOR'S NOTE: Outdoor writer and environmental activist James Johnson is chairman of the Many Rivers Group of the Sierra Club Oregon Chapter, representing 3,000 members in Lane, Douglas and Coos counties. Base Camp It's July 25, and the Clark Fire has been raging in Fall Creek for 12 days, transforming the nearby town of Lowell into base camp for a massive military-style campaign. The outfield of the high school baseball field is a tent city housing a thousand fire fighters. Semi trailers and prefabricated shelters house laundry facilities, showers, a first aid clinic and a cafeteria. Tons of supplies — everything from crates of Gatorade to piles of Nomex shirts — crowd the sidewalks and parking lot. Inside, classrooms have been transformed into high-tech nerve centers that resemble Pentagon war rooms. A math classroom labeled "Communications" houses a bank of radios that crackle with staccato reports from "forward observers," "overhead support," medics, and "division commanders." Another classroom has been transformed into the "Operations Center," where serious looking men and women in uniform are hunched over laptop computers, the walls covered by charts and maps with names like "Analysis of Tactical Applications" and "Operational Planning Worksheet." Other classrooms labeled "Logistics," "Security" "Public Information," and "Finance" are jammed with more computers, phones, fax machines, photocopiers and administrative staff. Putting out forest fires in this day and age, says Dale Gardner, in typically understated fashion, "can be a pretty complicated process." If the Clark Fire is a military campaign, Gardner is its general. A short unassuming man, this is Gardner's 41st season fighting fires, and his eighth as the incident commander of the Northwest Oregon Interagency Incident Management Team, one of 51 teams of fire behavior specialists and planners responsible for extinguishing the large fires that have become a fixture on the federal forestlands of Oregon and throughout the West. Today Gardner is pointing at a map labeled "Clark Incident Wild Fire Suppression Analysis." The map is the focal point of the entire operation, a detailed diary of the fire's advance across the rugged ravines and ridges of the Fall Creek watershed, and the Incident Management Team's deployments to halt its spread. The map shows good news. According to the Wild Fire Suppression Analysis the fire's has been stopped in its tracks. "This is a computer driven program," deadpans Gardner, "so you know it's right."
The Asbestos District Wildfire in the Fall Creek watershed seems as incongruous as a baseball game at the bottom of the ocean. The "asbestos district" as Forest Service rangers jokingly call it, is a temperate rainforest of dew-drenched ferns, moss draped logs, and cathedral-like Douglas fir, western hemlock and red cedar trees. Hundreds of thousands of visitors come to Fall Creek during the hot summer months, drawn to the emerald green swimming holes, abundant campsites and hiking trails just 45 minutes east of Eugene-Springfield. Last month, record high temperatures and low humidity turned the normally lush forest into a tinderbox. On the afternoon of July 13, someone just downstream of the Clark Creek Campground ignited brush and grass and touched off a blaze that quickly became a crown fire, an inferno that climbed into the dense upper canopy of Fall Creek's old-growth forest and leapt from tree to tree, incinerating the popular Johnny Creek Nature Trail and Bedrock Campground, forcing campers to flee, leaving behind tents, clothes, coolers and even their pets. On July 14, the Northwest Oregon Interagency Incident Management Team had taken over command of the fire, which had swelled to more than 900 acres. Flames almost 300 feet tall jumped Fall Creek and began marching north and east into a steep bowl formed by Slick, Bedrock and Jones Creeks. Fall Creek canyon, normally shrouded in thick early morning mist, was now almost totally obscured by a thick cloud of smoke. Gardner's team relied on infrared-equipped aircraft to fix the fire's location and line of advance, and began mapping out a containment strategy based on topography and wind direction. They picked the ridgeline to the northeast of the bowl as the place for firefighters to make their stand.
Forest Fighting Timothy Ingalsbee is the director of the Eugene-based Western Fire Ecology Center, and an outspoken critic of many fire suppression tactics. "It's a misnomer that they're fighting fires, in fact they're fighting the forest," says the former Forest Service wildland firefighter. "They use all the tools and ideology of warfare and they assault a forest ecosystem." On the ridgeline overlooking the Clark Fire, crews fell trees and clear vegetation with bulldozers and by hand along roads and ridgelines. On July 16th, the fire made quick runs up the steep canyon of Jones Creek on the critical eastern side of the fire, forcing crews to evacuate. But heavy-lift helicopters armed with buckets large enough to hold an SUV kept the flames in check until weather conditions allowed firefighters to complete the line.
When these lines are completed, crews battling big blazes in the backcountry fight fire with fire. They use a variety of incendiary devices — everything from hand-held drip torches to giant flamethrowers mounted on the underside of helicopters — to torch thousands of acres of forest in the path of a fire. If the direction of the wind holds, the fire dies for lack of fuel. Firefighters themselves torched as much as half of the 5,000 acres of forest burned in the Clark Fire. "The public thinks that the Forest Service is fighting fires," says Ingalsbee, "but they're actually starting fires. It's a search and destroy mission, logging hundreds of acres to create a line, then burning thousands more. What we're going to find out in the next couple of years is the collateral damage that's been done to Fall Creek." "Wildfire," he adds, "not logging and aggressive fire suppression, is what keeps forests healthy." The forests of Oregon were born in fire, and fire plays an important custodial role by clearing out dead brush and small trees, recycling nutrients and maintaining the structural complexity of what would otherwise be dense and homogenous forest stands. But a hands-off approach to managing the Clark Fire was not an option, according to Gardner, the incident commander. "A lot of things make that not a good idea for this area," he says, pointing to nearby residential areas and extensive (and highly valuable) neighboring private timberlands. Aggressive firefighting tactics are also called for, he says, because almost all of the fire is burning in the Fall Creek Late Successional Reserve, some of the most productive spotted owl habitat in the world. "This is not the place I'd pick to let a fire burn." But according to Ingalsbee, the issue is bigger than this one fire. "The Willamette National Forest has made a conscious choice not to do any pro-active fuel management in these owl reserves, so by default they've chosen to use aggressive fire suppression as their only form of management. There's lots of legitimate fuels reduction thinning needed in reserves that's not getting done. Their plans for this and the rest of the forest is fire exclusion, which is impossible and futile and ultimately an environmental calamity when a fire burns through there." The answer, he says, is for the agency to turn its back on the industrial forestry model entirely. Stop clearcutting in old-growth and roadless areas. Practice judicious fuel reduction thinning and reintroduce fire to ecosystems that need it. And create management plans that instruct how and if to fight fires when they start. "The forest evolved with fire both natural and human caused, but not with fire suppression and criminal arson. It's a bad scene that we're in." (The Forest Service is still investigating exactly how the human-caused Clark Fire began).
The Fire Service One thing is certain, thousands of hours of flight time and fire crew overtime does not come cheap. By the 25th, the cost of suppressing Clark has come to almost $8 million (as EW goes to press, costs have reached the $14 million mark). The 800 firefighters holding the line on the eastern end of the fire on this day have deployed 50 miles of fire hose and 250 pieces of mechanized equipment. They've used 13,000 AAA batteries, consumed 70,000 bottles of water, eaten 28,000 meals, taken 13,000 showers and produced 15 tons of dirty laundry. To Ingalsbee, the Forest Service has become the public face of "the fire industrial complex." "Beginning in the '80s they began to privatize a lot of firefighting. Now it's become a big business and business is booming. They're facilitating these large siege-like spectacles which are spending millions of dollars on everything from catering services to fire engines. A lot of money is going to a few contractors."
And federal wildfire budgets are becoming a bottomless pit. According to the Thoreau Institute, a non-profit that watchdogs government land management spending, the Forest Service is rapidly becoming the Fire Service. The agency's total budget has grown from $3.2 billion in 1991 to $5.3 billion in 2001. But during this same period, money for the actual National Forest System — money that does everything from build trails to sell timber on the 155 National Forests across the country—has shrunk by a billion dollars, a 37 percent decline. The fire suppression budge has increased by $1.1 billion, a 253 percent increase. The cost of fighting the 5,000-acre Clark
Fire for three weeks is almost half the amount of money that the Willamette
National Forest spends to manage the entire 1.7 million acre forest
for an entire year. In the past 10 years, the Willamette has already
laid off hundreds of employees
The Next Big Fire "Oh yeah, once they turn it over to an incident management team, it's a big show," says Craig Clifton who can barely be heard over the roar of helicopters shuttling water to the Kelsay Fire, burning 60 miles southeast of Eugene. A Forest Service fire fighter for 14 years, Clifton is one of hundreds of personnel recently reassigned to Kelsay from the now-contained Clark Fire. It's July 31, at the junction of a dusty logging road now serving as a "division break" between fire fighting units on the Kelsay Fire. The intersection is jammed with fire engines, command vehicles and hundreds of sooty firefighters marching single file to and from various hotspots along the line. "The old fire fighting system drew heavily on personnel who had other jobs and were mobilized during the fire season all throughout the different forests," says John Zapell, one of three Forest Service public information officers working for the Central Oregon Interagency Incident Management Team that is leading this suppression effort on the Umpqua National Forest. "The Forest Service has changed quite a bit," he adds after a pause. The agency is changing along with weather. According to Forest Service bioclimatoligist Ron Neilson, global climate change for the American West means more precipitation, and a corresponding increase in the amount of flammable fuel. With this increase in woody material will come a huge increase in the number and size of fires. Approximately 7.2 million acres of the west burned in 2002 at a cost of $1.6 billion, just short of the record 7.4 million acres burned in 1988. Some computer models being developed by Neilson and his colleagues predict as much as twice as much forest will be burned annually at certain points over the next 30 years. Which means boom years are ahead for the army of agency personnel, private contractors and suppliers who wage war on the West's wildfires.
THE POLITICS OF FIRE OREGON'S WILDFIRES are becoming a popular backdrop for political theater, and a ready-made smokescreen for aggressive new logging policies being pushed by the Bush administration. Almost exactly a year ago Bush stood in the still smoldering ashes of the Biscuit Fire in southern Oregon to unveil his "Healthy Forests Initiative," which would exempt "fuel reduction" logging from environmental laws. Last Thursday he came to the Bend area from a Portland fund-raiser to take a helicopter tour of the B and B Complex, a large wildfire burning towards summer homes at Camp Sherman on the Metolius River.
Later at the Deschutes County Fairgrounds, Bush told a crowd of local Republicans "it's hard to describe to our fellow citizen what it means to see a fire like we saw. It's the holocaust, it's devastating." "We write checks a lot on fire-fighting, and we'll continue to do that. But it seems like to me we ought to put a strategy to manage our forests in a better, more common-sensical way," said Bush. Jasmine Minbashian, coordinator of the Northwest Old-Growth Campaign, scoffed at Bush's remarks. "Bush wants to make forests healthy by cutting down healthy forests. He wants to protect the environment by gutting environmental laws. That's not common-sensical." Minbashian, who coordinates the Northwest Old-Growth Campaign, was one of almost 200 protestors outside the fairgrounds who rallied around a six-foot diameter slab taken from the stump of an old-growth "forest health" timber sale logged near Grants Pass this summer. — James Johnston |
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