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http://www.sltrib.com/2003/May/05262003/utah/utah.asphttp://www.sltrib.com/2003/May/05262003/utah/utah.asp
Utah Forests, Rangelands Are in Prime Fire Danger
By John Keahey
The Salt Lake Tribune
Utah, in its fifth year of drought and with millions of acres of forests and rangelands within its borders, is like a big old stoke furnace looking for a light.
And what ignites a furnace? Fire.
State fire manager Dave Dalrymple points to a small example of a landscape ready to erupt:
He says you can walk 150 miles from Navajo Lake, southeast of Cedar City, to Scofield Reservoir, northwest of Price, and never be out of dry, dead timber.
And because land managers traditionally suppressed fires for years, that forest and others like it are packed with dry, highly flammable undergrowth -- material that, if nature were calling the shots, would periodically burn, reducing the chances of really big blazes.
"Mother Nature will not tolerate [dry, underburned forests] in the long term," said Dalrymple. "It's only a matter of time -- not 'if' it's going to happen. And when [fire hits], it's going to be a catastrophe."
Good fire, bad fire: To a certain degree, state fire officials have their hands tied by laws that declare all fires on state and private land a "public nuisance." Each must be vigorously fought.
The U.S. Forest Service, meanwhile, believes that not all fires are bad, and the agency lets some of them burn until they either go out naturally or until they start threatening humans.
Most fire managers believe that periodic fires are a natural force. They help maintain ecological balance in Western forests and rangelands. They clean out undergrowth that, if allowed to build up, can threaten taller, older trees when fire hits.
Without such smaller, cleansing fires, lightning- or human-caused fires usually burn hotter and larger than what would naturally occur, says Tom Tidwell, forest supervisor for the Wasatch-Cache National Forest.
But being required to fight every single fire, even if homes or private property are not in danger, can be an expensive proposition for the state.
Utah taxpayers were hit with a nearly $20 million firefighting bill last year. The 2003 Legislature, in one of the tightest budget years ever, had to rustle up $11 million in supplemental appropriations just to pay the 2002 fire bill.
It is unavoidable that firefighters must be handed a blank check. They simply cannot stop fighting fires when the annual budget is devoured midway through a fire season.
Now, with what could be an even worse fire season waiting for that all-but-inevitable spark this summer, legislators have indicated they might be open to modify state laws to accommodate a more lenient -- and less costly -- firefighting approach.
That is good news for Dalrymple and his colleagues within the Department of Natural Resources.
"We have to [rethink] our whole fire program," he said.
There has to be flexibility in the way the state approaches flame suppression, he says. Fire must be allowed to play its natural role in the environment without putting people's lives and property at risk.
Fire science: Not all forest and range fires are bad.
Forest-ecology professor David Roberts of Utah State University in Logan believes that the way people think about fire depends on where they live, work or play.
"On one end of the spectrum, people want fiber production, primarily logs big enough to saw into lumber, but at least to make paper if not timber products," he said. For them all fires are bad.
"Somewhere in the middle are recreationists who want an aesthetic environment. On the other end are people who value forests' essential spirituality. Even if they never go there, they just want to know it is there and that it is somehow in a natural state," Roberts said. These folks know natural fires have been part of the ecosystem for thousands of years and believe such blazes are good.
Forests in the West are essentially 6,000 years old. Before settlers arrived less than 200 years ago, fires went through these lands in fairly predictable cycles.
For example, scrub oak typically burned every 40 to 60 years; the so-called "understory" of lower elevation, ponderosa forests probably burned on the order of every six to 10 years, leaving the larger trees intact and clearing out dead brush, annual grasses and smaller trees that compete for resources.
At higher elevations, fire typically swept through stands of spruce and fir every 300 to 400 years.
These natural fires, says Roberts, create a seed-bed condition to establish seedlings and regenerate a new forest.
Buildup of fuel: Pioneer journals, he says, often refer to smoky skies all summer long.
"Fire in the West was a very common phenomenon. Now people won't tolerate [the constant smoke]."
When pioneers arrived, they grazed sheep and cattle. For the next century or more, such critters annually consumed the "fine" flammable grasses, which stopped the "slow, crawling [natural] fires," and this allowed the larger forest deadfall to increase.
This more sturdy, flammable material continued to pile up throughout the 20th century as national and state land managers worked to suppress nearly every fire.
"There are 10 fires' worth of fuel, not one fire's worth" out there, said Roberts. "We have to do something with that fuel -- either get it off site or else manage fire in very, very careful ways."
And methods to do this go beyond intentionally starting prescribed fires or letting natural ones burn in remote areas.
Forest crews can go into overgrown areas and chop up the undergrowth and deadfall, and haul it out. Or the government can allow logging.
That logging option concerns environmentalists.
Sierra Club forest-policy specialist Sean Cosgrove is wary of a Bush administration plan that supports logging as a mechanical means to thin overgrown forests and return them to their more-natural state. Bush, he said, wants to allow forest managers "to go ahead with logging and call it fuel reduction."
"There is a huge difference between responsible fuel reduction and outright commercial logging," the Washington, D.C.-based activist said.
Prescribed burns: The U.S. Forest Service and other agencies have an elaborate process of managing what it calls "prescribed" fires -- a concept that came into acceptance in the early 1970s.
Through such fires, the Wasatch-Cache National Forest -- which runs down the spine of north-central Utah -- hopes to purposely burn, or allow naturally caused fires to burn, 10,000 acres a year over the next 10 to 15 years.
Utah is home to six national forests. All have similar programs in place, as do the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and various national parks within the Beehive State boundaries.
If that schedule can be kept, says forest supervisor Tidwell, Wasatch-Cache would be "more in alignment with the natural cycle."
The job is a bit bigger for state-owned lands.
"We protect somewhere around 15 million acres," says Dalrymple. "We would have to be [intentionally] burning something on the order of 150,000 acres a year" over 15 years to catch up.
Risky business: Prescribed fires can either be set on purpose to reduce undergrowth buildup around rural homes, to wipe out old, over-foraged stands of scrub oak so new stands can develop, or to remove and rejuvenate old stands of aspen, which are important to wildlife habitat.
Or, when lightning strikes, fires in areas deemed burnable might be allowed to burn within the boundaries of that prescription.
Organized fire suppression in such cases does not begin unless weather conditions change and the fire starts heading toward areas -- such as state or private lands -- where burning is not desirable.
"The risks [of this approach] are great," said Michael Jenkins, a wildland fire-management specialist at Utah State University.
"For a hundred successful burns, there is one that is unsuccessful, and it is the one that gets the publicity."
One such fire occurred in May 2000 at Los Alamos, N.M.
Officials at Bandelier National Monument set a fire to burn underbrush, but it spread into a nearby national forest.
U.S. Forest Service officials set a "back burn" to stop the fire. But winds shifted and sent flames into Los Alamos. In all, 43,000 acres were burned and 25,000 people evacuated.
State and federal cooperation: Today, state and federal officials spend more time communicating about how to handle fires -- either set intentionally or lightning-caused -- in their inter-mixed, sprawling domains.
"In much of the preplanning, we set up mutual-aid agreements with the state and the BLM," said Tim Garcia, manager for the Wasatch-Cache Kamas District east of Park City.
When a wildfire starts, he says, officials from the various agencies converge and prepare a situation analysis.
The feds are aware of the Utah officials' needs to follow statutes and fight nearly all fires on state and private lands, and decisions are made on ways to keep fire out of those areas.
But in the end, the process will always be tricky.
"We are never going to be 100 percent accurate," said Wasatch-Cache's Tidwell. "Even last year we caught 98 percent of the fires when they were two or three acres in size. You just hear about the big ones" that got away.
john.keahey@sltrib.com
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