Army, Aussies, and Kiwis

Looks like we're bringing in some troops from Ft. Hood to help with the fire situation in the Northern Rockies. Some Australians and New Zealanders are also on the way. Here's a map showing what we're up against... and California hasn't really gotten hot yet.



Where you see the word "complex" it means there are two or more fires in close proximity.

 

bnb--

How are you hanging? Been quite active up there the last few days. Is your sister's house OK?

 

Unfortunately, yes. A buddy and I were sitting around talking about houses the other day. For all the fires I've been on, the total loss is over 1,200 homes and for my buddy it was around 700. We couldn't count evacuees. We also decided that when you lose a house, it doesn't matter if you're a retiree living in a trailer on a fixed income in AZ or a millionaire living in a mountain chateau in Montana, the pain is the same.

By the way, I can't tell what the fire's doing outside the borders of your photo, but it looks like your sister has a decent fuel break in front of her house. Good luck.

 

Under--

Many dissertations have been written on this and related questions. I can't do the topic justice in a BBS forum, but here are some short answers:

1. Partially. In the Southwest, for instance, you have "island mountains" rising above the desert floor to host Pinyon/Juniper on the lower elevations, Ponderosa Pine in the middle elevations, and Mixed Conifer (fir, spruce, aspen, etc. at the higher elevations.

Within the Ponderosa Pine elevations, there should be 75-150 trees per acre with grasses and shrubs in the understory. This is sustained by frequent surface fires that clear out the new seedlings and regenerate the grasses. Tree ring data going back hundreds of years and bog samples (looking for layers of charcoal) going back thousands of years tell us these surface fires came every 7-20 years and some may have creeped around the forest for months. The only anamoly in the data starts in the 1880's-1890's and continues through today. During that time, you see few surface fires and many SW forests have not had fire for 80 years or more. The two primary reasons are economic and cultural. First, railroads came to the SW in the 1880's making it feasible for folks to go from subsistence grazing, where you only have enough animals to support your family, to business grazing, where you can raise many more animals than you need and ship them out on the railroad. The explosion in grazing from the late 1880's through the 1920's decimated the grasses throughout all three elevation ranges. Thus, fire was not able to carry through the grasses and keep the stands open. This led to increases in both Pinyon and Ponderosa numbers. Secondly, after the 1910 blowup which burned millions of acres in the Northern Rockies, the edict came down fromthe Forest Service to put all fires out by 10 am the next morning. Thus, even if there were sufficient fuels to move the fire around, we put it out.

We now have places in the SW where ther are 1200-1500 Ponderosa Pines per acre. Many are 80+ years old with small diameters and stunted heights. They have so covered the forest floor with shade and needles that there is little understory. Mature Ponderosas are adapted to fire in that they have very thick bark and the limbs are high off the ground. A fire with six-ten foot flame lengths is no problem for a mature tree. However, when you have milions of acres of these stunted trees that are so close together their canopies touch, you have a forest that can't stand much fire at all. Add the fact that the last 50 years have been some of the wettest on record, allowing the new trees to find sufficient moisture to get established and that now we seem to be going into a drought cycle where these trees will be dying or bone dry during fire season and it doesn't look good. When the fire starts under dry and windy conditions, it climbs the small trees up to the big ones and takes off through the crowns. This kills the pre-1880's trees as well as the ones started in the last century. Ponderosa Pines should never crown out, but we have created whole forests where this has happened or is waiting to happen.

There is not much of a market for stunted trees, so the land management agencies must bear much of the cost of thinning back to the open stand numbers. It will take at least 25 years of hard work to come close to what Mother Nature had in mind for this kind of ecosystem. In the meantime, we will continue to have stupid campers, arsonists, and lighning strikes that chew up stands before we are able to take actions that might prevent or slow down a wildfire.

Now, in the upper elevations of the mixed conifers, fire doen't come as often. These trees are higher and tend to get more moisture. Aspen stands act as natural fuel breaks (and Aspens are one of the first colonizers after a wildfire... everywhere you see a nice group of mature Aspens, that's where a fire was 80-120 years ago). The FRID (Fire Return Interval) is anywhere from 100 years to 250 years in high elevation mixed conifer. And when fire comes here it comes hot and is typically a stand replacement fire. (Hence, your open areas for Aspen stands to develop.) When Mixed conifer gets cranking, there's not much you can do about it except wait for favorable weather conditions. However, we are noticing more accumulation of fuels (dead standing and down logs) than should be there. Looking at the history, we are coming upon 100 years of active fire suppression, so the mixed conifer may have missed 1-2 FRIDs. This is not as bad as the 7-10 FRIDs missed by Ponderosa systems, but it is starting to be noticeable and we need to deal with the problem soon.

2. So, in some cases, crown fires are the natural form of fire (this is also the case in Lodgepole Pine, which was the dominant fuel in the Yellowstone Fires of 1988). However, we don't want crown fires in Ponderosa Pine systems or other forests where they are not the natural fire type.

3. More and more people are moving into the woods and not recognizing they live in a fire-prone environment. I've been on fires where we had to spend our resources on property protection instead of following the best tactics to stop the fire. (If you live in the woods, at a minimum you need to follow the Firewise.org recommendations.) The two trends of more trees and more people seem to be converging with a vengeance over the last ten years or so. Throw in a drought, and we can look forward to having large fires that threaten property for the foreseeable future.

4. Most firefighters don't consider themselves brave, they just do a job. There's a saying that if you try to be a hero, you'll end up with a nice plaque on the side of a mountain and a big obit in your hometown newspaper. We should never put people in a position where they have to act heroically. If that happens, there have been massive failures throughout the system. You want people to be able to work within an environment where the dangers are mitigated. If the dangers increase beyond your capacity to mitigate them, you run away. Fast.

Hope this helps... I could have written pages just on the Aspen issue.