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Before European settlement, many of America’s forests were very different from what we see today

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[Replace title with “The 2002 Fire Season: Challenges and Lessons Learned”]

Before European settlement, much of America’s forests were very different from what we see today. Millions of acres across the continent, both east and west, were covered by vast open forests. Trees were generally huge and widely spaced, or else in clustered groves surrounded by seas of grass.

What kept these forests open? In a word, fire. Lightning ignited many of the fires, and others were set by American Indians to maintain open woodlands. Enormous areas burned each year in low, relatively cool fires. These cleansing fires removed many immature trees but permitted the surviving giants to reach ripe old ages. Early settlers cherished these open forests and used fires to preserve them.

In the 20^th century, a new doctrine of forestry prevailed. It called for stopping all fires. As the fires went out, the big old trees were harvested as rich sources of wood. Foresters fully expected that the young trees they planted would replace them in time.

But nature proceeded differently, Instead of big, widely spaced trees; nature often produced thickets of small trees. Without frequent fire to clean them out, trees grew in dense, thick forests, forming dense stands that now are contributing to the spread of unnaturally severe wildfires. Where once only 25 or 30 trees grew on an acre of land, now more than 500 are crowded together.

These densely-packed forests are susceptible to disease, drought, and severe wildfires that burn at unusually high temperatures, and grow extremely quickly.

The 2002 fire season is not yet over and already more than 5.6 million acres have burned which is more than twice the 10-year average. With more and more people living in or near forests and rangelands it is an increasing challenge for firefighters to protect people, homes, communities and watersheds.

Fires are larger, hotter, and more severe than ever before. The 137,000-acre Hayman Fire west of Denver was five times larger than the previous largest fire in Colorado’s recorded history. The Rodeo-Chedeski Fire in Arizona grew from 800 acres to 46,000 acres in one day, and eventually grew to more than 450,000 acres. The 396,000-acre Biscuit fire is already larger than the largest fire Oregon’s history, the 1933 Tillamook burn.

These large, hot fires are tremendously destructive. Their extreme heat sterilizes soils, preventing growth for decades to come. The smoke from these large fires produces significant amounts of air pollution, and some fires threaten communities and destroy homes. This year’s fires destroyed more than 2,000 homes and structures.

Today’s wildfires are burning with greater intensity due to a century of unrestrictive growth of marginal trees and seasonal vegetation. This understory of immature trees, layers of dried grasses, and brush creates conditions ripe for fires, and the accumulation of fuels makes these fires extremely severe if they aren’t extinguished quickly.

Despite these forests conditions, firefighters have been able to stop over 99 percent of the fires that started this year before they grew. Yet, because of weather, droughts, and the accumulation of excessive fuels, some fires are not caught. These fire are extremely difficult to control and costly to suppress. Just one percent of all fires that started this year were responsible for 76 percent of the total acreage that burned.

Active management of forests and rangelands is needed to prevent these catastrophic fires. About 190 million acres of public land are at high risk of these severe fires. A century of fire suppression, record breaking drought conditions and decades of reduced forest thinning combine to make these lands vulnerable to intense and environmentally destructive fires.

Rather than let our forests continue to deteriorate slowly, ravaged by large fires, we need to start actively managing these forests in ways that will reduce the threat of fire, as proposed in the National Fire Plan. Unfortunately, procedural delays often prevent this work from being done in time to prevent catastrophic fires.

Firefighters and land managers know what needs to be done to restore forest health and prevent these fires. A combination of prescribed fires, timber harvesting, and selected mechanical thinning of brush and small trees reduces the buildup of fuels and returns forests to more natural conditions.

A prescribed fire is set only under carefully controlled circumstances. The weather must be appropriate, moisture content of the forest must be right, and fire crews must be standing by.

Fire is an important part of healthy forest ecosystems. Sequoia trees, for example, benefit from frequent low intensity fires. In fire dependent ecosystems such as giant Sequoias or Ponderosa Pines, natural fires stay close to the ground, and don’t move up trees and through the treetops or canopy. It takes out the brush and smaller trees, leaving the large fire-resistant trees intact.

Prescribed burns are not always the best tools. They are risky when used adjacent to communities or homes and prescribed fire cannot be used if vegetation is too dense as the fire will burn too hot and destroy the trees.

When fires develop in overly dense forests they explode with power from these built up fuels. These fires reach the tops of the trees, and spread rapidly. Even centuries-old forest giants are destroyed.

We know that treatments that reduce the number of trees in a forested area or mechanical treatments that remove brush are effective in stopping or moderating the behavior of wildfires.

These photos from the 2002 Rodeo-Chedeski fire in Arizona demonstrate

dramatically favorable post-fire conditions of the forest when they are thinned.

Both photos were taken immediately following the fire. The area on the left

was thinned. The area on the right was not. The larger trees in the thinned

forest survived.

This photo is of ridgeline that did not burn during the 1994 Tyee fire in Washington State. The green area in the middle was an area that had been thinned. On both sides of the thinning project the fire destroyed the forest.

These photos [THESE PHOTOS DO NOT REPRODUCE VERY WELL – CAN YOU SUBSTITUTE CLEARER PICTURES?] were taken from a fire earlier this season in OREGON. On the left is an area that had not been thinned. This area experienced a high intensity burn. On the right, the area had been mechanically thinned in 1999. This area had a low intensity burn. This dramatically shows the difference in mortality between treated and untreated stands.

The Squires Peak fire began Saturday, July 13 from a lightening strike and burned 2,800 acres of public and private land. The fire burned through a mosaic of oak woodlands, brush fields, and forested areas. The local land managing agency had previously treated some of these areas to reduce the heavy build-up of vegetation that has resulted from decades of fire exclusion. Methods to reduce the hazardous fuel build-ups in the area of Squires Peak included mechanical and manual brush removal, pre-commercial and commercial thinning of trees, and prescribed burning.

The Squires Peak fire exhibited extreme fire behavior. It was wind driven, and it burned during the hottest and driest times of the day. Even with these extreme conditions, fire behavior was significantly changed when the fire entered areas that had hazardous fuels removed. In areas where trees had been thinned or brush removed, the fire was more likely to remain on the ground or to drop to the ground because the ladder fuels, small trees and brush that allow the fire to climb into the treetops, had been removed.

The Squires fire struck before all of the thinning and fuel reduction projects in the area could be implemented. It started in an untreated area and burned into areas where brush and trees had been removed or thinned, and into areas where no work had been done. When the fire entered the thinned areas it dropped to the ground thereby creating space where firefighters could safely attack the fire. The fire, according to computer modeling, had the potential to grow to 26,000 acres. By being able to attack the fire directly in the thinned areas, firefighters were able to hold the fire to 2,800 acres. The hazardous fuels reduction treatments were a major reason this fire did not grow to be any larger.

This fire highlights the challenge of managing forests today. Even though the local land managing agency was successful in completing some of their hazardous fuel reduction projects, the area you are looking at now, which was one of the projects affected by the Squires fire, was in the beginning stages of treatment and would have been treated earlier except for administrative, regulatory and judicial delays.

This was a relatively small area, 430 acres, that was proposed for thinning treatments. It took six years of analysis, 830 pages of administrative record, several appeals and 2 lawsuits before a Federal District Court Judge issued rulings denying the efforts to stop the project.

This fire cost 2 million dollars to suppress and it is expected to cost up to 1 million dollars to rehabilitate the land.

[CAN WE INSERT SOME OF THE VIDEO FOOTAGE FROM THE BUCKTAIL FIRE VIDEO HERE – the shots of firefighters talking about fire behavior in treated and untreated forests were very good]

Another example where thinning treatments were effective was on the Cache fire, also in Oregon.

This area of small tightly spaced trees had not been treated. When the fire entered this stand of trees it was able to reach the tree canopies, killing the trees. Because of the dense fuels, it burned hot enough to destroy all of the vegetation.

Conversely when the Cache fire went through this treated stand, which had been thinned, if dropped to the ground, burned with lower intensity and the trees survived.

Not only did treatments protect trees during the Cache fire, firefighters were able to save homes in areas that had been thinned. The area around this home had been thinned, because of the thinning the fire was not as hot, it had dropped to the ground allowing fire fighters to safely protect the home.

Unfortunately, fuel treatments alone cannot completely control a fire’s behavior; sometimes conditions and circumstances are such that regardless of efforts, a stand will burn as in the case of Mongol Rim this year on the Rodeo-Chedeski fire. The landscape created a chimney effect that burned through treated areas.

It is imperative that we accelerate the work that is already being done to protect our forests, rangelands and communities, but as was evident on the Squires Peak Fire, agencies are often unable to do vital fire prevention and forest restoration work because of litigation, appeals, procedures and required paperwork.

It takes six months to prepare environmental planning documents for even routine prescribed fire treatments. More complicated projects can take two years or longer. Timber sales designed to achieve fuels reduction and forest health objectives take two to four years to prepare and complete.

The Forest Service has had 50 percent of its mechanical fuels treatment projects appealed in 2001 and 2002, delaying critical projects to reduce the risk of these catastrophic wildfires.

These procedural delays on critical projects endanger firefighters, the public, and the valuable wildlife habitat that is destroyed when catastrophic fires strike.

We know that treatments are effective and we need to work together with communities, local governments, tribes, states and private partners to minimize the effects of catastrophic wildfires.

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