Fighting fire with fire - forest fire - includes related articles

American Forests, July-August, 1995 by Herbert E. McLean

It's a promising tool, this idea of prescribed burning to defuel forests and help restore ecosystem health. But it's risky business, too, and smoke clouds public acceptance.

I THOUGHT FIRE SEASON HAD ENDED. BUT THE SCENT OF PINE SMOKE IN MY NOSTRILS LATE LAST OCTOBER TOLD ME SOMETHING DIFFERENT.

Deep in Oregon's ponderosa paradise on Winema National Forest, my wife Maurine and I had just finished flagging a new interpretive trail as Forest volunteers. As we drove a remote road just east of Crater Lake National Park, we smelled the smoke. Then we saw flames.

We relaxed a bit when we spotted a yellow-shirted, hard-hatted fire crew from the Chemult Ranger district. They were matter-of-factly tending flank and back lines (see illustration, page 16) on a low-intensity ground fire they'd set earlier. It gradually burned through bitterbrush and light woody debris, mimicking the natural understory fires of old and thus protecting a stand of mature ponderosas. The fire was moving away from our road, which acted as a firebreak.

Prescribed fire. Purposely burning within limits deemed safe for a given area. A relatively new technique on many of our 155 national forests these days. Everything under control.

But then the wind picked up, as though someone had tossed a pitcher of cold air down from Crater Lake. The fire intensified, as did my heart rate. I knew that a few sparks blown across that road could, given enough wind and a dry enough day, propel a wildfire for miles.

Fortunately, the unexpected downdraft wasn't sufficiently strong to spill the fire "out of prescription," as they say. It was a good, ecologically sound, "defueling" burn in this fuel-heavy forest.

Here, in microcosm, you have the yin-yang essence of prescribed fire in our forests:

On one hand it is a tantalizing, promising tool to help reduce our badly overfueled wildlands, a way of allowing low-intensity fire to resume its natural "cleansing" role after years of intense suppression and corresponding fuel buildups. On the other hand, there is the realization that Mother Nature - most often the weather - is not perfectly predictable. Accidents from prescribed fire - whether set on purpose or kindled naturally by lightning and allowed to burn - do happen. We earth creatures are, it often seems, a bit like mice playing beneath the gaze of a hidden cat as we tinker with a force beyond our comprehension.

Is prescribed fire a newly found magical doorway leading back to a hoped-for state of natural-fire ecology? Are the risks of escaped fires worth the obvious gains in forest health and wildlife habitat that prescribed fires produce? And what about all those folks now crowding into the so-called wildland "interface," where prescribed fires could get loose and zap some homes, or at least smoke-up a nice clear day?

The answers to these questions are just now emerging. Interestingly, I found most of them not at Forest Service headquarters but widely scattered in the field as I talked with a legion of prescribed-fire professionals throughout the U.S. In other words, the present emerging technology is a lot more parochial (meaning practical) than political - a refreshing thought.

"Honey, your fire has escaped.!"

"There's no guarantee you'll not get a big rip," (see terminology sidebar, page 57) says a Forest Service fire officer on the eastern seaboard.

"When you're messing with fire, there's always a chance one will escape," echoes his counterpart in California's Sierras.

"The fuels are tricky..." adds Ron Meyers, who directs prescribed fires for The Nature Conservancy from his base in Florida.

Such concerns are real.

Paul Tine, acting Forest Service fuels specialist for the sprawling eastern U.S. region, remembers well what he calls "the lowest day I've ever had in my 18-year career." As fire boss on a 40-acre prescribed burn on Minnesota's Superior National Forest in the '80s, he had taken a little time off to attend a fire seminar, leaving his mop-up crew in good hands after about nine days of solid progress. Then he received a call from his wife.

"Honey, your fire has escaped!" she reported. Apparently a rogue wind had come up, and his prescribed burn had suddenly become a 2,000-acre "project fire," to use Forest Service lingo.

On May 5, 1980, a 213-acre slash burn in jackpine on Michigan's Manistee National Forest, fanned by the winds of an unexpected cold front, jumped a major highway, consumed 25,000 acres in one afternoon, took the life of one Forest Service firefighter, and destroyed 44 homes on adjacent private lands.

And early in 1993, a 15,000-acre prescribed fire on New Mexico's Santa Fe National Forest was going fine - until 60-mph winds unexpectedly struck a small stand of pinyon pine and juniper, producing a crown fire that caught a burning crew off-guard, killing one member (even though the Buchanan fire was later pronounced an ecological success).

Tales like these are, thank heavens, exceptions in the new prescribed-fire technology. And though the learning curve has shown clearly that such fires can help control fuel overloads while improving wildlife habitat and producing other benefits, such incidents have helped to instill a much needed element in this risky business: a little more humility in the face of superior forces.