Living with wildfire - living in the country side

Sunset, April, 2001 by Matthew Jaffe

Last summer's fires were among the nation's worst. Experts believe more destructive fires are in our future. Now is the time to prepare for the coming fire season

across the west

* It often seemed the entire West was ablaze last summer. Fires burned more than 5 million acres, racing through forests, across grasslands, and even into homes and communities on the wildland edge. In terms of acreage burned and money spent on firefighting, the 2000 fire season was one of the worst ever.

* With a new season ahead, Westerners must confront the issues raised by these fires. Reflecting on the 1949 Mann Gulch tragedy in which 13 smokejumpers perished in a Montana fire, writer Norman Maclean captures the difficulty of that task. "It is hard to know what to do with all the detail that rises out of a fire. It rises out of a fire as thick as smoke and threatens to blot out everything. ... Some of it, though, is true--and makes all the difference."

* The 2000 fires came at a time of increasing debate about forest management policies and firefighting strategies. And although destructive--577 structures were destroyed and eight lives were lost--the fires need to be understood as the product of both the region's ecology and the disruption of the West's natural fire cycles.

* For the increasing number of Westerners choosing to live in or near wildfire country, understanding these truths may indeed make all the difference.

The West is meant to burn

Fire is both integral to the West and generally ignored--a natural force that is an enduring threat but nevertheless remains out of mind for most people. When fire does arrive on a large scale, as it did last year, we are reminded that it is one concern truly shared by all of us who live in the West.

Last fire season was part of a recent trend that has seen fires burning more acreage with a greater intensity. Drought, dying trees, the buildup of vegetation as a result of long-standing fire-exclusion policies, and logging and land-use practices that have altered the forests' natural mix all contributed to the onset of a historic fire season.

The most significant factor was also the most inescapable one: The West is meant to burn. From the coastal chaparral of Southern California to the lodgepole pine forests of Yellowstone National Park, most of our native plants are adapted to fire as part of their life cycle.

"Instead of thinking of fire as a catastrophe, we need to accept it as a part of nature," says Paul Alaback, associate professor of forest ecology at the University of Montana. "If we think we're going to exclude fire from the West, it's just not going to happen."

Two basic facts distinguish the current threat from that of 100 years ago: Forests a century ago were healthier, and back then relatively few people lived in fire-prone areas. Today forests are more vulnerable to catastrophic wildfire, and millions of us now live in what is referred to as the wildland-urban interface.

That term is a catchall for different kinds of residential development found in the fast-growing rural West (see map, at right): subdivisions that bump up against open space and places where housing is mixed into areas of natural vegetation and woodland. The vegetation in these interface areas makes them prone to fire in a way that urban landscapes are not.

More people living near wildlands also increases the chance of blazes igniting. The situation demands an increased vigilance and understanding that the public has not always shown. "Fire," says Alaback, "forces us to reexamine the basic notion that we can play by our own rules."

A year of big fires

The 2000 fire season first seared its way into the public consciousness last May when a prescribed fire (one deliberately set in order to burn off excess vegetation) in New Mexico got out of control. It quickly burned across the centuries, racing from lands surrounding the ancient Native American cliff dwellings of Bandelier National Monument before surging into the birthplace of the atomic bomb, Los Alamos--one of a growing number of Western communities where suburb and wilderness meet. That fire destroyed 235 homes.

As the season continued, fires burned through Mesa Verde National Park, sending columns of smoke 56,000 feet into the air. Fires halted rafting runs on Idaho's Salmon River and consumed vast stands of ponderosa pine near Flagstaff. In the Bitterroot Valley outside Missoula, Montana smoke from nearby wildfires kept city residents indoors during much of August, creating a siege mentality heightened by the rumblings of World War II firefighting aircraft making one sortie after another.

In California, the unusually long fire season extended into the new year. Wildfires threatened hundreds of Southern California homes just before Christmas and ushered in 2001 east of San Diego by burning more than 10,000 acres and costing $10 million to fight.

As serious as the events were, some fire professionals point out that things could have been far worse. Bob Mutch, a fire consultant with nearly 50 years of experience, has weathered bad years. But none of those compares to the Great Fires of 1910, the enduring standard for Western wildfires. "When you get a really tough year, people always want to compare it to 1910," he says. "In the past, I never bought into those comparisons. But this time it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck to think what would have happened if the big winds had come up. If we had had 36 hours of winds like they had in 1910, the northern Rockies would have been devastated."