War in our forests - fighting wildfires - includes related article

Sunset, July, 1993 by Bill Crosby

This could be the Western fire season we fear. Here is what all of us need to know about how and why wildfires are fought today

WE CAN STATE WITH some confidence--but with little comfort--that, as you read this, some part of the West is burning. Our region is home to the largest, costliest, most devastating wildfires the country sees. The wonderfully varied topography and wealth of plant communities combine to make the West the perfect host to the great regenerator--fire.

Our fears for this fire season are primed by several years of drought, and we're haunted by images of recent major fires, including those at Yellowstone in 1988 and in the Oakland Hills in 1991. Last winter's rain didn't rid our forests of dead and drought-stressed fuel waiting to ignite. What it did was grow the fuses--the fine grasses--in abundance. Those "lush" landscapes will no doubt lure record crowds into the wilds this summer, and statistics show where there's folk, there's fire.

Fortunately, we also have 90 percent of the country's wildland fire-fighting resources stationed in our backyard. Nine of the 11 national fire-fighting supply caches are tucked about the West from Fairbanks to Silver City, New Mexico; all nine smokejumper bases are located here. Most of the ground forces are here, staffed by state and federal crews. Our landscape is blanketed with a state-of-the-art lightning detection and weather-monitoring network, which is linked by satellite to the country's wildfire nerve center, the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) at Boise, Idaho. The center can mobilize up to 15,000 fire-fighters in less than three days--faster than the military.

In 1992 alone, 87,394 fires were reported to the Boise center--the Pentagon of fire combat. Nearly a thousand structures were lost; 2,069,926 acres were consumed. Ironically, the largest fire of the year struck just 11 miles east of Boise, burning more than a quarter-million acres. And 1992 was a relatively light fire year, mainly because of two factors: aggressive initial attack by firefighters and favorable weather conditions.

What sort of fire year might 1993 be? Well, it may be bad, but what year isn't? In a dry year, there's lots of dry fuel; in a wet year, as this one has been in much of the West, there's lots of fine fuel. But one wet year won't bring up the normal moisture content in stressed big timber stands. The preceding seven to eight years of drought and the high volume of insect-killed trees in many forests may make this a tough year.

"The southern Washington Cascades and some parts of Montana and northeastern Oregon are low on snowpack. Northeast Oregon also has a severe bug-kill problem--the dead tree and ground litter problem there is incredible," reports fire meteorologist Gary Bennett of the NIFC.

Most wildfires are handled by local and state fire-suppression units. Regional crews from five federal agencies--Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, and Bureau of Indian Affairs--tackle many of the others. (One reason the West has so many fire-fighting resources at its disposal is because so much of our land is administered by these five agencies.)

Last year, more than 5,700 fires got beyond the control of the local or regional units, and the Boise center answered the calls for help. The center managed 500 fires and handled requests for assistance in fighting another 5,200. In all, Boise dispatched 737 fire crews with 14,740 personnel. Smokejumpers were sent up 537 times. More than 300 helicopters, 240 infrared-mapping planes, 147 aerial tankers, and 63 cargo planes were mobilized--all this essentially in one summer, in a light fire year.

COMPUTERS AND SATELLITES JOIN THE FIGHT

It's not just the sheer numbers of resources that can be brought to bear that have changed the way Western wildfires are fought today. It's the technological ability to predict where fires will be that has most dramatically reshaped the battle scenario in the West for the '90s.

Computers can now guess where Western fires will occur. How? First, know that two-thirds of all wildland fires are started by lightning. Lightning detectors, strategically placed at 37 spots around the West and linked by satellite to the Boise center, can detect ground strikes more than 200 miles away and pinpoint the location to within 10 square miles. In addition, remote weather stations report hourly via satellite from 600 locations throughout the West. This "real time" weather data is fed into the Boise computers and overlaid with up-to-date topographical and fuel-load information. Armed with all this data, the computer crunches the information and gives a best guess.

Meteorologists in Boise then make daily, or even hourly, presuppression forecasts. When "red flag events," such as dry lightning, high winds, and low humidity occur, fire managers position crews and equipment or put local crews on alert status. Jumper planes are often sent out to tail high-ignition-probability storms as they move across the region; the crews are constantly fed current computer information and fly over the lightning strike area looking for smoke. When they spot a plume, a couple of jumpers parachute down.