Plan to Increase Controlled Burns Ignites Criticism

Despite the likelihood of increased air pollution and heightened risk to resort areas, federal land managers have stepped up controlled burns of overgrown wildernesses with the goal of setting fire annually to seven times the acreage burned under controlled conditions in 1995.

The controversial new program, which was forged in the aftermath of a 1994 wildfire that killed 14 firefighters near Glenwood Springs, Colo., also allows federal authorities to put protection of natural resources ahead of private property. That provision is certain to generate hostility among local governments that have for years depended on federal help in saving threatened homes. Overall, the program seeks to temper six decades of Smokey Bear policies that reduced human-caused wildfires by 97% but also created dense vegetation for wildfires that burn hotter and spread faster and farther.

So far, wildfires fueled by such vegetation have burned 2.3 million acres of forest this year, three times the normal amount.

Officials aim to deliberately burn 600,000 acres this year, 750,000 acres in 1997 and a million acres in 1998. By 2005, the U.S. Forest Service alone wants to deliberately burn 3.5 million acres annually nationwide, or about 0.5% of total federal lands.

The program is already being challenged in California, where state fire authorities say it fails to take into account the complexities of wildfire behavior, air pollution restrictions and containment strategies in densely populated regions such as Southern California.

“If ever there was a reason for the federal government to get the hell out of state affairs, this is it,” said California Department of Forestry Director Richard Wilson. “It is incumbent on the state to provide leadership and for Washington to be a partner in any fire plan within our boundaries.”

But David Bunnell, the national fuel-management specialist for the U.S. Forest Service and an architect of the program, said there is no turning back. While jurisdictional disputes may delay application in California, he said, the program will go forward in less populated regions from Oregon to Maine.

“I have confidence this program will be funded and implemented regardless of local and political stigmas,” he said.

Prescribed burns are only part of the effort to reduce tinderbox conditions across the West.

Mechanical, chemical, biological and manual thinning treatments will be coupled with calls for people to make their homes more fire-safe, federal officials said.

Planned fires will be set when weather, terrain and the location of personal property are right--and local agencies and communities are in agreement.

Federal authorities concede that such fires put at some risk resort communities such as Big Bear Lake in the San Bernardino National Forest, Lake Tahoe in the Eldorado National Forest, and cities such as Boulder, Colo., near the Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest.

Even if they are able to control errant embers, officials acknowledge that the program may violate federal clean air standards. Federal land managers are negotiating with the Environmental Protection Agency to revise the Clean Air Act to allow for prescribed burns, which they argue in the long term could reduce the amount of smoke wildfires pour into the atmosphere each year.

“We will do everything possible to eliminate those concerns,” said Gardner Ferry, chief of fire planning and prevention for the Bureau of Land Management. In California, the program faces an additional problem: a basic difference in approach to fire suppression between state and federal fire officials.

The California Department of Forestry this year launched its own state fire management plan calling for immediate multi-agency suppression of all fires, regardless of their size.

“The bottom line is that when a fire starts in California, there is only one way to put it out: attack it when it is a small as can be,” said Jim Owens, the CDF’s deputy chief of fire protection. “That approach can never disappear in California.”

That strategy is clearly at odds with a portion of the federal program that for the first time ranks property and resources equally, behind the protection of human life, in firefighting priorities. The previous policy put property value ahead of natural resources in all situations.

The change was needed, federal authorities say, to provide their commanders with more flexibility.

“Let’s say the last California condor habitat on Earth is threatened and homes are also threatened,” said Russ Johnson, deputy forest fire manager for the San Bernardino National Forest. “Placing emphasis on the habitat at the expense of the homes is a tough decision, but it makes common sense and it can be politically supported.”

In such a scenario, Johnson added, the job of protecting private property outside of federal land boundaries would be left up to state and local fire agencies and landowners.

Given the call for dramatically expanded prescribed burns, CDF director Wilson regards the federal priority guidelines as doubly bad news.

“We can’t be responsible for fires they set that come off federal land,” Wilson said. “We can’t have one entity starting fires and another putting them out, and burning up assets in between.”

Federal land managers, however, say the controlled burns will be phased in over the years in sparsely populated regions where the danger posed by “escaped fire” and smoke would be minimal.

Exactly where expanded prescribed burns will take place is yet to be decided by regional consortiums of federal, state and local government officials, federal authorities said. For now, initial targets include fire-prone forests in the Southeast, as well as in Montana, Idaho, Utah, Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado.

Throughout a 2,500-square-mile stretch of Colorado’s Front Range of the Rocky Mountains are accumulations of brush and diseased trees so great that Forest Service officials fear a conflagration on the scale of the one that erupted near Oakland, Calif., in 1991, which claimed 25 lives and destroyed more than 3,400 dwellings.

Standing beside a dirt road in rugged terrain about 2 miles west of Boulder, Colo., U.S. Forest Service fire ecologist Paul Gleason pointed toward a nest of cabins near a crest targeted for prescribed burns and asked: “Would you want on your conscience lives lost trying to save those homes?

“We understand how this is a highly sensitive area because of the local population and its closeness to Boulder,” he added. “But people are just going to have to have faith in the effort.”

Ron Zeleny, a district supervisor for Colorado’s State Forest Service, said the program is bound to upset small rural agencies that for years have relied on federal firefighters to save threatened structures abutting public forests and grassland.

Nonetheless, he is generally supportive of the program he figures “will force local agencies to redeem responsibility that was theirs all along.”

The need for wholesale changes in federal fire management policies became clear in 1994, when a forest fire that swept up Storm King Mountain near Glenwood Springs, Colo., left 14 firefighters dead, nine of them from Oregon.

By year’s end, 34 lives were lost across the nation, millions of acres burned and nearly $1 billion spent. In the months that followed, procedures for communicating weather changes were improved, training courses and standards for use of fire shelters were modified and wilderness fire management policies were reviewed top to bottom.

Now “we have an action plan,” said John Chambers, assistant director of fire and aviation management for the U.S. Forest Service in Washington.