Fire Inflames Debate on Prescribed Burns

The computer models didn’t predict this.

Ash fell steadily from the smoke-filled sky, and fire hoses snaked around Bert Wohlschlegel’s cabin. Fire was raging through the forest beyond a ridge four miles away and, if the wind kicked up, firefighters told Wohlschlegel, the fire could hit Gattin Ranch within hours.

Wohlschlegel stood by his log cabin and surveyed a yard full of memories. He pointed to a ring of stones around some foot-high pines--a memorial to his daughter, Becky, who died three years ago at age 23. How she loved those little trees, he said.

What if all this burned?

Wohlschlegel didn’t want to talk about it. He squinted up at the smoke-shrouded sun, blood red at midday.

“Damn smoke,” he muttered.

*

The West is burning as it hasn’t in nearly three decades, and among the biggest blazes is one called the Swet Creek Fire, in the Bitterroot National Forest along the Idaho-Montana border.

It is no ordinary wildfire. Sparked by lightning July 9 in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, it was designated a “prescribed natural fire” by Forest Service officials. Instead of dousing it, they planned to let it burn for the good of the forest.

Their computer models showed that even a worst-case scenario would char no more than 18,000 acres, all within the wilderness. But the fire had its own design. Over the last eight weeks, it has swept across more than 34,000 acres and still is going strong. Officials say it may burn until the snow flies.

Out of the wilderness and out of control, the Swet Creek Fire is testing the government’s commitment to a dangerous enterprise--restoring fire to the Western landscape.

*

For a month, the fire behaved as if it had read the 45-page burn plan prepared for it by Forest Service managers.

From the 7,000-foot-high ridge where it started, the fire chewed its way slowly downhill through lodgepole pines to Swet Creek, then climbed uphill to join another small lightning-sparked fire. Flames jumped across the Selway River on Aug. 10, right on schedule.

The fire missed some spots and burned others lightly, creating a mosaic of scorched and green areas that will provide diverse wildlife habitats in years ahead. It was just the thing, managers agreed, for an overgrown forest clogged with dead wood from decades of overzealous fire suppression.

Then came the wind--three days of wind, gusting to 40 mph from the southwest. It fanned the crackling fire to a thunderous roar and pushed it through valleys filled with tinder-dry logs. Flames shot 200 feet high. Whole mountainsides turned black. Bushy pines became charred poles poking up from the ash.

The fire raced east, eight miles in three days, and managers looked ahead on the map to a high divide separating Idaho and Montana. Maybe that will stop the fire, they thought.

It didn’t. Wind tossed embers over the ridge, and the blaze ran down slope, past the wilderness boundary and out of the “maximum manageable area,” the zone within which managers believed the fire could safely burn.

On Aug. 14, the fire was declared a wildfire, to be fought with whatever resources were at hand. But by then, it was too late. The blaze had grown too big to stop, and there were precious few resources at hand.

Other fires were breaking out across the West, stretching fire crews thin. For three days, there wasn’t even a helicopter to be spared for the Swet Creek Fire.

The weather gave firefighters a weeklong respite--cool and humid, with a sprinkling of rain. But by Aug. 23, the fire had reawakened. Temperatures soared into the 90s, and relative humidity dropped into the teens.

The eastern edge of the fire resumed its downhill march, torching into trees and repeatedly flinging embers over lines dug by firefighters.

Along its southern flank, meanwhile, the fire bulged out into heavy timber. A mile-wide wall of burning trees sent a smoke column 20,000 feet up--so high it formed an anvil-shaped icecap like those atop thunder clouds.

Dick Hodge, incident commander for the firefighting effort, flew over the fire two weeks ago. From a helicopter, he pointed to flames boiling up from the trees, and to sun-dried logs stacked in front of the fire like kindling.

“If you had somebody out in front of that, they wouldn’t have a chance,” Hodge said. “We can’t put any people there. It’s not defensible.”

*

By Sunday, Aug. 25, firefighters were laying hoses around the seven homes at Gattin Ranch, a 100-acre patch of private land at the edge of the wilderness.

As yellow-shirted firefighters uncoiled hoses down to Horse Creek, homeowners dashed around their yards, clearing debris and wetting down walls.

Bert Wohlschlegel, 65, hauled branches into the forest as his son, Perry, 35, sawed up a big lodgepole pine lying by the driveway.

Fire has a place in the woods, the Wohlschlegels agreed. But the Forest Service ought to be more careful about which fires to allow, they said.

“If it’s September, late in the year, that would make more sense,” Bert said. “Then the fire wouldn’t have time to spread.”

“When it’s a bad fire season, they ought to catch a fire when it’s small,” Perry said. “This fire’s so big now, there’s nothing they can do.”

They aren’t the only ones with complaints about the federal government’s growing use of deliberately set and prescribed natural fires.

Air-quality officials have threatened to shut down the program, saying it produces too much pollution. Loggers would rather cut trees than see them burn. Some state forestry agencies, including California’s, contend the federal government is too cavalier about prescribed fire’s threat to populated areas.

And no fire official can forget 1988, when fire swept across more than a million acres of Yellowstone National Park. Politicians made scapegoats of managers who had authorized lightning-sparked prescribed blazes there.

But even in an incendiary year like this, in which the area burned nationwide has surpassed 1988’s 5 million acres, federal land managers are forging ahead with plans to greatly expand their use of prescribed fire.

Why so bold? Stephen Kelly, Bitterroot supervisor and one of three officials who authorized the Swet Creek Fire, explained that for all the arguments against prescribed fire, there is one big argument for it: The West is meant to burn.

“This is risky business,” Kelly said. “But you risk it now, or risk it later.”

*

Late last month, the weather gave firefighters on the Swet Creek Fire another break. Daytime temperatures dropped out of the 90s, and a thunderstorm brought a light rain. The fire slowed its advance, nibbling mostly at unburned patches within.

But the fire hoses remained in place at Gattin Ranch, and nobody was relaxing. Any day, the wind could return. Any day, the temperatures might soar again. Only the cool weather of autumn will slow this fire, and only the first snows will put it out for certain.

“We could be done by mid-September,” fire-behavior analyst Mark Woods said. “Or we might be here through the end of October.”

Although the daily forecast is not certain, the long-range outlook is, Woods said. Just look at the hills, where young pines crowd around the charred trunks of trees killed in past conflagrations.

“Fire has been here before, and it’s going to come again,” Woods said. “When you look at the old fire patterns out there, you realize we ain’t touched nothing yet.”