Forest-Edge Homes at Heart of Wildfire War

In the Bitterroot Valley, where the worst of the nation’s wildfires have marauded across more than 200,000 acres of mountain forests, firefighters over the weekend mounted a desperate stand to channel flames away from thousands of houses that in recent years have crept up from the valley floor and into the lovely but treacherous edges of the wilderness.

Already, more than 1,400 homes have been evacuated in the scenic canyons and forest fringes south of Missoula, Mont., where new residents escaping urban America have fueled one of the nation’s highest growth rates--and posed a dilemma for firefighters faced with protecting them from the inevitability of wildland fires.

The result, fire officials said, is that firefighters facing furious wildfires in 13 states have had to deploy resources around the increasing number of rural residential developments and leave most of the wildland fires not threatening homes to burn--perhaps for months.

“It’s very simple. We do not have sufficient resources to protect structures and take containment action on the fires,” Steve Frye, incident commander for the massive complex of fires burning south of Darby, Mont., said over the weekend. “One of the take-home messages is that development in the urban-wildland interface has complicated significantly the job of fighting large wildland fires.”

On Sunday, there were signs of some progress in the battle against 868,975 acres burning from Arizona to Idaho. In Montana, where the worst of the fires are raging, hundreds of evacuees in the Elkhorn Mountains south of Helena were allowed to go home.

In the Bitterroot Valley, where a complex of fires laces the mountains on two sides of the valley between Hamilton and Sula, two days of cooler temperatures have allowed firefighters to erect several more miles of fire lines to help control the blazes, fire officials said.

Reinforcements in the form of 79 firefighters from Australia and New Zealand arrived in Missoula, along with the Army’s 20th Engineers Battalion from Ft. Hood, Texas, to combat the 9,000-acre Upper Nine Mile complex of fires near Huson, Mont.

All told, there were still 76 major fires burning Sunday across the West, though only one remained in California, a 321-acre blaze on the Inyo National Forest near Independence, which was 80% contained, according to the National Fire Information Center.

The Bitterroot Valley has become a focal point in the national firefight because of the sheer number of homes pressed up inside remote canyons and under the canopy of the lodgepole pine forests that throughout history have been the scene of dramatic forest fires, fire officials said.

The region that was once a remote ranch and farming community has become in recent years a magnet for retirees and others who have sought refuge and beauty on the edges of the wilderness. Ravalli County, which includes the towns of Hamilton and Darby, was the state’s fastest-growing region through the 1990s and the 10th fastest in the United States.

Complicating the assault on this year’s wildland fires is a dramatically high fuel load, which is packed into forests all over the West.

This is attributable to decades of increasingly proficient fire suppression in the national forests, quick and vigorous clampdowns on wildland fires and major reductions in logging on public lands that have left national forests jam-packed with not only trees, but heavy underlying brush, particularly in the lower elevations.

Forests that in past years had 50 to 80 trees per acre now hold 700 or even 1,000 per acre, said Mick Harrington, fire research ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service’s Fire Science Laboratory in Missoula.

“They’ve had to extinguish all these fires [in past years] because people are now living in the forest, recreating in the forest, at levels we haven’t seen before. So it’s important that these fires be extinguished for safety reasons, really,” Harrington said.

Firefighting Tactics Changed

With unusually high heat and low humidity, the Western forests have become dangerous tinderboxes, and several weeks of dry thunderstorms have essentially lit the match. During one night last week alone, there were 21,000 lightning strikes. In recent weeks, 30% to 70% of such strikes have produced fires.

In response to these factors, fire officials have adopted a fundamental tactical shift in the way this year’s wildland fires are fought.

First priority has gone to saving lives: No more firefighters making heroic stands to halt the advance of the flames, a policy that has seen more than 50 structures lost so far in the Bitterroot Valley. Second priority: Save homes and structures, when it’s possible to do it safely. A distant third: Put out the fires.

“We all have the same charge, and that is that we’re not fighting forest fires in the traditional sense. We are here to defend these homes,” said John Silvius, part of a California-based team that is attacking fires in the northern Bitterroot Valley. “We’re going to let the forest go.”

In cases where protecting homes puts firefighters’ lives in danger, fire officials said, the houses will be left to burn.

At an often contentious meeting with Darby residents Friday night, U.S. Forest Service firefighter Sonny Lasalle laid it on the line for angry residents whose homes had burned in rural Dickson Canyon. Referring to the dozens of firefighters who lost their lives battling to protect wilderness-edge homes in the 1990s, he said:

“Your house is not worth my life. It’s just not going to happen.”

Policy analysts in Montana and other Western states have focused increasingly on protecting the so-called urban-wildland interface, with mixed results, in part because the urge that drives city dwellers to the mountains is hard to combat.

“The ease of logistics, the beauty of the place, is what attracts people, who then of course want to build in the folds and wrinkles of these mountains,” said former Montana Congressman Pat Williams, now a fellow at the University of Montana’s Center for the Rocky Mountain West.

Danger of Building Close to Wildland

Ravalli County, which has been a hotbed of anti-government sentiment in Montana, has no zoning or land-use ordinances in its unincorporated areas. People are permitted to build anywhere on their properties, with no requirements for setbacks from trees or brush clearances.

One house outside of Hamilton--which was fiercely protected by firefighters--had a huge pine tree in an atrium in the center of the house. Trees growing through the middle of decks are not unusual.

“I see it in my community in Northern California,” Silvius said. “People want their own little bit of heaven. Particularly empty-nesters, they’ve raised their families and they say, ‘Come on, Marge,’ and they get their little five-acre plot where they can smell the trees and hear the creek flowing. Now the question is, do you have so much vegetation around your home that with one ember, you lose it all?”

As he talked, the thick cloud of smoke that has blanketed much of the Bitterroot Valley in the last week temporarily lifted, and helicopters began swooping up 1,000-gallon buckets out of nearby ponds and dropping the water on the fire up the mountain. “Hot shot” crews worked with bulldozers and axes to clear lines on the edge of the fire to channel it across the mountain and away from residences, with varying success: The fire has broken through two huge fire lines above Hamilton, leaving it only 35% contained after nearly two weeks. (The 147,000 Valley/Sula complex of fires, to the south, is only 10% contained.)

One of those whose houses miraculously escaped the blaze was Dick White, who built his little piece of paradise in the hills above Hamilton a few years ago when he retired and moved up from Central California.

Fire charred nearly all the acreage around his home, right up to the edge of the garden. It consumed two cabins just down the road. It melted the plastic trellis behind his house.

For White, who is 75 and was never a particularly religious man, there was only one thing to do when he drove home over the weekend and saw his house still standing. He and his wife, Shawna, got down on their knees and gave thanks. “I had to tell that old gentleman thank you,” he said.

In this case, it was also a ferocious stand by members of the Pinesdale, Mont., volunteer fire department and a large crew of Blackfeet Indian firefighters who fought off the blaze, laying down foam on the roofs, hacking fire lines around front yards and cutting away vegetation before finally retreating to let the fire’s roaring advance do what it would.

White had stayed behind after most of his neighbors were evacuated to try to guard his house, turning on sprinklers and cutting away brush. Nearly three dozen local volunteers and Blackfeet Indian crews were working beside him to make barriers around houses, he said.

But it finally became clear that nothing would stop the huge, hot, oncoming blaze, roaring through the crowns of the trees at temperatures exceeding 2,000 degrees. “They said, ‘Guys, get out! Get out!’ ” White recalled. The approaching blaze sounded like a jet taking off, he said. “We gave the top of the house one last spray, and then we had to go. I looked behind me, and I saw a big boom, and I thought, well, there goes three years, up in smoke.”

Hours after the fire had passed, White went back and found his house, and those of most of his neighbors, still standing. He went down to the campground in Hamilton where many of his neighbors were staying with the news.

“Dick came home that night and said, ‘It missed us,’ ” said Delores Longbow, who lives just down the road. “He was crying, and Dick doesn’t cry. He’s an ex-Marine. He said, ‘I met the man upstairs.’ He said there are no atheists in a foxhole, and there are no atheists in a firefight.”

Longbow herself, who moved up with her truck driver husband, John, from Susanville, Calif., to build a house in 1996, lost $1,500 worth of groceries and saw most of their 10 acres charred, but their dream house with the open beams and hand-milled floors was still standing.

Longbow was shy as she tried to explain it, then tearful, so moved she could hardly speak. Her two dogs had died within a couple of weeks of each other, she said, and the fire stopped right near the place they were buried.

“The Indian guys, one of the last things one of them said was, ‘Your dog’s spirit was guarding your property,’ ” Longbow said.

“Something like this, it’s a tragedy, yes,” she said “But on the other hand, you see some of the most beautiful and wonderful acts of the human spirit. I can’t even describe how horrified I am of fire after this. Your instinct is, you want to run. And these guys, they run into that stuff. There will not be a night of my life or John’s life when we don’t go to bed and ask God to keep these men safe.”