Fire Fuels Controlled-Burn Controversy

As federal forestry officials have retreated from the “Smokey Bear” philosophy that fire is the enemy, they increasingly have turned to small, controlled fires to thin dense growth on public lands.

The fires, deliberately set under certain conditions, are intended to clear the undergrowth that could spark major wildfires and also restore the natural role of fire in forest ecosystems of recycling nutrients and promoting the reproduction of some species.

As the destruction at Los Alamos, N.M., vividly demonstrated this week, there is always a risk that such burns will get out of control. But experts say that does not happen often.

“We successfully burn millions of acres a year in the United States without those escapes,” said forestry professor Ron Wakimoto, who teaches fire management at the University of Montana at Missoula.

Particularly in the Southeast, he said, commercial timber growers use controlled burns on private land to clear out fire-prone undergrowth.

The federal government’s use of controlled burns, also known as prescribed burns, is not without controversy.

Environmentalists generally applaud the trend. But the timber industry and some residents of forested areas complain that there is too much fuel in the woods to handle with controlled burns and that more logging is needed to reduce the risk of devastating blazes. There are also concerns that the fires contribute to air pollution.

“You’re building a tinderbox that’s waiting to ignite, and even the most well-intentioned controlled burn is doomed to fail due to the conditions our national forests are now experiencing,” argued Derek Jumper, media director for the American Forest and Paper Assn., which represents the forest products industry.

His organization does not oppose controlled burns, Jumper said, but believes that there is too much reliance on them. “We’ve seen the [Clinton] administration turn to prescribed burns as the holy gospel of forest health.”

Yet Ray Quintanar, director of fire and aviation management for California’s 18 national forests, said that, if anything, he’d like to see more controlled burning.

Last year, the U.S. Forest Service set fire to about 93,000 acres in California. Quintanar said ideally he would like that figure to climb to between 125,000 and 150,000 acres a year.

He argued that wildfires are far more destructive, as well as harder and more expensive to control, than controlled burns.

Controlled burns are carefully planned, taking into account wind speed and direction, temperature, humidity and the amount of moisture in vegetation. They are ignited by either aerial drops of incendiary material or by hand-dripping fuel on the ground.

Fire lines are dug, and water trucks and sometimes helicopters with water buckets are on hand to keep the flames within bounds. The fires are designed to burn at a low intensity so they move along the ground and stay out of the crowns of larger trees.

What went wrong with the controlled burn west of Los Alamos in the Bandelier National Monument will be the subject of intense investigation. But initial reports suggest that weather forecasts of increasing winds and low humidity either did not reach the National Park Service personnel who oversaw the burn or were not sufficiently heeded.

“The official version is we don’t know what happened,” said Interior Department spokesman Tim Ahern. “We are still trying to figure it out.”

Ahern said he has heard unconfirmed reports that winds may have changed direction.

In Arizona, the park service is also battling a wind-driven blaze on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon that began with a controlled burn. Unlike Los Alamos, it is in a wilderness area and not threatening structures.

Since it began prescribed burns in the late 1960s, the National Park Service said that it has set 3,746 burns covering nearly 900,000 acres. Only 38 have raged out of control.

“As far as I know, the park service has never [before] lost a prescribed burn in which homes burned,” said Tom Nichols, fire management officer for the National Park Service’s Pacific West Region. “It’s really unfortunate. But it’s a real rare event.”

After doing everything it could to suppress fires for much of this century, federal forestry officials began to change their philosophy in the late 1960s. Dousing every wildfire, they realized, was simply encouraging dense growth that promoted bigger, hotter blazes. It was also blocking a natural cycle that shapes ecosystems.

“Fire acts as an agent to rejuvenate forest and chaparral stands,” Nichols said. Nutrient-rich ash fertilizes the soil, and some species of plants need fire heat to open their seed cones.

Logging thins stands, but it does not serve that same biological role, said Craig Thomas of the Sierra Nevada Forest Protection Campaign. “Ecologically, logging doesn’t replicate what prescribed fire does in terms of nutrient recycling and release. With logging, most of that material is removed. “

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Times staff writer Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in Washington contributed to this story.