Forest Dwellers Are on Front Line in Fighting Fires

Emmett Dosier, a 70-year-old retired hospital chaplain, was working on his lawn last May when a wildfire broke out on the other side of the old clear-cut next door and started bearing down on his neighborhood.

“I told my wife it was time to get out,” Dosier recalled. “By the time she came out, it was here. It was just coming--a wall of fire moving.”

In years past, when Smokey Bear’s message was pretty much limited to being careful with matches to prevent forest fires, that wall of flame might have wiped out dozens of homes in the piney outskirts of this small, high-desert town of 7,000 on the edge of the Deschutes National Forest.

Across the West, the folks in the Smokey Bear hats now have a different message: Fire is coming someday to a forest near you, and if you live in the woods, you had better be ready when it does.

Heeding the advice of their local fire department, the Oregon Department of Forestry, and the U.S. Forest Service since moving here, the Dosiers have been cutting brush and thinning trees on their five-acre parcel to give firefighters a chance to make a stand.

It finally paid off. After the evacuation of their neighborhood was lifted, the Dosiers were able to go home to bed instead of picking through the charred remains of their lives.

“It’s our first example of where people are really starting to listen to what we are saying,” John Stewart, National Fire Plan coordinator for the Deschutes National Forest, said of the La Pine fire. “We’ve really turned a corner.”

For more than a decade, the U.S. Forest Service has been trying to put on the ground the scientific evidence that fire is a regular visitor to the pine forests of the arid mountains and plains of the West, and 50 years of high-grade logging and a century of fighting fire have created disasters waiting to happen.

But the effort has been difficult. Every year more homes are built in the woods, and the public is afraid of starting fires on purpose--known as prescribed burns--and breathing the smoke that goes with them.

Last year, those fears came to life in New Mexico, where a prescribed fire on Bandelier National Monument got loose and left 400 families in Los Alamos homeless.

A total of 6.8 million acres burned nationally last year in the worst fire season in 50 years. President Clinton persuaded Congress to put some serious money behind preventing fires, and the National Fire Plan was funded to the tune of $1.8 billion--the biggest commitment ever.

The money goes to hiring 5,000 new federal firefighters, thinning 3 million acres of federal forests to reduce fire danger and restoring 5 million acres that has already burned. It also provides money for state and local agencies to help people like the Dosiers make their homes safer.

The wake-up call in central Oregon came in 1990, when the 3,300-acre Awbry Hall fire destroyed 20 homes in the nearby city of Bend, many of them ignited when firebrands landed on shake roofs that were like so much kindling.

Consciousness is rising slowly. Deschutes County this year adopted an ordinance prohibiting shake roofs on new homes in rural areas. A program called FireFree, which offers free dumping for people who clean up brush and trees around their homes, has been growing. Over the last four years, the amount of debris collected has risen from 9,102 cubic yards to 13,884 cubic yards--a 53% increase.

The Oregon Department of Forestry will come to people’s homes, describe what they need to do to make their homes defensible when fire comes, and in some cases help get the work done.

“We’d have a smoke column coming out of central Oregon that would dwarf Mt. St. Helens if we didn’t have some alternatives” to just putting out fires, said Tom Andrade of the Oregon Department of Forestry.

People who don’t make their homes more defensible will be left to pay the price when the fire comes, said LaPine Fire Chief Jim Court.

His crews carry a checklist to decide whether to try to save a particular home. Is the driveway too narrow or steep to turn around for a quick getaway? Is the roof made of shakes? Do trees overhang the roof or driveway? Are trees and brush thinned out within 30 feet of the house?

Too many wrong answers and the list instructs: “WRITE OFF!”

“If I’ve got a $50,000 home and a $300,000 firetruck, I’ve got to think about priorities,” said Court.

The science is clear, said Jerry Franklin, professor of ecosystem analysis at the University of Washington and a longtime advisor to the Forest Service.

In forests dominated by ponderosa pine, such as those in central Oregon, fire was historically a frequent visitor, burning up the castoff needles, dead branches, and young seedlings that had built up since the last fire.

The forests looked more like a savanna, with widely spaced trees. When fire came, it crept slowly along the ground, killing seedlings and saplings. Mature trees were protected by their thick bark.

After the Forest Service sold the big valuable trees for lumber and put out every fire it could, many of these forests now are packed tight with thousands of trees per acre. If lightning or a careless camper starts a fire, it quickly moves from the ground up the ladder of brush and small trees into the crowns of large trees, sweeping across the landscape.

As the nation saw in Yellowstone National Park in 1988, once a big fire gets roaring, there is nothing that thousands of firefighters and millions of dollars can do to stop it until nature decides it is time, usually with rain or snow.

The $127 million spent on building 630 miles of fire line had no effect, said Don Despain, a research ecologist for the U.S. Geological Survey’s Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center in Bozeman, Mont.

“The only firebreak that wasn’t breached was Yellowstone Lake,” he said.

While nature rules in national parks, the U.S. Forest Service tries to make a difference on national forests, which have the mixed goals of providing timber as well as outdoor recreation and wildlife habitat.

The National Fire Plan has granted $924,000 to the Siskiyou National Forest to thin forests abutting the outlying communities around Grants Pass. One project is known as Waters Thin, where crews are thinning the dense second-growth trees that grew after a major fire about 100 years ago. The idea is to get closer to the widely spaced pine and oak savanna that used to be here, which was less vulnerable to fire and more valuable as winter range for deer.

Thinning without selling off mature timber is expensive--about $1,000 an acre, said silviculturist Don Billville. But it is cheaper than the $3,000 to $4,000 an acre in lost resources and firefighting costs that quickly mount up when a major fire hits.

“Conceptually, it’s very simple. Socially, it’s very difficult,” said Franklin of dealing with fire in the forest. “You can do things as an individual on your 10 acres that might make your home more defensible, or make firefighters more willing to deal with it. But unless you deal with the larger landscape [100 acres and more], you’re not dealing with all of your risk.”