Cutting Off Fuel for Fires

Fires are like people. They need to breathe and eat. For two weeks a sprawling wildfire has been feasting on a rugged patch of the southern Sierra, periodically threatening some of the world’s grandest trees.

But don’t blame the McNally blaze, named after a roadside cafe near the fire’s origin, on environmentalists or the spotted owl or any other form of wildlife that thrives in dense timber--the favorite culprits in this summer of flames across the West.

The steep, brushy slopes of the Kern River Canyon that stoked the blaze to blast-furnace intensity is not owl, or even timber country and never has been.

The wildfire, now approaching 100,000 acres, began as a campfire and gorged on chaparral because the weather was hot, dry and windy--and because much of the harsh terrain had not burned for decades, or in some places, for more than a century.

And if anything has kept the U.S. Forest Service from taking some of that fuel out of the canyon--setting prescribed fires and thinning the brush and smaller trees that fires consume like candy--it has been weather and limited funding.

Fire management officers in the Sequoia say 30% to 40% of this 1.2 million-acre forest east of Bakersfield needs work to reduce fuels, either by thinning or controlled burns or a combination.

If they had the money, forest officials say, they could treat about 12,000 acres a year. They’ve been averaging somewhat more than half that amount since the mid-1990s. This year they are only getting enough money to treat 1,400 acres.

“It’s all dollar driven,” said Brent Skaggs, deputy forest fire management officer for the Sequoia. “If we can get more money, we can do more acres.”

A youthful-looking 40, Skaggs has been fighting fires and performing fuel-reduction work in the Sequoia for two decades.

Last week on the western flank of the McNally blaze, where it has been largely contained, he took stock.

The fire never got to many of the areas that crews have burned or thinned in recent years, stopping just to the east. But in some cases, firefighters used the prescribed burns to help establish a successful line of defense against the advancing inferno.

And at French Joe Meadow, one of Skaggs’ projects helped keep the flames out of nearby Packsaddle Grove, one of the 11 concentrations of giant sequoias that the fire threatened in its first week but never entered.

The evidence was dramatic. On one side of a dirt road, the fire had raced up a steep slope thick with pines and manzanita bushes. Most were dead, charred sticks standing in several inches of gray ash. On the other side of the road, where Forest Service crews had thinned and burned a few years ago, the trees were green and very much alive. The McNally blaze stopped at the road, unable to establish itself on the treated land.

“Talk about an area that can take a wildfire--this is it,” Skaggs said proudly as he glanced around. “I feel pretty good about this work.”

The French Joe project was designed to protect both the Packsaddle Grove, about a mile away, and Johnsondale, an old logging camp and mill community reincarnated as a recreational vehicle park that lies several miles northeast.

Logged in the 1930s, the land around French Joe is dotted with large, weathered tree stumps. The area had grown thick after the timber cut because there was no wildfire to clear out young trees and brush, and no thinning work until Skaggs’ crew took on the job in the late 1990s.

For most of the last century, the federal government did all it could to suppress wildfire, extinguishing the natural cycle of low-intensity fires that historians believe were once common in Western forests and routinely eliminated the brush and small trees that kindle today’s wildfires.

About half of the 2,200-acre French Joe project was thinned, and later controlled burns were set. Smaller trees--up to about two pencil lengths in diameter--were cut along with brush to create 18-foot openings on the forest floor.

The size of trees removed can be the most controversial aspect of thinning projects on national forest land, with environmentalists complaining that the cuts are a ruse for commercial timbering that targets the biggest, most fire-resistant trees.

In the case of French Joe Meadow, the trees removed were far smaller than those logged in the 1930s, and Skaggs said environmentalists did not object.

“It was really weird to see a truck with 30 to 40 [logs] on it,” he said, comparing the sight with a full-blown commercial timber cut, in which logs would be of such size that only about half a dozen would fit on a truck.

Still, some of the trees thinned in the French Joe project were large enough for lumber production. An area mill, which has been retooled to handle smaller logs, bought them and hauled them down to the Central Valley.

The success of the French Joe project notwithstanding, thinning and controlled burns do not fireproof the forest, nor are they intended to.

“Overall, we have so much country out there out of the natural fire cycle that fire is going to get into these systems one way or the other,” said Bill Jackson, a Forest Service fire behavior analyst who came from Arizona to help battle the McNally blaze.

But the treatments can slow fires and keep them from getting so ferociously hot that nothing is left in their wake but black death.

The McNally flames ran through areas the Forest Service had treated with prescribed burns a decade or more ago, but the fire clearly lost some of its intensity. South of Johnsondale, Skaggs pointed to a small ridge and creek bed where controlled burns had been conducted in the early 1990s. Much of it was blackened. But there was also green, signaling trees that would survive.

A larger spot north of Johnsondale had been commercially logged in the mid-1970s and then subjected to a controlled burn. Brush had since grown thick enough for the Forest Service to mark it as a spot ripe for treatment. According to Skaggs, “our analysis showed this was a bomb ready to go off.”

It did. When the fire leaped through, it charred much of the area. But again, there was scattered green.

Major wildfires all over the West this summer have poured gasoline on a decades-old fight over the management of national forests. Conservatives and the timber industry are pointing the finger at environmentalists and a steep decline in logging on public land that occurred during the Clinton administration. The critics argue that environmental appeals have been blocking logging contracts that would thin the forests.

A few days ago, a group of Western senators, all Republicans except Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California, announced their support for a forest management plan that could bypass appeals and lengthy judicial reviews.

But in the Sequoia at least, things are not so black and white. Forest supervisor Art Gaffrey said that, although there is an ongoing environmental lawsuit and there have been appeals of some thinning projects in recent years, the litigation has not halted work. Nor he said, are new environmental protections for the Sierra Nevada preventing him from reducing the forest fuel buildup near communities.

“I haven’t found it productive to try to place blame,” Gaffrey said.

One of the biggest challenges in conducting prescribed burns, he added, is the weather. There are too few days when the wind and temperature and humidity all come together to create safe burn conditions.

Money is another issue. According to Skaggs, carrying out thinning and controlled burns on 12,000 acres a year in the Sequoia--the amount fire managers would like to treat--would require $4 million a year.

The most ever treated in a single year in the Sequoia was 10,000 acres. The acreage was thinned or burned last year with $2.4 million in extra funding given by Congress in conjunction with creation of the Giant Sequoia National Monument on the forest’s western side.

This year, the fuels-reduction budget for the entire forest will be $1 million, enough to treat only about 1,400 acres.

Scott Williams, a fire management officer in the Sequoia, warned that after more than a century of being denied its natural urge to clean house with frequent, low-intensity fires, “the forest up here is screaming to burn.”

It’s not enough to remove brush and small trees, he said; the forest needs prescribed burns as well. “Whatever you want to call it--thinning, logging--and prescribed burning. That’s our preference. Don’t just thin and walk away from it.”

Perhaps the biggest lesson of McNally is that the forest will burn--if not on human terms, then on its own.