17 Blazes Charring the West

Two side-by-side fires raced out of control toward homes here Saturday, forcing the evacuation of more than 15,000 residents and dramatizing how a confluence of weather conditions and forestry practices has made this fire season the most treacherous in decades.

Already this year nearly 2.3 million acres have burned nationwide, far eclipsing the 1.3 million acres burned by the same date during the disastrous 2000 fire season and dwarfing the 10-year average of about 920,000 acres.

On Friday alone, 127,138 acres were added to the tally.

“Conditions have never been worse,” said Tina Boehle, a spokeswoman for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.

The combination of high temperatures and low humidity is the immediate ingredient feeding the 17 major fires burning in eight Western states. The extended drought has added a powerful punch to the mix, leaving the nation’s forests especially vulnerable.

But these fires also are so large and are burning so intensely because of a decades-long government policy that hasn’t allowed the practice of setting forest fires under controlled circumstances to reduce the brush and timber that stoke wildfires so hot that firefighters can’t get close enough to fight them.

The federal policy, influenced heavily by public opinion, also demanded that wildfires be extinguished as quickly as possible, even though some experts say the fires, if allowed to run their course, would ultimately have left the forests less prone to infernos.

“The fire prevention that we saw throughout the 20th century is now bearing fruit--by leading to catastrophic wildfires,” said Allen Mattison, spokesman for the Sierra Club. “The attitude of the Forest Service for decades was, as soon as a forest fire was spotted, to have it out by 10 the next morning. That defied the laws of nature.”

In Show Low, the call to evacuate came at 7 p.m. Saturday. In the largest evacuation of this fire season, 7,700 residents were ordered out of town after the Rodeo fire, which has burned more than 150,000 acres of forest since Tuesday, breached what authorities considered the critical point, about eight miles west of town.

For days, many residents here had been packing their cars in anticipation of the call. Within minutes, streets were gridlocked under skies that glowed with fireballs spit high into the air from the approaching fire. U.S. 60, the only highway to the Phoenix area, was closed, forcing vehicles to the northeast out of town.

Two hours later, neighboring Pinetop-Lakeside, with 3,500 residents, also was evacuated.

By 11 p.m., the fire was a couple of miles from Show Low. “Nothing is going to stop it [from reaching the city].... We will have a lot of fire in town,” fire official Jim Paxon said.

A smaller fire had burned to within six miles of the Rodeo fire, and officials said they assumed the two blazes would merge by today. Fire information officer Rob Deyerberg said that then the blaze would move faster and burn more fuel, making it harder to fight. “If it merges it just gets worse.”

Two years ago, new philosophies emerged about the merits of controlled burns to prevent disasters like this.

For decades, Americans listened to Smokey Bear, subscribing to the strict theory that all forest fires were bad. In 1988, when government officials let a wildfire sweep through nearly a million acres of Yellowstone National Park, the public was outraged and the incident opened the door to reconsidering the nation’s fire policy. In 2000, the Clinton administration put forth a national fire plan that called for prescribed burns and forest thinning as effective fire prevention tools. But the controlled burns have been controversial.

In the summer of 2000, a controlled burn in New Mexico’s Bandelier National Monument backfired disastrously. It was poorly planned, understaffed and blew out of control.

The intentionally set fire burned 43,000 acres, destroyed facilities at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, leveled about 200 homes and fueled renewed public opposition to the practice. The government has paid more than $100 million in damages to businesses and homeowners.

So far this year, 1.3 million acres has been burned nationwide in prescribed fires, according to government statistics.

Forest planners say more timber could have been saved this year had there been more controlled fires in the past.

The 137,000-acre Hayman fire southwest of Denver exploded across lands where little had been done to thin forests. As a result, relatively benign ground fires have reached the crowns of mature trees, causing the most intense blazes.

“We’ve neglected the role of prescribed fires,” said Jim Anderson, a planner for the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest. But Anderson and others say reducing combustible material in the nation’s forests to manageable levels through controlled burns now will be a daunting exercise in catching up. Part of the problem, they say, is that much of the public still is opposed to prescribed burns.

When controlled burns were set recently in the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest, where the Rodeo fire now rages, nearby residents complained to state air quality officials about the smoke. The state pressured Forest Service officials to extinguish the blazes prematurely, Anderson said.

Other plans to start controlled burns have been blocked by litigation, he said.

On Saturday night, as fire closed in on Show Low, Paxon said, “Mother Nature can’t stand the congestion on the hill over there,” referring to the heavy forest growth, “and she’s starting over.”

Controlled burns are especially tricky affairs this summer, given the drought. Intentionally setting a forest ablaze requires immense planning and staffing, at a cost of millions of dollars. Some experts wonder whether it’s too late to set controlled fires, given the decades-long buildup of combustible material in the forests.

“If you’ve got messed-up forests, you’ll have messed-up fires,” said Stephen Pyne, an Arizona State University fire expert who can see the smoke of the Show Low fires from his home in Alpine.

“Just putting fire back in [the forest] is not ecological pixie dust. It’s an immense problem. Those fires will behave differently.”

Pyne likened the challenge of clearing the forests to that of cleaning up toxic waste sites.

“We need some kind of superfund,” he said. “It would be a huge, messy project that nobody wants to deal with. We’re decades past a simple solution. Now we have to accept what’s out there.”

Anderson, Pyne and others say the forests need to be cleared of small trees, not just through fire but through commercial harvesting. But most timber companies have little use for the small trees, so there’s little profit incentive for them to help out.But even with the renewed prescribed burns and some harvesting of small trees, Anderson said the thinning efforts are not keeping up with the growth of the forest. It’s growing about 275 million board-feet a year, he said, while thinning is reducing it by about 30 million board-feet. “We can’t keep up,” he said.

Peter Morrison, executive director of the Pacific Biodiversity Institute in Winthrop, Wash., cautions that the Forest Service shouldn’t be the fall guy.

From 1992 to 2001, national forest land accounted for only about 17% of the total wildfire burn area, he said.

“People have this very mistaken perception that all these fires are happening in national forest lands, and if we just changed forest management we wouldn’t have these fires,” he said. “We’ve got to get over this misconception that it’s national forest management that is the problem.”

Most fires, he said, burned across grass and shrub lands.

This weekend’s largest fires, however, were marching mostly through big timber.

In Show Low, officials asked residents to hang a white rag or T-shirt on doors to show homes had been evacuated.

Residents were directed to Eagar, 40 miles to the east, or Holbrook, about 45 miles north. Evacuation centers there put out requests for blankets and sleeping bags as they awaited the deluge of evacuees.

Meanwhile, the smaller Chediski fire crossed another fire line and entered Heber-Overgaard, an already evacuated community of 2,700 about 25 miles to the west, Paxon said.

The biggest of the two fires was thought to be caused by humans, although authorities didn’t know whether it was an accident or arson. The second, smaller fire was started by a lost hiker signaling for help.

Outside Denver, the Hayman fire was more than 60% contained and had not grown for two days. It has destroyed at least 114 homes and 424 other structures.

In southern Colorado, the Million fire near South Fork had burned 8,000 acres and was 20% contained; 11 homes had burned, but evacuated residents were being allowed to return. Near Durango, the Missionary Ridge fire had grown to more than 67,000 acres and was 25% contained.

In neighboring Utah, a 72,000-acre fire 20 miles northeast of Panguitch in the Dixie National Forest was 50% contained.

In eastern Arizona, firefighters were assigned to the quieter flanks, while the heads of the two fires were being targeted by aircraft.

Paxon said he wished for more airplanes. And the word from the fire headquarters in Boise: Sorry, but the nation’s other 37 air tankers are committed to fighting other fires.

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Times staff writer Julie Cart in Denver and researcher Lynn Marshall in Seattle contributed to this report.