Montana Lab Fiddles With Fire
A teacher once described what researchers at the National Fire Sciences Laboratory do as “Smokey the Bear takes algebra.”
Looking around each office, the description seems to fit.
Amid the clutter of charts, computers and stacks of research papers, each researcher here has the same outfit hanging on a hook or sitting on a bookshelf -- yellow shirt, green pants, hard hat. It is the fire-resistant uniform of those who get close to the flames to study them.
The lab, built in 1960 next to the Missoula Smokejumper Center, was the culmination of a Forest Service quest to learn more about how wildfires behave. That pursuit kicked into high gear after the 1949 Mann Gulch fire trapped and killed 13 firefighters in a steep ravine along the Missouri River near Helena.
Today, the lab is home to some of the country’s best wild-land fire experts, who continue to build and refine their understanding of fire’s effects and behavior.
The lab is equipped with two wind tunnels and a “burn chamber,” a 60-foot-tall steel-and-concrete room that perpetually smells of smoke.
“The lab is unique in that it was built for one specific purpose -- for fire research,” said Colin Hardy, the lab’s project leader for fire behavior. (His father, Charles “Mike” Hardy, now retired, was the lab’s first project leader.) “What we do is a combination of really basic theoretical engineering and lots of experiments with fire.”
Studies have led to development of computer-generated models used to help predict the movement, speed and ferocity of forest fires. Research also led to advances in predicting the ecological effects of fire -- determining the positives and negatives of a fire burning through a forest.
“Part of our mission ... is to determine methods to apply fire -- how to use fire -- for restoration and maintenance,” Hardy said. “If we decide to use fire as a tool and we know what outcome we want, then we can determine under what conditions fire can be used to get those effects.”
Although the work has given firefighters and land managers a tremendous understanding of fire, researchers say their work has also shown that the nation’s emphasis on fire suppression has only made matters worse.
“What we’ve learned is we have become very good at putting fires out,” Hardy said. “We find and put out 99% of wildfires before they get to be one-quarter of an acre.”
In the meantime, the only process that can consume excess fuel in a forest has been virtually eliminated. “We’ve created very unnatural conditions in our forests by removing fire,” said Kevin Ryan, fire effects project leader at the lab. “We shouldn’t be surprised at the results.”
The results are the “uncharacteristic” fires that have burned across forests in the West in recent years, researchers say.
They say that in many instances, the best option for restoring the health of a forest is reintroducing controlled fire.
With the expertise developed in predicting the movement and behavior of fire, many researchers believe fire managers could take more advantage of controlled burns to reduce the danger of future catastrophic fires.
But researchers are quick to note that physical and cultural hurdles must be overcome.
Attempts to reintroduce controlled burns in forests heavy with fuel and dry from years of drought can be dangerous. That was proven in 2000, when a prescribed burn set by the National Park Service to clear brush at Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico got away and swept through Los Alamos, destroying dozens of homes.
An even greater obstacle may be the public’s aversion to smoky air, and a perception that any fire is dangerous and unhealthy, researchers say.
Stephen Pyne, a historian at Arizona State University in Tempe and author of a number of books about fire in the West, notes that reintroducing fire may be unrealistic.
“Putting it back in is not going to be as easy as taking it out,” he said. “It’s like trying to reintroduce an endangered species.”
