Black line protects subdivision from Biscuit Fire, (Oregon still burning)

Residents in a 25-home subdivision near Agness got some relief Sunday as crews finished a burnout to protect them from the Biscuit fire raging three-quarters of a mile away.

A black line, an area devoid of fuel, now protects the Oak Flat subdivision, but the line needs to be tested by the main fire to ensure it's secure.

However, hot temperatures and high winds can blow embers across the line and spark spot fires, Fleishman said.

A new wildfire was reported Saturday in Lane County. The Siuslaw fire has burned about 400 acres of forestland 15 miles southwest of Veneta.

About 220 firefighters were battling the blaze Sunday with the help of four helicopters, five water trucks, five engines and two bulldozers, said Joe Walsh, a spokesman for the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center. The cause of the blaze is still under investigation.

Although small, the Siuslaw blaze has grown quickly in the tinder-dry forest. The fire was reported by a motorist and was estimated at the time to be about a quarter-acre in size.

Northeast of Agness, near the Rogue River, 120 firefighters and 16 engine crews made great strides in completing burnouts along Bear Camp Road to fight the Biscuit fire. Only five miles of the 30-mile section remained to be burned, said Rochelle Desser, fire information officer.

The fire there has the potential to enter the protected Wild and Scenic section of the Rogue River and follow it upriver to Galice, near Grants Pass.

The news wasn't as positive along the southwestern side of the 435,654-acre fire, where a 1,000-acre spot fire continued to nag fire managers.

While crews worked directly against the flames Saturday, heavy smoke kept them away most of Sunday. Fire managers would not deploy crews because they could not assess the fire's danger.

The blaze, near the headwaters of the Pistol and Chetco rivers, concerns fire officials because it could sweep into the river drainage system. Both rivers lead to populated areas.

The Biscuit fire continued to creep toward homes on its western flank. High humidity prevented crews from setting burnouts near Wilderness Retreat east of Brookings. Firefighters worked on a containment line to protect homes in Gardner Ranch near the Pistol River drainage southeast of Gold Beach. Flames remained about five miles from the homes.

The Siuslaw fire in Lane County is not threatening people or residences, said Walsh of the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center. But it has burned about 400 acres of old and second-growth trees owned by the Bureau of Land Management and the private timber firm Roseburg Forest Products.

Crews have asked for an additional 400 firefighters. Favorable weather forecasts have officials hopeful they can control the blaze quickly with the additional help, Walsh said.

The Siuslaw brings to seven the number of wildfires charring Oregon forests, including the Biscuit, Tiller, Apple, East Antelope, Mount Marion and Monument-Malheur fires. There are 540,699 acres burning and a total of 9,800 firefighters working the lines.

The Apple fire, which started Friday 21 miles east of Glide, is the only Oregon fire that worsened significantly during the weekend. It burned 3,000 acres Saturday.

"It was moving like a freight train," said David Widmark, a spokesman for the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center. "There's even a roar like a train when they're moving that fast."

Hot air, big winds and dry conditions fueled the burn, pushing it about two to three miles from the Tiller complex. It wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing for the Apple and Tiller, a blaze east of Canyonville that has been burning for more than a month, to join up, Widmark said. A single perimeter may be easier for firefighters to manage.

The Apple has closed a portion of the North Umpqua River -- a popular spot for whitewater rafting -- and closed a popular Forest Service trail called Twin Lake Trail near Diamond Lake.

The Apple started Friday night near a campground. An untended campfire is the suspected cause of the blaze. Since then, the fire has burned 5,000 acres, Widmark said, and 172 firefighters are working the lines.

There was mostly good news from other sources. No other fires made major progress since Saturday, thanks to good weather and to good resources such as helicopter crews and fire retardant.

Jon Silvius, a public affairs officer with the Forest Service who's tracking the Tiller complex, said the weather was on the firefighters' side.

Based on reports, Silvius said today and Tuesday will bring cooler, damper air into the area. Lower temperatures, he said, discourage burning and boost firefighter endurance.

Although the 53,000-acre Tiller fire won't get extinguished in the next couple of days, Silvius said, crews could make major headway in encircling the fire to contain it. There are 90 miles of fire line to dig to encircle and contain it.

"For the first time in a long time, we've got some cautious optimism," he said. "Beating fires always depends on the right combination of firefighters and weather. Now it appears we've got both on our side. We won't beat this fire out, but at least we can check its spread."

Here's a little something to chew on:

The Washington Times
www.washtimes.com

Greens gear up for Bush fire address
Hil Anderson
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL

Published 8/19/2002

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 19 (UPI) -- With President Bush expected this week to call for a scaling back of overgrown forests that have turned into fire hazards, the Wilderness Society said Monday that the environmental movement should not be blamed for wildfires that have burned through nearly 6 million acres this year.
The organization issued a statement denying charges from some western lawmakers that environmentalists have used legal challenges to derail efforts to clear out forest areas thick with tinder-dry brush and small trees and, instead, argued that the U.S. Forest Service was too focused on the commercial aspects of the task.
"Severe drought has caused an above average number of forest fires," the Wilderness Society said. "As the blame game continues, the U.S. Forest Service clearly must improve its performance if it is to achieve the goal of the National Fire Plan -- prioritizing our limited resources to protect lives and homes."
Forest areas that have grown thick with brush and saplings have become a major area of concern for firefighters who view the underbrush as a "ladder fuel" that allow flames to leap into the vulnerable tops of older, larger trees and trigger the devastating canopy fires that are extremely difficult to contain and can kill entire stands of timber.
The National Fire Plan endorses the notion of clearing out areas that have become overgrown so that fires, which are a natural component of the ecology of western mountain forests, do not pose such a dire threat. The president, who is scheduled to speak on the subject of wildfires Thursday in rural Oregon, is expected to call for an acceleration of fuels reduction efforts in the West.
Western senators and governors have made their presence known at appearances just behind the fire lines in Oregon, Arizona and Colorado. Those visits have often included demands that the Forest Service begin "treating" more acres to remove the fire threat, and sometimes there have been calls for changes in environmental regulations to make more it difficult to block a fuel-thinning project.
It is not known if Bush will announce any such regulatory changes, but the Wilderness Society repeated earlier statements from environmental groups that most treatment projects sail through the approval process unchallenged while those that were challenged were not necessarily contested by the green community.
Citing a General Accounting Office report on fuel reduction in 2001, the Wilderness Society found that only 1 percent of 1,671 proposed projects were "appealed by any interested party, including recreation groups, conservationists, industry interests or individuals."
The same report, the group said, was critical of the Forest Service for tending to focus its fuels-reduction plans in areas where commercially valuable timber was located rather than on areas that had the highest fire hazards.
The Forest Service, however, contends that it needs to include some larger trees in their treatment plans as financial incentive to attract private companies to perform the labor-intensive work since there is little, if any, commercial value in saplings and dead brush.
The Los Angeles Times said Monday that in California, the lion's share of funding for treatment projects was spent in the remote Plumas and Lassen National Forests of Northern California while the Angeles National Forest outside Los Angeles was at the bottom of the funding list even though it is near many more homes and other structures that could be threatened by wildfire.
Forestry officials said Northern California received the primary focus due to its residents; environmentalists and loggers were all in agreement that the forest floor needed a good cleaning and basically agreed to support treatment projects that did not involve old-growth timber stands.
In Southern California, officials told the Times, the situation was more complicated because of funding limits and objections to large amounts of smoke and traffic from heavy logging equipment.
"Some of it is money and not having the funding to do a large number of acres," said Don Feser, forest fire chief for the Angeles. "But more restrictive is just the few days that we can burn."
Bush will be speaking Thursday in a state that has had to bear much of the brunt of the 2002 fire season. More than 895,000 acres in Oregon have been scorched by wildfire this year, second only to the more than 2 million acres in remote areas of Alaska where fires are often allowed to burn themselves out.
The largest active fire in the nation is in southwest Oregon. The Biscuit Fire that began July 13 was up to nearly 449,000 acres Monday and 40-percent contained.
Fires were burning in a total of 11 states, and the National Weather Service had fire weather watches and warnings posted late Monday in Nevada, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and South Dakota.

Copyright © 2002 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.

I have had a phoney conservative try the 1% of the fires BS today re the green strategy: "Citing a General Accounting Office report on fuel reduction in 2001, the Wilderness Society found that only 1 percent of 1,671 proposed projects were "appealed by any interested party, including recreation groups, conservationists, industry interests or individuals."

"The same report, the group said, was critical of the Forest Service for tending to focus its fuels-reduction plans in areas where commercially valuable timber was located rather than on areas that had the highest fire hazards."

Here is the rebuttal of this Enviral Lie from the Wall Street Journal:

Truth Under Fire [Libs Lie Again on Forest Fires]
Wall St. Journal ^ | July 11, 2002 | Editorial

Posted on 07/11/2002 1:28 AM Pacific by The Raven

Talk about starting a fire in your own backyard.

Last month, environmental groups across the country hollered like banshees when politicians and local communities began taking them to task for the massive wildfires that are today gutting the West. The crescendo came when Arizona's Gov. Jane Dee Hull, watching half a million acres of her state go up in smoke, flatly blamed greenies for obstructing work to clean up national forests. She was talking about the never-ending stream of appeals and lawsuits they file to halt thinning, road building and firebreaks.

The only thing was, just as the enviros were taking some richly deserved heat, they suddenly surfaced with what looked like an ironclad defense -- in the form of a General Accounting Office report. According to that paper, of the 1,671 Forest Service projects to reduce hazardous fuels in 2001, outside groups had objected to only 20 -- less than 1%. "It would have been good if the governor had gotten her facts straight before spouting off," spat Sandy Bahr, of the Sierra Club Grand Canyon Chapter.

The report quickly became the news in the forest-fire debate. The Sierra Club pasted Ms. Bahr's quote beneath the GAO numbers on its Web site. The Center for Biological Diversity and the Wilderness Society feted the document, claiming exoneration. The New York Times editorial page howled that the report showed accusations against environmental groups to be "absurd."

Western politicians, scientists and forest officials, in the meantime, were mystified: Everyone unlucky enough to own a tree in his backyard knows from experience that environmental groups appeal projects faster than bunnies reproduce. So what was up with this GAO report?

What was up was the report itself. And the environmental groups, who knew it all along, now have some serious egg on their all-natural faces.

In a three-page letter sent this week to Congress, Barry Hill, the director of natural resources and the environment at the GAO, set the record straight. He delicately explained the methodology used to count up appeals and litigation. The details are dense, but the message was clear: The GAO didn't have the whole story.

His letter just happens to coincide with a new Forest Service report with the correct numbers. And guess what? It turns out nearly half (48%) of all the Service's plans for getting rid of hazardous fuels were appealed by outside groups. In the Northern Region, one of nine the Service administers, every single one of its projects for fiscal year 2001-02 -- 53 in total -- was appealed. Other regions saw anywhere from 67% to 79% of their plans put on hold through appeals.

But here's the real kicker: The Forest Service report also names those groups that launch the most appeals. Surprise, surprise, they include the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Wilderness Society and others -- the very same folks who held up the (obviously) incorrect GAO report and claimed it was true. "These numbers are . . . a harsh reminder of just how relentlessly ideological some environmental litigants have become," said Rep. Scott McInnis (R., Colo.).

That comment just about sums it up. For years, radical environmentalists have twisted and fabricated facts in their desire to keep humans out of the forests. Most of the time, they get away with it. This time, they've been caught with their loincloths down.

It'd be nice to think that Ms. Bahr, the Sierra Club and other groups will now post the real numbers on their Web sites -- seeing, after all, as how we should all "get our facts straight before spouting off." Then again, if that's the standard, perhaps we just won't be hearing anything from these groups for a very long time to come.

When do enviralists, phoney conservatives who are enviralists lie about their tactics, strategies and goals?

Well, we will see a lot on this board, in the fish wraps, and quotes/questions from phoney conservatives like this 1% BS. We have to have the answers to refute these liars.

Just look at their articles, quotes and other bald face lies as more lynx hairs being planted in the forest and more bad science be used to defend their undefendable agendas re the fires of this year.

Thanks for the great gif.

I will use it as a reply when I see the Green Weenies playing their Bravo Sierra Games. Then we can have the award for the most incredible BS of the week.

Re Jimmy Carter, this man destroyed the CIA, started the FBI into being the Former Bureau of Investigation, killed our economy with his lack of response to the Iran situation and of course allowing the Opecker Princes and Opec to sieze economic control of our country.

Then he made the Green Jihadists very powerful/ Since then, they have worked 24/7/365 to make us more energy dependent on Opecker oil and to minimize any use of any resources in the US. Like no drilling in Alaska for oil, no coal to be taken from Utah, and of course no logging in America's forests, including dead trees, killed as part of their Fire is Good Agenda.

That was all a mystery to me until I found out that Carter has been bought out for a long time by the Opecker Princes. I will post a reply on that little known reality after I post this reply to you!

Thanks for the no BS gif.

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