How a forest stopped a fire in its tracks

Atlanta Journal-Constitution ^ | 7-22-03 | NYT reprint

[farmfriend]

How a forest stopped a fire in its tracks

The New York Times

SUSANVILLE, Calif. -- Where the fire came through Blacks Mountain Experimental Forest last September, the ground is ash and the trees are charcoal. Black and gray are the colors, lightened only by small mounds of red dust at the base of some of the charred trunks -- the leavings of bark beetles -- and flecks of green where new growth pokes above the ash.

Through the tall, ravaged columns, however, a living pine forest is visible. And as visitors inspecting the fire damage walk toward the living forest, they come to an abrupt transition.

September's blaze was named the Cone Fire, for the hill where it was first thought to have begun. It burned 2,000 acres of Lassen National Forest, and 1,600 of those were in Blacks Mountain Experimental Forest, a 10,000-acre area within Lassen set up in 1934 for ecological study by the Forest Service.

When the Cone Fire swept through these woods it came to a patch of forest that was different from the rest, and stopped dead. What stopped the fire was an experimental plot that had been selectively logged to thin it, and had been burned in controlled fashion. The result was an open forest, much the way it might have been 500 years ago when regular forest fires swept through the high dry country, and no one tried to stop them.

"It just stopped," Carl N. Skinner said, looking satisfied but almost surprised. Skinner, a geographer with the Forest Service at the Redding Silviculture Laboratory in Redding, Calif., and Dr. Steve Zack, a conservation scientist with the North American Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society, along with other Forest Service colleagues, are showing a reporter the results of an accidental experiment that still impresses them each time they visit it.

"Night and day," Zack said.

"If we hadn't treated this it would have just blown right through this area," Skinner said.

The members of the group are part of a cooperative research project involving different parts of the Forest Service and the Wildlife Conservation Society.

The researchers have been trying different forest management plans on 12 250-acre research plots for about seven years. The point was never to find out how best to stop fires. Instead the research was meant to develop a general picture of how different management techniques affect forest ecosystems.

In the past, many forests were either cut down for timber or left alone. A century of fire suppression resulted in the accumulated underbrush and thick tree growth that can fuel catastrophic wildfires. Parts of Blacks Mountain and the surrounding Lassen National Forest have had enough time to get thick and brushy.

In the experimental plots, some were selectively logged, either to remove bigger trees, to mimic one lucrative logging approach, or to leave a wide range of tree sizes. The plots that had the large trees removed were so-called low diversity plots.

"So much of this kind of forest has had the large trees removed over the years," Skinner said, and now "we have very dense forests that need thinning now from a fire hazard perspective. This is what many of them are going to end up looking like."

Other plots were both thinned and subjected to prescribed burns -- fires set by the researchers, a management policy that is followed in many national forests.

Finally, some areas were subjected to prescribed burns only. The researchers -- fire ecologists, wildlife specialists, botanists -- have followed the changes in plant growth, tree growth and wildlife populations in all the different situations.

Ponderosa pine forests are no strangers to fire. Skinner has taken samples of trees up to 700 years old to find out their fire history. Most trees showed evidence of some sort of fire about every seven to 10 years. And big, intense fires occurred every 20 years or so, until a century ago when the idea of fighting forest fires took hold.

Once the natural fires were stopped, said Zack, the Ponderosa and Jeffrey pine forests from Baja California to British Columbia grew thick. Underbrush, fallen limbs and dry needles accumulated to make fuel to feed fires that would consume the large trees and destroy whole stands of timber.

When the Cone Fire hit, it created a controlled experiment on how different management techniques, at least in this area, affected a big forest fire.

The results are clear to the naked eye. The fire started in an area where the woods were thick, and quickly became intense enough to consume the woods that it went through. It was blown south and west, but it was turned away first by a mechanically thinned plot, which it scorched before dying out, and then by a plot that had been subjected to thinning and prescribed burning. The fire did not penetrate that patch at all.

In the thinned area that had no controlled burn, Skinner pointed to the effects of the Cone Fire. "We definitely changed the fire behavior and made it so the fire dropped to the ground and made it so that from a point of view of putting out fires it's easier to put out," he said, "but still there's sufficient fuel here to cause a lot more damage to the stand that was left here."

Doing controlled burns, with no thinning, worked better. But the best of all was a combination of thinning and controlled burns. The stands of moderate-size trees, what the researchers call "low diversity," stopped the fire cold.

The high diversity stands, which included more large trees, showed some scorching for 30 yards or so, as the fire burned the needle bed that had accumulated over five years since the last controlled burn. Then the fire died out.

Dr. Scott Stephens, director of the Stephens Laboratory for Wildland Fire Science at the University of California at Berkeley, has been to Blacks Mountain Forest and seen what happened when the Cone Fire hit. He said in an interview that this kind of accidental research with rigorous data was very rare.

He would have predicted, he said, that thinning and burning together would stop a fire, but was surprised that the plots that were thinned but not burned survived as well as they did. Many trees died, but enough lived for the stand to recover.

The key, he said, was that when the small trees were cut, they were completely removed, rather than leaving remnants on the forest floor, as was done with the larger trees. That reduced the fuel on the ground.

"It really points to surface fuel reduction," he said, as the most important step to prevent big fires.

Stephens said the Bush administration's current Healthy Forest Initiative is mainly about reducing regulation and does not specify fire management regimens. He also said he thought that not enough emphasis in the initiative was placed on reducing surface fuels by prescribed burning, or other means. Whether large trees were removed or left made a big difference for wildlife, Zack said. Large trees, and large dead trees, are attractive to woodpeckers and other creatures.

Although prescribed burns are common, they are also controversial, partly because of a fire in New Mexico in 2000 that destroyed 200 buildings in Los Alamos, leaving hundreds of people homeless. That fire resulted from a prescribed burn by the National Park Service that got out of control.

Cost is also an issue. In plots where large trees were removed, timber sales were lucrative enough that the net gain was $1,400 per acre. Where only smaller trees were cut, the Forest Service suffered a net loss of $200 per acre.

Zack and Skinner and their colleagues agree that no single panacea will solve the problems resulting from a century of fire suppression. Still, they can point to the evidence on the ground, where you can stand on a line between charred trees and healthy ones.

[farmfriend]

Rights, farms, environment ping.

Let me know if you wish to be added or removed from this list.

[E.G.C.]

BTTT!!!!!

[hattend]

BTTT

[AlaskaErik]

Expect the eco-terrorist lobby to bury this information and put their own spin on it.

[T. P. Pole]

Last year my family and I were in so Cal for a funeral and drove through the mountains near Wrightwood and Lone Pine canyon. There was the signs of a recent fire.

After a while I noticed a trend where the fire burned on the left-hand side of the road but not the right.

Even my 8-year-old son could figure out that it was the road that stopped the fire.

[farmfriend]

www.azfire.org

Both of these photos were taken on August 8, 2002. Both landscapes were attacked by the Rodeo-Chedeski fire.

The barren shot looks south from State highway 260 on the way from Heber to Show Low. The other looks west from US highway 60 from Show Low south toward Globe. What's the difference between these two pictures?

Why is one recovering while the other isn't? Fuel loads, and nothing else. The difference is who managed the land.

The lush, recovering land is managed by Native Americans who log and otherwise manage their land. The ash heap adorned with skinny crooked poles belongs to the Federal Government. Various NGO's and complicit Federal judges, have dictated it be managed as "pristine wilderness," as if an overgrown forest that had been logged for decades "knew" how to return to pristine condition without an awful lot of work.

Which management policy works best?? You decide.

[Ursus arctos horribilis]

Au contrare to the green weenies running through the western forests screaming the sky is falling. 60% of all US wood products are harvested from tree farms in 13 southern states. Wood is a renewable sustainable resource.

[farmfriend]

I love the sound of a chainsaw in the morning.

[waRNmother.armyboots]

Finally... someone acknowledges the laws of physics. This is not rocket science, but we should not confuse the environmental tree huggers with the facts.

[Bruce Buckley]

I seem to recall several months ago, our supposedly dim witted President remarked in a visit to a National Forest, that it was common sense to remove "kindling" from the forest.

Do you think that anyone will acknowledge his prescience?

[TenthAmendmentChampion]

Bump!

[Darksheare]

And the sad part is, they have burned down several million acres under the stupid assumption that the fires that exist are natural.
Thinning the trees and removing dead brush and fuel is a good idea, too bad they won't.
The greenies won't be happy until they've killed every living thing, and burned everyone out of their homes, reduced mankind to eating twigs, and abolished the internal combustion engine.
So until someone with brains gets stuck with the top slot of whatever agency decides it, we'll keep having ravaging destructive fires.

[farmfriend]

Ah, come on. Tell us what you really think.

[Conservative4Ever]

thanks for the graphic pictures. Yep...land and fire management are soooo important. Maybe the enviroweenies will begin to listen. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this one out.

Red

[farmfriend]

Those wonderful pictures were taken by freeper Carry_Okie.

[Darksheare]

That is what I really think.
Put even simpler: This makes too much sense, therefore that is what will not happen.
As I have said elsewhere and been flamed for it, TRUE conservation is responsible stewardship of the land.
Meaning: Logging and thinning the forest, removal of tinderbrush, 'forest maintenence'.

The Greenies do not represent conservation.
They represent the destruction of mankind. Follow their flawgic to it's logical conclusion, and man cannot eat anything or cook it, nor can you wear anything NOT made from hemp, you can't drive anywhere, and you cannot live anywhere as it might hurt the sensibilities of some fly or newt somewhere.
That means mankind must be extinct at worst, or controlled like breeding cattle where only the select get to reproduce.

They're going to spike this study, just wait.
The greenies will ignore it or spike it, saying that it doesn't fit with their lynx hair studies.

[farmfriend]

As I have said elsewhere and been flamed for it, TRUE conservation is responsible stewardship of the land. Meaning: Logging and thinning the forest, removal of tinderbrush, 'forest maintenence'.

You'll get no flames from me. I am a true proponent of the Natural Process

Natural Process introduces a free-market environmental management system that gradually eliminates the need for permits, regulations, and agency enforcement. Its design starts with proven product-design and manufacturing process-control techniques used to assure consumer product quality and safety. These components are incorporated into a system of checks and balances that uses third party certification and pooled risk to price the use of natural assets objectively and demands inviolable protection of private property rights. This synthesis can improve our care of the environment in harmony with an advanced economy.

This 455 page, five-part work rigorously demonstrates how regulatory government operates under false premises, rendering its managing agencies dependent upon continuing problems, incapable of balancing competing risks, and subject to political corruption. The book makes its case with detailed analyses of original source data that reveal a new way to do better for both nature and humanity. It proposes specific examples and suggests an implementing strategy. It is a thought-provoking work that handles an emotional subject with a delightful sense of humor.

[Darksheare]

Thank God!

How long until the greenies do try to spike the story though, or at least try to spin it?
To me, the greenies represent everything that is actually anti-connservation. It's like the Muslims screaming that they represent the one true compassionate god while at the same time screaming kill all infidels.
Same behavior, different sack and wrapper for the greenies.

[farmfriend]

They won't have to kill it or spin it. The leftist media will never report it.