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From a writer buddy who lives near Devore, the Old Fire.

FIRE MANAGEMENT NEEDS TO CHANGE -- Jim Matthews column 29oct03

Fires created by mismanagement of local forests

Outdoor News Service

Like many Southern California residents this past weekend, I spent the days in my neighborhood helping friends and family evacuate as flames approached their houses. We stood at the back fence of my in-laws and watched flames leap 40 feet into the air, feeling the heat on our faces, with shovels in hand ready to douse hot embers on their property while firefighters knocked the flames back. My neighbor and I stood side-by-side at the back of our yards at 2 a.m. with binoculars marveling at the wind-whipped inferno 1/2-mile away burning across the mountainside, and we worried about neighbors' homes ahead of those flames, homes that would be burned to the ground the next morning.

Most of us had been through this before in 1980 when the Panorama Fire scorched some of these same neighborhoods, burned up to the same back fences, ripped across the same mountain sides, pushed by the same Santa Ana winds. The residents who'd lived through it before had learned from it. Shake roofs were replaced, yards became sparser with vegetation, wood fences were replaced with block or chain link, brush was keep down in the horse properties, barns and hay bales set well away from homes. They had learned, fearing, perhaps knowing, that it could and probably would happen again.

Those of us who've lived through it twice now are still unsure the state and federal agencies charged with managing the public lands that fuel these massive fires have learned anything. Fire breaks, controlled burns, and vegetation removal are still mostly hobby activities for the U.S. Forest Service. They are not being done to the extent and with the dedication and planning they need. Management, and the manipulation that the word "management" implies, is still an alien activity for agencies that need to manage the ground to help control fires while benefiting the wildlife and recreational users on the forest.

As this was written Wednesday this week, fires had consumed an area 3/4s of the size of Rhode Island, hundreds of homes had been burned, over a dozen lives lost. Santa Ana winds were decreasing, but fire fighting resources were thinly stretched from San Diego to Ventura counties. It looked like it was going to get worse before it got better. My own neighborhood was still choked with smoke.

The problem is easy to pinpoint: massive stands of dense brush and dead timber, and funds used for other things that should be directed to solving this problem. The solution is on-the-ground management that not only helps solve the fire threat but would be a massive benefit for all wildlife. I'm not sure what else the Forest Service should do if it can accomplish those two goals.

During the early stages of the fire burning near Lytle Creek, I was hoping the flames would run up the mountain through San Sevaine and down into the North Fork of Lytle Creek -- through what used to be some of the best deer and bighorn sheep country in the region. The fire would be a benefit. This area hadn't burned in decades and the wildlife was choked out. That happened because of Forest Service inaction in action. In all the tragedy, if there was a benefit to the Lytle Creek portion of the fire, it was simply that it burned sheep habitat that needed to be burned.

Since I first started following bighorn sheep management in 1970-something, our herd in the San Gabriel Mountains has plummeted from a conservative estimate of 700-plus animals to a generous 100-or-less estimate. Until one small burn last year, there has never been a controlled burn in sheep habitat, and most wildfires were hammered before they reached sheep country, tankers bombing ridges with fire retardant in wilderness while homes were threatened three miles away in foothills.

The U.S. Forest Service and state fire agencies need to get back to managing the forest resources with two things in mind, wildfire and wildlife. We need to prevent massive fires not fear them. Here in north San Bernardino, we have a clean slate for the Forest Service to work with on this south facing slope of the San Bernardino Mountains: the hills are bare and ashen.

We were promised after the Panorama Fire, that such an event would never happen again. But now it has. Will we have hollow promises again or action? Fire breaks insulating the residential areas from future catastrophic fires need to be mapped, created, and maintained. A grid of additional fire breaks and brush clearance can be bulldozed so controlled burns can be set annually to keep the chaparral in a healthy patchwork that is good for wildlife and would help to stop huge wildfires or suppress those fires when they do burn. A similar system is needed in forested areas on the top of our mountains where drought and bark beetles have killed more trees than should have been destroyed if we'd just been managing our forests intelligently. Management is better than a vast blackened landscape with hundreds of destroyed homes.

Investing in proactive management would do three things: First, it would make incredible economic sense. The cost of fighting huge fires is astronomical and just a small percentage of those costs could be diverted to maintain a healthy forest. Second, it would help protect the public safety, saving lives and billions of dollars in lost property. Lastly, it would be a boon to wildlife.

As one of my buddies said to me Monday morning. "This is horrible, but at least we're going to have good deer hunting for a few years."

If the ground were managed properly, we should always have good deer hunting and the fire danger would be far, far less.