Photo_ Red Mountain Fire_captured by "Idaho City Hot Shot" lookout. We dropped into the Red Mountain at `2300 acres, 14 days later, as we hiked out of the fire we had to watch it burn. I stood by the "Shot" when he shot this photo. The fire ragged to from just over 2300 acres to 10 thousand acres that afternoon, after hours of manpower and umpteen-thousands of dolors of funds, all our efforts for 14 days were lost.
It’s funny how the mind works, watching a man gaze at a series of torching trees, holding the radio on his chest. His internal monologue almost appeared to recite the pledge of allegiance to a wall of fire. He wasn’t saying anything. He wasn’t listening to the people around him. He just watched.
Knowing fire disturbance is an integral part of the ecosystem (Bowman 2000), the look: it was a look of awe, delight, or sheer wonder. A look in a man eyes when he doesn’t quite understand something, but wants to. It’s the child in him building a tepee of wooden matchsticks on the living room carpet, the aged historian, Smokey Bear, and the conflict of whether to let it burn or save it (Agee 1993)?
Over the decades of monitoring the forest, the Forest Service has put out fires that normally would burn. Since the fire didn’t burn, inside the canopy the older, diseased, and dead trees kept falling. Ridge tops of windblown sub-alpine, steep bottoms where the dead trees are thumbnailed over top of one-and-other, long stretches of simi-dead or dying lodge-pole pine, these regions create a natural habitat for which large wildfires thrive (Calkin 2005, Westerling 2006). The more fuel there is to ignite, the more intense a blaze will become, the more fuel it is able to consume in large amounts. This is a one-plus-one-equals-two kind of thing.
With all the data that has been collected and the studies conducted, there is a better understanding of fire, its benefits, and its detriments. There are questions being answered every day: in a 2011, New Phytologist article, the Pyrogeography Working Group claims that a better simulation for fire regimes has been attained. That by combining the landscape fire succession models: the ecological model for burning the Yellowstone region, simulations in the linked processes of fire and succession, and dynamic global vegetation models, tabulating fire regimes becomes feasible. Or, LSFMs=EMBYR+ FIRESCAPE +DGVMs=prescience.
Huh? Like some of the FNGs ( F… new guys) that day watching the series of trees torch, then looking to Shorty, the squadboss for directions; they didn’t understand. O, they more than understood “Hot-Fire” “IS Close” and that they should run or do something. But to where, or what they hadn't a clue? Shorty of course didn’t say anything: not to someone who didn’t know Shorty’s way of communicating that is.
The crew had sat in Knox Meadows for nearly two days on standby in mid-summer 2006, and decided to moved to Garden Valley, where there is a better standby facility. We unloaded the overnight gear, set up camp and heard the radio chatter. We'd been dispatched from Knox Meadows. Stowing our overnight gear, we returning to Knox Meadows later that afternoon. From the meadows a Two-12 (Bell Helicopter) dropped us into Lunch Creek. It was a central Idaho box canyon that contained a few conifers and was somewhat marshy.
Using the side of a cliff as a natural firebreak, the crew quickly ringset the rest of the fire's perimeter, and turned the blaze over for monitoring status to the monitor crew that showed up shortly after we finished. We were being dispatched to another smoke sighting further North. Hiking to the hilltop LZ, landing zone just out of the Lunch Creek ravine, Shorty and the crew watched the fire we were assigned to, get going. It wasn't far as the crow flies from where we were at. It was at least 20 miles of mountain terrain. Waiting for the helicopter to scoop us off the mountain and fly us across a valley to the next mountain we watched the smoke tuft continue rising.
At first it was a small tuft of smoke. A little less than three hours later, it had boiled into ten-thousand acres of wildfire as the wind carried it further northeast into the Payette.
It wasn’t until late that afternoon that the helicopters were released to retrieve our crew. By then the whole valley looked like Baghdad, Initial Strike, Desert Storm 1992. C-130s, SEATS (Single engine air tankers), Bell Two-12s, Sikorskies, and K-Max clouded the air, dumping water and slurry on the blaze. It goes to wonder just how much money was being used to fight the wind dominated furry when to even get a helicopter off the ground it costs $10 thousand dollars, (Richard "Tiny" Furman, Idaho Department of Lands).
When one of the two-twelves was finally able to drop out of the sky and pick us up. Instead of dropping us in front of a blazing inferno of a wildfire. The two-12 flew us back to Knox Meadows. Where we bailed into the crummies (work trucks) and traveled into the Payette National Forest to an airfield that looked like basecamp Iraq, surrounded by conifers. Again a wonder of the money used to finance this fiasco was aired in a guffaw of coughing tones, to the tune of some un-gaudy number.
After receiving the Incident Commanders standing orders the following morning, the crew headed out to their working zone of the Burnt Log Fire. We had been working a section of marshy bottomland. The fire had carried as it spotted from tree to tree overhead. When Shorty stood there gazing into the torching trees’ wall of fire, his hand clasped to the radio he held across his breast, he was, as a matter of fact, internally reciting the pledge of allegiance. Though it wasn’t an allegiance to any flag, or to a country, it was an allegiance to his own situational awareness, his own appropriate management response, (AMR 2008).
Overhead the trees they stood in had torched here and there, but the Burnt Log hadn't burned through that division in a clean crown. Fifty percent of the available fuels had already ignited, leaving the remaining fifty percent that could reignite.
With the possibility of fire returning and crowning through the canopy, Shorty assessed the danger to himself, the danger to the crew, and the danger that the fire may turn from an isolated torching into a full crown and begin another onslaught at the upper-ended valley. It isn’t for sure, but one could also imagine, in his head, Shorty calculated the resources already involved at that point, and the extensive reinforcements needed if the outbreak occurred. Airplanes and helicopters flying over the treetops, the fire engines, and transport vehicles, the long lines of hose, all the way down to the Mark-III water pumps setting in the creek. These are fire resources. The trees, the wildlife, and the water are the natural resources. Though you can bet Shorty thought about them.
Shorty knew without any words. Yet without words that are understood some people will never understand. As most newcomers or observers, like the more inexperienced crew members didn’t have the capacity to remain calm, and take in all the known aspects. They just began to panic. I think Shorty blocked them all out.
The Pyrogeography Working Group understands what its current study is about. It understands how to manipulate fire, and how to distinguish fire. But without a working lexicon of fireknowledge anyone outside the loupe is likely to misunderstand, or misperceive what is actually being intended. If: From a recent meeting in the Brisbane, Australian Center for Ecological Analysis, scientist have stated they have uncovered a better means to predict when fires will occur and reoccur over a region, would have been said to begin with, all the confusion would have been averted. But fire is a complex thing. It is even more of a complex thing to explain a complex thing without the complexity.
Fire is beautiful. It’s a natural aspect. Scientists keep testing, and manipulating, and simulating it in an attempt to understand it better. It is so majestic people become awed and try to explain it in that general frame of mind (et al...). Sometimes these explanations are spot on, sometimes they’re not.
Ask any firefighter out there, “What the one constant in Fire is,” and they will tell you “Change.”
Yes that is the variable the New Phytologist article has included into the modern theory, that variable in the form of climate change. In the end, whether they are on the firelines, making the firecalls, or studying the diversity of fire, all people work from the same understanding, but appear sometimes to be speaking, or writing in different languages. Nevertheless, the evolution of firethought has come a long way. Today people who are not in the loupe may not understand fire is a natural process of the landscape, and has been burning the land, since plant species began forming over 350 million years ago (Agee 1993). And that it would be a challenge to enter into any one of the forests around the globe and not find evidence of at least one fire that burnt it at one time or another.
As a species mankind has discovered a lot about the nature of the flame. When pyrolysis happens and smoke begins rising, it is actually a byproduct (Cottrell 2004). Heated particles divide oxygen into carbon dioxide and water, this mixture is carried away in heat currents --the smoke plume-- and is how a fire is usually located. After years of understanding little about it, and now grasping more of the concepts there is just that much more, not only to learn but to relearn. It would be a monumental task to read all the information in the known world on the subject. But a certain amount of preparation can prepare someone for certain situations. This is so, because in analyzing situations even if the events are similar they have a certain amount of identifiable variables, variables that are not easily spotted by the inexperienced or untrained eye.
Without having viewed and analyzed all the facts surrounding a situation -- a process of life-- it is difficult to make an educated objective decision on how to move on from that process. Shorty, although not looking for peer review, or spectator approval did what all concerned individuals would have done. Shorty just studied the fire, deciding where the crew would be safe, analyzing fuel loading, capacity, and rate of spread. He was running the ten standard firefighting orders through his head, and the watch-out situation checklist, (PMS 461 2010). He was mentally classifying fuel type, and moisture content. Numerically he contemplated the resources involved. There were a number of things Shorty’s mind did. What it wasn’t doing, was going to act before all the information about the situation was grasped first. That way he wasn’t making any illogical assumptions and putting manpower in danger.
That is what it comes down to, property and money can be replaced but there is no replacement for human life. That is my understanding of fire. It is my own personal ethic that no matter how bad a person wants it, glory can only be found in the land of the living. Because only those left alive can glory in the dead.
As for Shorty’s final decision, he didn’t do anything. He didn’t speak. He didn’t even flinch or blink. He just monitored the situation. Let the isolated torching event burn itself out and calmly released the radio contained in the bra at his chest. The FNGs, who realized they were not in as much danger as they thought, were still not at all impressed at Shorty’s actions, or in the situation, the lack thereof. Shorty put his nose back down and began cleaning more line. The rest of the crew followed in succession.
Shorty knew what could happen if he made a wrong decision. Shorty knew this because Shorty had been involved in extinguishing forest fires for a great many years. The FNG’s who were new to the field of fighting fire all probably had good ideas of what to do in the situation. They were running around like chicken’s with their head’s cut off, attempting to get close to a fire that was too thermally excited to get close enough to it, to douse the flames with even a piss-pump. Shorty knew once the tree tops started torching there was no getting close to the fire safely to mitigate the flames.
That is what Fire for Resource Benefit is all about. It is about modifying the landscape so that when the inevitable fire does occur, the fire stays on the ground in the grasses and doesn’t climb into the tree canopy where no firefighter can get close to it.
These deep timber strategies to keep fire on the ground, won’t work in the Southern Sage Brush deserts. There are so many different types of forest fire fuels in the world, it is felt that the current Regime Classification does not encompass every Fuel Regime out there.
Government policy makers need to look at the science of the situation. They need to analyze the situation not from a business man’s perspective, but from a person like Shorty’s perspective. Imaging if as a crew, the men on the fire squad were commanded by one of the FNG’s who had not experienced much fire first hand. The crew itself would be in serious danger because someone who didn’t have the situational awareness to make the rational decisions would have been in charge. That for the most part is what American Society is doing. Policy makers are business men and lawyers who have never witness ed an ounce of true grit on the lines of a fire. These individuals can’t have the situational awareness to make the proper choices, because they don’t have the proper knowledge or experiences to guide their decisions.
There are a great number of experienced and qualified politicians in the Unites States. While these individuals are experienced at political rallies, and in political actions, they are not all that well versed on firefighter coordination and firefighting actions.
The federal government has a strict policy, no individuals without proper governmental “G” classification can legally make decisions about forest fire strategy and planning. (This will be discussed in the next installation of this series) Why then does the government allow politicians to vote on fire policy? Politicians who have no experience with fire.
It is a fickle situation, when people who have no experience with forest fire are making decisions about forest fires.
Along with the rethinking and the reworking of Fire Fuels Regimes, the government needs to rethink its standpoint concerning fire. Those who have authority to make decision on a fire need extensive experience working with either the science of fire, or fire itself. The government must also realize that scientists who study fire, in public institutions should also be allowed to help design a future fire prevention agenda.
Because the Atmosphere clogged with smoke this summer it tells us; the current fire prevention plan, and the current fire prevention measures have not stopped the large fires from occurring. That may mean the current approach the government is taking to ward off fire, is also not working. “Change” is needed! A change in philosophies and a change in the structured personnel system of the modern Policy Making Regime.
References
AMR. 2008. Appropriate management of response (AMR) policies: a state perspective. Management considerations for large, long duration wildland fire incidents in Montana. Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation.
Agee, JK. 1993. Fire Ecology of Pacific Northwest Forests. Island Press. 53. 63.
Bowman DMJS, Balch JK, Artaxo P, Bond WJ, Carlson JM, Cochrane MA, D’Antonio CM, DeFries RS, Doyle JC, Harrison SP et al. 2009. Fire in the earth system. Science 324: 481-
484.
Calkin, D.E., Gebert, K.M., Jones, G.J., Neilson, R.P. 2005a. Forest Service large fire area
burned and suppression expenditure trends, 1970-2002. Journal of Forestry 103, 179-183.
PMS 461. NFES 1077. 2010. Incident Response Pocket Guide. National Wildfire Coordinating Group. Front-back cover.
Pyrogeography Workign Group. 2011. Fire Regimes: moving from a fuzzy concept to geographic entity. Meeting 1, Australian Centre for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, Brisbane, Australia, June/July. The New Phytologist (2011) 192: 316-318. www.newphytologist.com.
Westerling, A.L., Hidalgo, H.G., Cayan, D.R., Swetnam, T.W. 2006. Warming and earlier
spring increase western U.S. forest wildfire activity. Science 313, 940-943.