Fire Problems

So far I’ve made two trips to the Dixie area to report on the Rattlesnake fire efforts, and two trips down to the river looking over the Poe Cabin fire. From that, I think I can safely say that nobody from the area residents to the firefighters are all that happy with this weeks old situation, and that everyone involved is making an effort to resolve the problem. Certainly the rest of us in the county aren’t very happy with choking, coughing, and hacking on the incessant smoke clouds that blanket the prairie, no matter where the smoke comes from.

While it’s not a unique situation, the extensive grasslands on the river make fighting the Poe Cabin fire difficult but not impossible, and thus we see this fire at least is nearly contained. Unfortunately for us all, the terrain, fuels and our summer weather patterns make any direct suppression efforts (and thus quick extinguishment) very different on the Rattlesnake fire, as well as being extremely hazardous to the firefighters. Much the same situation exists to the south where the Loon-Zena fire, and the Raines fire are having the same problems. (All in all, with twenty going fires we’ve lost nearly half a million acres so far this summer.) Remember that these fires are generally burning in very steep terrain difficult if not impossible for motorized equipment to operate in. The fuels include deep grass, heavy brush, and dense Lodgepole Pine jumbles in which a high percentage of the trees have been killed by bugs. You might also keep in mind that handline crews would have to work upslope of an active fire, with unburned fuels between them and the fire, something that is never a very good idea! All in all, we have the necessary ingredients of a firefighter’s nightmare, with the potential of making the 1994 South Canyon fire (Storm King Mountain) tragedy seem like child’s play!

The primary firefighting efforts on the Rattlesnake fire are intended to protect the communities of Dixie, Comstock, and now Orogrande from the fire if, or should I say when, it comes boiling out of the canyons. In addition, helicopter bucket drops are being used to cool hotspots in an effort to keep the fire from moving out of those same canyons, a very good idea considering that we can’t with any degree of safety put people in there to actively work on the fire.

The question that quickly comes to my mind however, is how did we get into this sorry situation in the first place? Consider the problems that the fire crews are facing. The steep terrain features we can blame on the action of the Salmon River over quite a few thousand years I guess, and there isn’t much we can do about that. Nor can we do much about the weather conditions, as much as we’d like to. The fire fuels on the other hand are something we could, and should, have done something about long ago. It’s my understanding that those dense stands of Lodgepole Pine are partly the result of the disastrous 1910 fire, making these trees nearly 100 years old. Generally these dense stands should have been logged, thinned out years ago, but weren’t for various reasons. For that I blame the environmental activists, and the federal courts, which seem to know little more about forestry than I know about the finer nuances of law, despite all the weeping and wailing about our country’s mistreated forests.

Next, enter the infamous Mountain Pine Beetle. The beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins, is a member of an insect class known as bark beetles. Except when the adults migrate and attack new trees, the mountain pine beetle completes its life cycle under the bark. They attack and kill lodgepole, ponderosa, sugar, and western white pine by tunneling under the bark, where over a short time (sometimes as little as two weeks) the trees are overwhelmed as the phloem layer is damaged enough to cut off the flow of water and nutrients, leaving the tree to starve to death. Beetle outbreaks frequently develop in dense stands of pole-sized pines, where outbreaks often kill millions of trees. During epidemics, tree mortality can alter the entire ecosystem, where often the beetles have almost totally depleted pine forests. The profusion of beetle-killed trees can severely affect wildlife habitat as well, by changing the cover available and hindering wildlife movement. Even worse, the dead trees left standing are a source of fire fuels that well, as forests are prone to do, burn, unless they’re somehow removed. After all, a lightning strike in the top of a dead, pitchy, lodgepole is somewhat akin to striking a kitchen match in a pile of gasoline soaked tinder!

High-risk lodgepole pine stands have an average age of more than 80 years, an average diameter of more than 8 inches, and a climate suitable for beetle development. According to numerous studies, thinning those stands of lodgepole and ponderosa pines will generally prevent, or at least minimize, beetle-caused tree losses. However, once a large outbreak has developed, salvage logging of infested material to reduce future tree mortality generally will not be effective. It’s possible to prevent infestation with specialized sprays on high value trees, but they need to be applied before the tree is infected and the cost of such treatments is excludes any large-scale application. Once a mountain pine beetle outbreak begins, it can often only be stopped by thinning the trees ahead of the outbreak. More importantly, infestations can be prevented by thinning those dense stands before crown closure, an operation that not only increases the vigor of the remaining trees, but also prevents the spread of an outbreak if individual trees have already been attacked.

Mountain pine beetles are a natural part of the ecosystem, and will never be completely eradicated. To keep the beetles at their normal numbers however, the causes of an outbreak must be removed. First and foremost, overstocked stands of timber need to be addressed by foresters, as overstocking causes trees to become highly competitive for the limited water, light, and nutrients available, and this quite naturally stunts their growth along with weakening their defenses against beetle attack. The beetles also carry spores of bluestain fungus which colonizes the sapwood and defeats the natural defenses of the tree. When lodgepole is young, it is able to resist infection by the fungus, with resistance increasing to about age 60, and then rapidly declines. The decline in resistance to bluestain fungus occurs when lodgepole pine is considered mature, and just when beetle outbreaks typically develop. Logging these dense lodgepole stands is one proven answer, which would make everyone happy if the logging of such small timber can be made economically viable. If standard logging isn’t an economical operation, then perhaps we could give the excess trees to somebody who could use them, forestry economics be dammed, just get them out of there! I know a lot of pole cutters that would be quite happy to remove as many of these excess trees as they can get if they don’t have to pay an arm and a leg for them! If, for one reason or another, thinning isn’t acceptable or possible, then the stands should most likely be burned out, with the general recommendation being a “patchwork” burn of six to ten acres per plot.

If nothing else, that sure would reduce the vast amounts of secondhand “government smoke” we’re being exposed to for much of each summer!