Incinerating the Bitterroot
The following article appeared in the Missoulian today. Rather than comment on their site, I am commenting on mine.
State fire panel discusses solutions in Hamilton
By JOHN CRAMER of the Missoulian [here]
HAMILTON - Montana’s Fire Suppression Interim Committee kicked off its statewide road tour Monday at ground zero in the West’s growing dilemma on how to reduce large-scale wildfires at a time when more people are building homes in fire-prone forests.
No homes are built in National Forests. No one is allowed to construct residences on public land.
The Bitterroot National Forest, which the U.S. Forest Service considers America’s most threatened national forest because of the population explosion in the Bitterroot Valley’s “wildland-urban interface,” served as a backdrop for the state legislative committee’s first public forum.
Good for John Cramer for putting Wildland-Urban Interface in quotes. The WUI (pronounced Whooie) is a figment of the government’s imagination. The Bitterroot NF is not “wildland,” it is public forest. There are few urban areas in the Bitterroot Valley. Outside of those areas, the rest of land is rural private property. It is not “interface.” It is where all the farms, all the ranches, and all the homes are. People have the right to live on their land and more power to us.
We also have the right not be incinerated by wildfires emanating from the Federal Estate. If the USFS cannot contain fires on their acres, then they are remiss, not doing their jobs, and that land should be removed from public ownership.
We also have the right not to be incinerated by backfires set by remiss government employees, or we should have that right. Recently the Ninth Circuit Court held that private citizens do not possess any defense against firebrand USFS employees who burn our homes down [here]. I say take the land away from the recalcitrant, legally immune, incompetent USFS if they cannot forebear from burning down the homes of private citizens.
The committee, which was created last year, heard from many speakers who said reducing forest fuels and streamlining the approval process were top priorities.
“We will not eliminate wildfires, but reducing fuels can significantly modify fire behavior,” said Tom Tidwell, regional forester for the U.S. Forest Service’s Northern Region.
The committee is hosting a series of meetings across the state to gather public reaction to its draft report, which is available on the committee’s Web site at www.leg.mt.gov/fire.
The report predicts Montana’s wildfires will destroy more homes and kill and injure more people unless better ways are found to fight wildland fires and to pay for wildfire suppression.
The committee’s goals are to draft legislation that helps the state Department of Natural Resources and Conservation improve its firefighting capability, create a better interagency communication system and influence the federal fire suppression system, including fuels reduction.
Several speakers told the committee that federal, state, local and private wildland firefighters can do a better job of communicating, but that Montana’s wildfires will continue to worsen until public and private landowners greatly reduce forest fuels and accept responsibility for building homes in fire-prone areas.
Much of Monday’s discussion focused on using thinning and prescribed burns to reduce forest fuels, on firefighting agencies clarifying their objectives, and on generating logging and mill jobs to process woody debris.
Officials from the Forest Service and the DNRC agreed that all agencies could improve their coordination at a time when fire budgets are tight and fire seasons are becoming longer, hotter and drier.
Committee members expressed concern about responsibility for protecting the growing number of homes being built in the wildland-urban interface, or the border area between communities and forests.
Again with the Whooie. It is a total misconception that all humanity lives inside urban boundaries, especially not in the American West. Some might wish that to be so, but we are a free people with the right to own and live upon private property.
About 97 percent of all wildfires were extinguished within a few hours in the Northern Rockies last year, meaning a few large fires caused most of the damage and took up most of the costs.
Tidwell said his agency focuses on wildland firefighting, but that it helps to protect private land and homes whenever possible.
Not true. The USFS has policies against fighting structure fires, their crews are not equipped or trained to fight structure fires, and they refuse to do it.
He said the Forest Service, which once suppressed all fires, uses its limited supply of firefighters, equipment and funding more selectively than in the past, choosing the time, place and conditions where a fire can most likely be suppressed.
Those choices are made without public input and without regard to U.S. environmental laws or due process.
Regional Forester Tom Tidwell is referring to his agency’s Let It Burn policy, which includes the concepts of “Appropriate Management Response” and Wildland Fire Use (whoofoos). The USFS routinely allows fires to burn on Federal land until they reach private property, at which time they complain that homes are interfering with their firefighting mission.
“We need to do a better job communicating” with other agencies and the public, he said.
No, the USFS needs to do a better job of listening to the public, which after all, pays their salaries and owns the land they are supposed to be managing. The USFS instead listens to special interest BINGOs and other anti-human, anti-American radicals who seek to drive citizens off their private properties.
I can cite no case where the USFS has gone to the public to ask what their mission should be, or how they should manage forests or fires. The USFS disdains public input. To them, communication is a one-way street. They are incapable of listening to or hearing what the public wants. There is no dialog; it is all monologue.
The Forest Service uses an “appropriate management response,” which allows more fires to burn as a natural part of the ecosystem, while focusing on keeping others from threatening communities and infrastructure.
Modern USFS fires are not “natural” but instead are stand-destructive canopy fires that kill trees and wildlife. The USFS does not perform significant stand treatments, does not do restoration forestry, does not engage in active management, and does not tend our public forests. As a result, our public forests have grown thick with too many trees and too much fuel, so that the former historical “natural” fires that burned as ground fires now erupt into holocaust firestorms.
Bob Harrington, the state’s top forester, said his agency’s mission continued to be suppressing all fires.
That is as it should be. Wildfires are destructive of natural and cultural resources. It is better to tend the land than to allow wildfires to incinerate watersheds, farms, ranches, and homes.
Tidwell, Harrington and Dave Bull, forest supervisor for the Bitterroot National Forest, said fuel reduction projects have been unnecessarily delayed by appeals, lawsuits and time spent on completing environmental analyses.
Bull said 80 percent of his staff’s time is spent on environmental analyses and 20 percent on actual fuel reduction work.
That is a common complaint, but is not completely true. The USFS has spent the last six years avoiding environmental analyses and instead relies on “categorical exclusion” from NEPA. In order to make that work, they plan minuscule treatments that affect few acres and which are ecologically unsound in most cases.
In their defense, the USFS has stripped their ranks of professional foresters who know how to treat stands, know how to prepare environmental analyses, and know how to restore forests to fire-resilient conditions. The USFS has also failed to use competent attorneys in defending against lawsuits.
Properly designed restoration forestry treatments must be done on landscape scales. The push to do tiny projects with categorical exclusion has crippled the ability of the USFS do do any meaningful forest management.
“We’re setting ourselves up for more catastrophic fires,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time before hundreds of houses burn.”
Dave Bull should be speaking in the past tense. All of the above has already taken place.
Bull said many new homeowners near the Bitterroot National Forest don’t take precautions against wildfires, such as creating a defensible space around their homes.
“They don’t have any clue on what it means to live in a fire-dependent ecosystem,” he said.
No, Dave Bull does not have a clue how to manage public forests. Defensible space must extend to farthest reaches of the USFS land. Then fires could be contained and controlled before they reach private properties. It is not the job of the Federal agency to tell private landowners how to manage their properties, especially given that the USFS is clueless about how to manage forests in the first place.
Kristiina Vogt, professor of ecosystem management at the University of Washington, made a presentation outlining the ecological and economic benefits of using biomass, or thinned forest fuels and other woody debris.
Steve Woodruff, deputy director of Western Progress, suggested the committee consider mandating an insurance premium fee on forest homes in fire-prone areas and levying a modest statewide firefighting property tax.
He said fuel reduction should focus on the wildland-urban interface, which would protect communities, improve forest health and generate jobs.
No treatments on private land will improve forest health in public forests. Mandating levies against private homeowners will not prevent Federal holocausts, emanating from unkempt Federal land, from burning private homes down.
Sonny LaSalle of the Big Sky Coalition encouraged committee members to help streamline the process for approving fuel reduction projects.
The State of Montana does not approve or disapprove of Federal projects. Sonny is all mixed up.
Matthew Koehler, executive director of the nonprofit Wild West Institute, said environment groups agree that fuels have overloaded some forests.
But he criticized proposals to suspend federal environmental laws and to restrict the public’s right to challenge overly large fuel reduction projects.
Conservation groups “are coming up with (targeted) fuel reduction projects right here on the Bitterroot and Lolo national forests, but people with a political agenda are just ignoring the common ground,” he said.
Matt Koehler is a former Earth Firster who has frequently sued to stop Healthy Forest Act thinnings. That is his modus operandi, when he is not in Oregon protesting salvage logging. He is not a forester, has no schooling or experience in restoration forestry, but actively engages in eco-litigation to tie up forest health projects. He has a huge political agenda that has nothing to do with forests.
The committee will reconvene Tuesday to visit areas in the Bitterroot National Forest that have burned in wildfires or are targeted for fuel reduction.
The committee has been meeting in Helena for a year to discuss reducing the costs of fire suppression and the impacts on local communities. It plans to hold similar public hearings in Lewistown on May 16, Miles City on May 30, and Seeley Lake, Thompson Falls and Libby on June 19 and 20.
More than $100 million in federal and state funds were spent last year in Montana to fight 72 wildfires that burned more than 700,000 acres.
The National Interagency Fire Center reports that in 2007 there were 1,871 wildfires in Montana that burned 811,598 acres. In 2006 there were 2,311 fires that burned 1,047,323 acres. In 2000 the Valley Complex Fire alone burned 292,070 acres of the Bitterroot National Forest.
The State of Montana is justified and to be commended for examining the fire risk that exists in their state. They should not be snowed by misinformation, however. The hazard is on USFS land, and that is where hazard abatement, in the form of restoration forestry, must occur.
by bear bait
by Joe B.
All fires start small, they only grow because nobody put them out early enough. It’s a shame that people buy into the notion that when 300,000 acres are torched, the fire is too big to fight. People forget that when 300,000 acres are torched, they all aren’t still burning and that they began as a fire in one lightning split tree or one spot on the ground no larger than a manhole at first spark. Then they forget that we have helicopters with buckets, planes with retardant, smokejumpers with the heavy packs, and rappelling teams with the equipment to take out a small fire.
Then they forget that we know exactly where and when the lightning struck from satellite data, and they also forget we know what the condition of the forest is from moisture content to fuel loads. Then they forget we know due to topography and the winds where the fire is likely to go.
And yet they still do not demand that the agency responsible for managing the land that we all own do something about potentially catastrophic fires before they become so.
After working for 3 months out of Hamilton, back in 2003, I could see the future of the Bitterroot in the short time I was there. The recent past was VERY clear, as well.
After the catastrophic fires in 2000, the court-brokered compromise on salvage logging sealed the fate of the whole area by “preserving” perfect bark beetle habitat and causing a huge “bloom” of infestation. Dead trees that still had green needles were the preferred sites of these bugs, and there were millions of these kinds of trees just waiting for new tenants.
We were still salvaging dead and dying trees in 2003 but, there was an elevational line that delineated “Potential Lynx Habitat” (not that they found any cats but…) that was preventing salvage efforts at the higher elevations, dooming them to the worst kind of catastrophic fire, frying the soils and opening them up to accelerated erosion.
My main questions are: When does that land cease to be considered “Potential Lynx Habitat”? When ALL of the trees are dead?!?
The last two USFS Chiefs have come from Region 1. The Bitterroot is ground zero in the USFS program for nuclear-scale holocaust. The lynx has nothing to do with it. It is about scorched earth and laying waste to millions of acres in a bitter, bitter war against forests.
A first it was a game of extortion chicken-fund us more and more or we’ll burn it to the ground. But then those plans were scrapped for wholesale incineration, on purpose, without qualms, as if that were what they were hired to do.
Hmmmm, this makes me think of another conspiracy theory. Since the Sierra Club moved its headquarters to Missoula, maybe the Bitterroot was chosen to be “ground zero”, as an example of what will happen (IS happening) to majority of our western forests.
The Bitterroot truly is a “poster child” for what is wrong with our National Forests. “Recovery” needs to be monitored to show how agonizingly slow it will be to re-forest the land without man’s help. Of course, the eco’s will embrace the tick brush as “re-wilded” environment, cleansed of that pesky human parasite.
The West is the MOST urban of all the sections of the USA. The highest density of urban living is in the West. It would follow that the rest of the USA is more at risk for fire than the West, in terms of homes burned.
But we that is not true. In many parts of the West, urban areas have grown to the edge of the public sector ownership. In Nevada, special Sen. Harry Reid, Democrat Senate President, legislation has accomplished huge land trades so that Las Vegas can grow, and be away from the public lands….or what WERE public lands, and are now Del Webb subdivisions, expanded gambling, all that great growth in Vegas. Those are land conversions in the last 20 years, not some long ago railroad grant lands. As long as there is water, and Reid has claimed all the unclaimed ground water in Nevada except for 6 counties in the NE corner, for Clark county. You can’t drill a well in the rest of the state on your own property.
The issue is that we have a population that will risk wildfire, because there is a modicum of human response that might mitigate the damage. You can’t regulate hurricanes, floods, tornados, and random crime that seems to touch everyone sometime. Living in the woods is a risk people are taking, and the one new, never before in the last 100 years factor, is that the Federal government deciding that they no longer fight most fire because they have decided that is not what they want to do. That is another social engineering solution to a forest management problem of their creation, that they have failed to address, that will not grow smaller by ignoring it. Fighting fire was part of the mandate to even create the agency. Protect the frigging forests from fire. The country had already lost too many lives, too much treasure, to fire, and the USFS was formed to put an end to that threat as best they could. Now they have rationalized their job as to not fight fire, and that could be accepted if they had done one/one thousandth of the job they need to do to reduce fuels so that fire might be introduced or allowed with regularity, and we could once again have heritage forests, diversity, and the place some people like to be.
Doing nothing is a very directed decision. Doing nothing is a part of management. You do nothing when doing anything will hurt the resource. That is no longer an option with fire. Doing nothing for too long has hurt the resource. And to continue to do nothing only exacerbates the problems, and creates a growing fire threat. We are in that “for want of a nail, a shoe was lost, for want of a shoe, a horse was lost, for want of the horse….”
We are losing the battle, and you lose enough battles, you lose the war. If this place is to look like a WWI front line forest, all due to neglecting fuels reductions because it can be called logging, then, really, why should I give a tinker’s damn for any of the Federal Estate. Burn the SOB, and get it over with. Show us how stupid, lazy, wrong headed a bureaucracy made from societal rejects, industry losers, Quislings, promoters of eugenics in spotted owl management, mismanagers of human capital, can be. That cake needs its frosting, and maybe some more nuts sprinkled on top.
Softwood timber is in a world wide glut, and nobody needs the timber from USFS lands. But burning them up to prop the Megapulps REIT or TIMO values is an insult, even if NGO’s do have to earn the money they need to survive to forward their wrong thinking agendas of godless science and Malthusian human order policies to the rest of us. The USFS is wrong. Just plain wrong. 535 in Congress, and not one standing up to them. We are lost.