SOS Forests

Rattle Fire Musings

As we pointed out yesterday, the Rattle Fire has blown up. Ignited August 18 in the Boulder Creek Wilderness, the Rattle Fire had been subdued by the Northwest Oregon IMT (IC Carl West) with water drops from heavy helicopters. But last Thursday the NWO IMT was ordered off the fire, precisely because they had been so effective at suppressing it.

Sunday the Rattle Fire exploded. It is now over 2,000 acres and burning beyond the wilderness boundary. State Highway 138 is closed from MP 45 to MP 59. Pre-evacuation notices have been issued for Toketee Falls and Clearwater. Pacific Corp powerlines were de-energized for safety.

The local Type 3 firecrew that replaced the NWO IMT (Type 1) were themselves replaced after one day by the Southern Oregon/Northern California Type 2 Team (Paul). ORCA (as the Southern Oregon/Northern California Team is called) just came off the Siskiyou/Blue2 Complex on the Klamath NF, an 80,000 acre megafire that has been burning (and continues to burn) all summer long.

The Umpqua NF Forest Supervisor, Clifford J. Dils, evidently wants the Rattle Fire to burn, baby, burn just like the Siskiyou/Blue2 fires.

Not everybody is completely happy with Dils’ Let It Burn plan for the Umpqua NF. An interesting discussion about the intentional incineration of Oregon old-growth forests appeared in the Roseburg News-Review yesterday [here]

Rattle Fire ignites debate

by Adam Pearson, Roseburg News-Review, Sept 7, 2008

Ask any Hotshot, and he or she would tell you they’d rather dig a fire line than deal with hazard trees. And these snags felled by the Wolf Creek Hotshots Crew were remnants of the 1996 Spring Fire — so old, they have a tendency to fly apart the moment they begin toppling. …

Note: Three years ago Arrowhead Hotshot Danny Holmes was struck and killed by a tree top from a snag he was falling. This year firefighter Andrew Palmer was killed in the same manner. Hotshots are great firefighters but they are not professional, experienced timber fallers. We discussed fire falling last month [here]. More from the News-Review article:

[Wolf Creek Hotshot superintendent Eric] Miller and his crew, on a second 14-day “roll” battling the Rattle Fire in the Boulder Creek Wilderness of the Umpqua National Forest, were busily cutting down dead tree snags along the half-mile trail to the Illahee Lookout. At 1,010 acres Friday, the fire was on a lazy pace in the Rattlesnake Creek drainage since igniting Aug. 23.

Twenty-four hours later, it would burst wide open by another 700 acres, riding on canyon winds and hot temperatures. …

Before its eruption, the Rattle Fire was already creating a stir.

“We hope that it doesn’t blow up and get away in green forest and toward any structures in Dry Creek,” said Bob Ragon, executive director of the Douglas Timber Operators, on Friday.

The Boulder Creek Wilderness was burned in 1996 by the Spring Fire, with two-thirds of the 16,000-acre blaze consuming large swaths of wilderness.

The rest burned in late successional reserves — as drawn out by the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan — outside of the Boulder Creek Wilderness.

Ragon said industry lobbied the U.S. Forest Service to design salvage-timber sales for burned trees outside of the wilderness, but “nothing was done.”

Cheryl Caplan, spokeswoman for the Umpqua National Forest, said at the time, forest Supervisor Don Ostby was “responsible” in his decision to not sell a stick of burned timber, as national forests in southern Oregon were still assessing two years later the implications of future actions taken on the late successional reserves.

Forest officials figured there was 4 million board feet of timber waiting to be salvaged outside of the wilderness. Logging is not allowed in wilderness areas.

Ostby decided the small amount of timber outside the wilderness area was not worth the time it would have taken for the Forest Service to plan a timber sale that environmental groups likely would have appealed, and then for timber companies to go in and carefully extract it — most likely by helicopter.

Today, the timber industry points to the dead trees still standing from the Spring Fire — snags — as a hindrance to firefighting activity because of the hazards they present.

Before the Rattle Fire erupted, forest officials figured there were 100 to 125 snags per acre inside and outside the wilderness.

“In these cases you can’t get close to the fire,” Ragon said. “And it will continue until we get a complete burnover.” …

It is important to understand that incinerating forests does not remove the fire hazard. There is more dead fuel today in the Spring Burn than there was before the 1996 fire. In the eleven growing seasons since, the brush has resprouted, and the combination of brushy fine fuels and abundant dead snags makes for a fire fuel nightmare. Flaming brush ignites punky snags which shoot ember like giant Roman candles, and the wind carries those embers a half mile or more beyond the fire front.

Snags that could have been cut by pro timber fallers and sold for a profit are today being cut at huge expense and significant danger to the inexperienced firefighters who are falling them. The post-fire salvage was recommended for more than wood product production; it would have also saved lives and prevented more old-growth forest from being incinerated.

More from the News Review article:

Many people who stand behind issues touted by environmental groups, however, say fire in wilderness areas is good for burning up fuel loads.

In fact, Francis Eatherington, conservation director for Umpqua Watersheds, wonders why any suppression of fire in wilderness should happen at all.

“Why are they spending all that money?” she asks.

At the same time, Eatherington said the Forest Service should focus more on leaving burned areas that are open to logging alone, because snags provide beneficial habitat to wildlife.

In 2006, the Bybee Wildland Fire-Use Complex burned over 1,000 acres in Crater Lake National Park. Firefighters managed it only at its south and west borders so it wouldn’t escape the park. Early snow, because of the park’s high elevation, extinguished it by September.

“Why can’t they do that in the Boulder Creek Wilderness too?” Eatherington said.

To answer poor Francis’ rather ignorant question, again: the reason for rehabilitating forests after fires and for restoring forests before fires is to SAVE our priceless, heritage old-growth forests from TOTAL INCINERATION.

Excuse me for shouting, but when are you dimwit eco-nazi holocauster forkheads going to CATCH A CLUE?????

We professional foresters profess forests. We are stewards of the land. We use our training, experience, and expertise to PROTECT, MAINTAIN, and PERPETUATE forests. We know what we’re doing. People like Francis have zero expertise and don’t know beans about it.

The extreme Leftwing eco-nazi movement is utterly deluded by mythic paranoia about vast conspiracies and imaginary secret plans to eat the Earth and all its inhabitants. Their paranoia is irrational and horribly rude. They are fundamentally insane.

And the direct result of allowing insane fringe groups to dictate forest policy is catastrophic holocaust and destruction of those forests at landscape scales.

My thinking is that it would be better to allow dedicated profession foresters to care for our public forests rather than deferring to insane idiots with a track record of catastrophic failure, holocaust, destruction, and disaster.

Why should we listen to kooks who have decimated millions of acres of old-growth habitat with their kooky, a-scientific, never-been-right-once-yet notions?

And by the way, the entire Umpqua watershed, including Boulder Creek, has been home to human beings for 10,000 years or more, and is perforce NOT wilderness. The whole wilderness myth is not only highly destructive of the very values it purports to protect, it is racist to the core.

We need to stop listening to the ignorance-based jive political doublespeak and get real or we are going to lose all our forests.

An interesting sidebar story: the Dearhorn Fire ignited last week on the Hoopa Indian Reservation in Northern California. The Six Rivers NF has a co-op agreement with the Hoopas to fight fires. The SRNF dawdled on the Deerhorn Fire and left the impression with the Hoopas that they were going to Let It Burn, as the SRNF has done with the Ukonom and Panther Fires this summer.

The Hoopas went ballistic. They took the Incident Commander aside and read him the riot act. This morning a special 209 fire report was issued with words to this effect [here]:

The Tribal Council met with the Type 3 Incident Commander Gary Risling and Tribal OES director Rod Mendes to discuss control strategies and alternatives in the event control strategies failed to achieve the desired outcome.

[IC Risling now understands and wishes to communicate that] ~$109 million in resource value of merchantable timber is in imminent threat. The Bull Creek drainage is also a major watershed that is listed as critical to the tribe for its resource value. The Hoopa Tribe sustains its infrastructure through the sale of timber and other natural resources. The impacts associated with failure to suppress the fire and keep it as small as possible are very significant to the future of the Hoopa Tribe and its people.

The Hoopa are not enamored of Let It Burn racist wilderness jive bullshit. They want the fire out now.

Funny, the radical eco-nazis don’t spout their horrid crap at the Indians. Probably afraid of getting scalped.

Maybe we white people should scalp a few eco-nazis, and then they might leave our forests alone and stop trying to incinerate them for a change.