Idaho and the West’s long, hot fire season, and its connection to global warming, is the subject of a segment of “60 Minutes,” scheduled to run at 6 p.m. MDT this Sunday.
Idaho Statesman readers will recognize many of the sources for the story who were interviewed by Scott Pelley, a former chief White House correspondent for the CBS Evening News. They are the many of the same experts I relied on for my series of fire stories this summer, including the Bureau of Land Management’s Chief of Fire Operations Tom Boatner, of the National Interagency Fire Center.
The “60 Minutes” team of producers, photographers and sound men repeatedly came to Idaho this summer to put together what will likely be the most in-depth television reporting this year on the changing fire behavior experts attribute to global warming..
I bumped into producer David Gelber in late July at NIFC as he was heading to Valley County to see the East Zone Complex fire north of McCall. Pelley returned with the team in late August, after a stint in Afghanistan, and went to Ketchum to cover the Castle Rock fire.
Pelley also interviewed Tom Swetnam, Director of Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, who was one of the authors of the scientific paper that documented the climatic changes, the longer fire seasons and the bigger fires the West has experienced since 1988.
This should be a report Idahoans don't want to miss.
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Wild Fires
What is the deal with wild Fires.... Letting them burn is stupid.... We need to attack them like we mean it... using men/women to attack a large fire with picks and shouvles is like using a bandaid on a severed arm.. When a Fire is spotted there should be a call out to all the tanker Planes/Choppers in the state and get that thing OUT... Let alone the health hazzards from all the smoke we need the trees to produce the air we breathe..
I'm am not a cattle man but when we had open range land the cattle kept the grasses down so we didn't have hardly any wild fires... So maybe we need to reopen up the land.. and what has happend to all the Forest Service outpost that used to watch out for fires..
Tim
Fuels Management
The reason fires are so bad now isn't global warming, it's forest service policy on fuels management. I grew up in the 70's and 80's, and we always spent our summers camping in the Payette National Forest between McCall and Yellow Pine. During the 70's and early 80's, there was always some logging going on in the area. Not clear cutting, responsible, efficient logging that thinned fuels and didn't destroy the environment. During this time, there were no major fires in that area. In fact, the only changes to the place I camped the most was a few trees that blew down. There weren't a lot of people carving trees or spreading trash. Then in the late 80's and the 90's, the government's policy on fuels management changed, and logging was discontinued in this area.
My job moved me out of state and I've only been able to take my family camping up there about every other year since 1989, but I've been alarmed at the amount of undergrowth and the degrading condition of the forest.
Since 1994, there have been several major fires between Cascade/McCall and Warm Lake/Yellow Pine. This year, all 5 of the camping areas my family has used in the last 40+ years burned. To make things worse, the forest service isn't having salvage sells on most of these burns, and so they're just setting the forest up for worse fires in 20 years when all these dead trees dry out and the next lightning strike hits. Those fires will be hotter and even harder to stop.
I fought fires in 1987 for the Sawtooth National Forest, and I'm not saying anything I didn't learn in their own training classes.
It's not global warming, it's mis-management.
Fuels and history
From the 1950s to the early 1980s the Forest Service had been especially effective at putting out fires because of manpower, technology and generally wetter fire seasons. I don't think anyone would have suggested the agency was effectively managing fuels during this period. Fire suppression was contributing to the growing fuel load across the western landscape during this period, according to the Forest Service and the timber industry's forest scientists. As for logging's impact on the environment, most foresters agree that the road-building and logging in the 1960s triggered the mudslides and sediment loads on the South Fork of the Salmon River remains a problem for salmon today.
The evidence that a warming climate has made the fire seasons longer and the fires larger is indisputable. Fuels certainly contribute but the people who taught you firefighting, today tell me they are routinely seeing conditions now that weren't there in the 1970s and early 80s.
On a personal note, I've covered fires since 1986 and they have increasingly got bigger and more widespread, even in places where logging and fire suppression were never effective.
In Yellowstone, for instance there hasn't been logging ever.
But 1988 and several seasons since have had bigger fire seasons than any other year in recorded history.
Logging and thinning can be tools to address the problem but we can't simply manage our way out of the climatic shift that is likely to dramatically change our western forests.
Not soo much
1) Drought.
2) Past fuels management.
3) A change in current management.
4) And Budgets.
Does a 1 degree increase in average temperature make much difference? I find that difficult to accept.
The new piece did not elaborate on the drought. How many years? To what degree? Yes our fire season is earlier- because the snow melt is earlier and not enough spring rain. Drought equals more and bigger fires. With NO other impacts, drought alone would contribute to the problem.
It hasn't been mentioned that FS is intentionally letting fires burn more. One of the points of the 60Minute piece was that the fires are getting bigger... yea, if you do not jump right on it, it is going to get bigger. And the FS has acknowledged that NOT getting right on it and letting it burn is a better practice. The Chief Parrish fire is a good example. That baby started right on HWY 55. Someone called that in right away and there is no better access for any other fire in the West (except a range fire on the interstate maybe) yet, the FS and local could not put that out quickly. IF they don't get on it quickly, of course it's going to to burn more... but that's okay. I'll bet, right now, next year there will be more acres burned than any year previously.
Also let's mention the bureacratic mind-set of "bigger-budgets". The bigger budget I control, the bigger my salary is warranted. If my budget was $10Million last year, it's easy for me to get MORE than $10 million this year. I get to spend that somewhere, somehow. And the more I spend, the more 'responsibility' I have and inherently I have a higher salary. The person with the biggest budget gets the highest salary. That's the way it works.
The problem is only going to explode as more urban growth happens 'in the trees'. And I do not want to pay to protect million dollar homes in Ketchum simply because they want to live in the trees and not pay for their own fire protection and not make defensible space.
Is a climate change going to change our forests? Yes. And Boise used to be Lake Idaho too. Things change.
98 percent
The federal agencies put out 98 percent of the fires in initial attack.
Statistics
Does a 1 degree increase in average temperature make much difference? I find that difficult to accept
Because it's 'the average' it's not necessarily an accurate predictor or fair in its assessment.