Forest fire peril; Old complacency still

fooling us

Arizona Daily Star; Tucson, Ariz; Apr 16, 1995;

Thomas W. Swetnam;

What happened last year in the Chiricahua and Rincon

mountains - terrible, destructive wildfires - could

easily ravage the Santa Catalinas or Mount Graham

this year. The excessive fuels are in place, and the

probability of people setting fires at just the wrong

time and place is even greater in these heavily used

mountains.

Under the current conditions, indeed, it is more a

question of when than if another catastrophic blowup

will occur.

Although the ancient burning patterns were interrupted

more than 100 years ago, wildfires continue to ignite.

Indeed, the mushroom clouds of smoke visible over

the Rincon and Chiricahua mountains last summer

signaled a warning to all who value these mountains

and the ecosystems they contain.

The problem is not too much fire, but too little. Where

the once frequent surface fires maintained open,

park-like stands, now dense forests are choked with a

century's accumulation of woody debris. These fuels

serve as ladders for flames to climb into the canopies,

and so surface fires explode into crown fires.

Enormous walls of flame race up slopes and destroy

entire stands of 200- to 300-year-old pines and firs

that in earlier centuries endured dozens of low

intensity surface fires.

The history of wildfires is written across Southern

Arizona landscapes. Patches of aspen on the high

slopes of the Santa Catalina, Pinale o, and Chiricahua

mountains attest to the hot fires of centuries past. Here

and there the conifer stands were consumed in flames,

opening up their dark canopies and giving foothold to

the sun-loving aspen sprouts and seedlings. These high

intensity "crown fires" were relatively small, creating

scattered patches of aspen a few tens or hundreds of

acres in size. The rest of the mountains sustained

frequent "surface fires," which swept through the

understories of pine forests in waves of low flames

every two to 10 years.

Fire scars preserved in the tree rings of old pines

clearly show this history. The flames returned again

and again in erratic cycles of fuel accumulation,

lightning strike and fire. The result was open, park-like

ponderosa pine stands that were pleasing to the eyes of

pioneers who recorded their impressions in journals

and diaries.

But then, around 1890, the ancient burning cycles

ceased.

Large numbers of cattle, sheep and goats began the

end. These herds grazed the grasses that formerly

carried the waves of flame, and they trampled new

trails that limited fire spread. Organized fire fighting

by forest rangers began shortly thereafter.

Last summer's 27,500-acre Rattlesnake Fire in the

Chiricahua Mountains showed what will continue to

result from this century's interruption of natural

burning patterns. During the big "blowup" days of July

12 and 13, several large watersheds went up in crown

fire holocausts in a matter of minutes. In some places,

1,000-acre patches extending from oak woodlands up

to spruce and fir virtually exploded, with virtually no

surviving trees. To the best of our knowledge, this

spatial scale of crown fire is unprecedented in at least

the past three centuries. The landscape scars created by

the Rattlesnake burn will last for hundreds of years

into the future. We do not have a clear understanding

of the ecological implications of this anomalous event,

but it is clear that some of the native plants and

animals are not well-adapted to recovering quickly, if

at all, in such drastically altered habitats.

And yet, it could have been worse.

Areas in the Catalinas or on Mount Graham were

spared:areas that provide red squirrel habitat, extensive

recreation, numerous summer home and telescope

sites. Meanwhile, dangerous conditions persist in such

rural/urban towns as Oracle, where hundreds of homes

rise in a volatile matrix of chaparral and overgrown

oak woodlands.

Visions of last year's smoldering ruins in Southern

California should sober Southern Arizona

homeowners and astronomers living and working in

similar fire-prone habitats.

We would be foolish to assume that our fire-fighting

forces and technology will indefinitely forestall the

next blowup. Rather, we should assume - as has been

demonstrated time after time in recent years - that once

a "big one" gets going in the West, nothing will stop it

but topography and weather. With fuels continuing to

accumulate, and episodic drought a fact of life in

Arizona, how long will it be until a big one gets going

in or near Summerhaven, Emerald Peak or Oracle,

despite the heroic efforts of firefighters?

Furthermore, property and ecosystems aren't all that is

at stake here. Fighting big blowup fires remains a

dangerous business - a fact painfully known to the

families of six firefighters killed by the Dude Fire on

the Mogollon Rim in 1990, and relatives of the 14

firefighters killed by the Storm King Fire in Colorado

last summer.

Most of this may not be news to Forest Service and

National Park Service managers, or to informed

citizens. But a disturbing complacency still exists, as

well as frustration over the very real practical

limitations of what can be done under current policies.

I believe that if property owners and visitors fully

recognized their peril, they would demand action from

politicians, managers and themselves. Here are the

challenges and some possible solutions:

The Forest Service must inaugurate a large-scale effort

to improve forest health and tamp down the fire hazard

by aggressively reducing the accumulated living and

dead woody fuels. This will cost money and take years

to accomplish, but consider the economics:Last

summer more than $14 million was spent attempting

to suppress the two big wildfires in the Rincon and

Chiricahua mountains alone. How much area was

prevented from burning catastrophically by this huge

expenditure? The answer is probably "very little."

Wouldn't it be wiser to revise funding policies and to

invest in fuels treatment projects that should ultimately

reduce the necessity of expensive, "all-out"

fire-suppression tactics, and the destructive effects of

blowups? To its credit, the Forest Service is currently

initiating such efforts in "ecosystem management"

programs. But so far, the dollars allocated are far too

few.

Homeowners should take some personal initiative to

reduce the hazard of wildfire starting on, or spreading

across their property. Demonstration tree thinning, fuel

piling and removal projects, with the aid of the Forest

Service, are badly needed.

Prescribed burning should be one of the major tools

used to restore ecosystems to lower fire-hazard levels,

but we must carefully assess costs, benefits and risks

of reintroducing fire at landscape scales, versus other

fuels treatments, or doing nothing. Large amounts of

smoke can be expected, and there is always a chance

that a prescribed fire may "escape" and become an

uncontrolled wildfire.

Environmental organizations should continue to

monitor federal land management, but they should not

be too quick to condemn well-intentioned efforts to

reduce catastrophic fire hazard that involves

tree-cutting. Tree-cutting will be necessary, as

prescribed burning alone will remain too dangerous in

some areas until chain saws thin the fuels.

Perhaps the Forest Service can facilitate commercial

uses for small-diameter tree stems in the process of

achieving fuels reduction. If so, such plans should be

fairly evaluated on their merits, without the rhetoric

and mistrust generated by past conflicts. Cynical

efforts by some in Congress to end-run existing

environmental planning regulations requiring public

review, under the guise of "forest health" emergencies,

are not necessary. Such changes in our laws will only

serve to further alienate a public that cares deeply

about forest ecosystems.

None of these efforts will be easy. Over the past

century we have greatly changed our Southern Arizona

mountain ranges, perhaps irrevocably. Restoration of

all ecosystems to some "pre-settlement" condition is

neither desirable nor practical. Nevertheless, the

current fuel accumulations, which we have created, are

creating some very sudden and extreme ecosystem

changes that the mountains have not experienced for

centuries, if not millennia. When endangered species,

telescopes and people are added to this equation, the

potential for tragedy is too great to ignore.