Burning Issue

t's rare for a devastating fire to bring calls for more fire, but that's just what's happening in the wake of last May's Los Alamos fire in New Mexico.

For at least a decade, many federal land managers have been working to reverse their agencies' prior commitment to all out fire suppression.Over some resistance, they have proposed to ignite widespread prescribed burns to reduce forest density and fire hazards.

Ironically, that program seems to have gained ground from one of its biggest mistakes: the prescribed burn that escaped in May to blacken almost 400 homes in and around Los Alamos, N.M.

After shrugging off warnings from federal officials that unnaturally thickened western forests threaten public safety and ecological health, western residents now are paying attention. The Los Alamos incident seems to have boosted demands for controlled burning and thinning of overstocked forests.

"A year ago we were getting accused of crying wolf in the forest," said Leonard Atencio, superintendent of the Santa Fe National Forest. But now that Santa Fe residents have watched fire rage through Los Alamos, he said, "they want action. There's a lot of urgency."

Initial reactions suggest that the public and legislators are getting smarter about co-existing with nature and that some environmentalists are becoming less adversarial. Many people are concluding that they cannot banish fire, but must learn to work with it.

If so, that's a big change. In 1988, after prescribed fires exploded and charred much of Yellowstone National Park, a backlash against prescribed burning swept across the nation.

Since then, a growing chorus of scientists and land managers have said that thinning and prescribed burning can reduce the heat and hazards of wildfires. Some say they are necessary to protect homes in the "urban interface," where forest meets the edge of town. Others favor them to restore health to fire-prone forests that have been further endangered by grazing, logging and fire suppression practices.

The Forest Service has circulated plans to ramp up its fuel thinning and prescribed burning almost tenfold in the West within four years. Leading western politicians are applauding the plan. And in Santa Fe, N.M., and Flagstaff, Ariz., for instance, officials are pressing ahead with plans to treat forests to reduce wildfire risks.

"The Los Alamos fire heightened public awareness of fire danger and the urban interface issue," said Craig O'Hare, Water Programs Administrator for Santa Fe. "People want us to go up and take care of the fire danger."

The fuel treatment program still faces major obstacles. It's expensive, risky, and easily delayed by procedural challenges. But with public interest rising and mostly positive media coverage, some proponents of prescribed burning are cautiously optimistic.

"We didn't want the notoriety that this incident offered. There's nothing OK about what happened [at Los Alamos]," said Dave Bunnell, who heads the Forest Service's fuel treatment program. But ironically, he added, "one thing that could come out of this is some positive exposure for prescribed burning."

Bunnell expected a firestorm of negative publicity from the Los Alamos calamity. Twelve years ago, the media initially portrayed the big fires in Yellowstone National Park as an unmitigated disaster. Some observers rushed to blame fire managers who let some area fires burn for a time before trying to put them out. Politicians blasted prescribed burning of all kinds, and federal agencies' controlled burning was shut down for years.

Of course, the Cerro Grande fire that charred Los Alamos also brought plenty of negative coverage. It began as a small prescribed burn in the Bandelier National Monument. After it escaped, high winds drove it through part of Los Alamos, leaving a fickle path of blackened homes and others that escaped untouched. It grew to more than 47,000 acres, becoming New Mexico's largest wildfire of modern times.

Many people heaped blame on National Park Service managers who set the prescribed burn and let it escape control. Some called for heads to roll. After an initial inquiry, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said both the fire plan and its execution were badly flawed. Roy W. Weaver, superintendent of Bandelier National Monument, announced he would retire almost a year early as he and three other officials were under investigation for their handling of the fire.

Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., charged that the fire's handling reflected systematic failures that "undermine the credibility of the program itself." She called for a review of the organization, training and culture of prescribed burning.

But Bunnell was surprised that the fallout was not worse. Even Rep. Joe Skeen, R-N.M., who initially called for a suspension of prescribed burning, said he wasn't opposed to controlled burns in general. He just wanted them to be safe. The Forest Service resumed prescribed burning June 12, as did most other agencies. Even the National Park Service is allowed to conduct burns under certain conditions.

Figuring Out Fire

In fact, the nation has been climbing a learning curve on fire for a decade. Major media followed the Yellowstone fires with stories about the regrowth of the forest. They explained that fires naturally clear away older lodgepole pine trees and enable a new forest to sprout in their place. Foresters also spread the word that tens of millions of acres of ponderosa pine forests have grown thicker and sicker over the past century, putting them at high risk of unnaturally damaging fires.

Their tale has grown familiar. In many areas, the ponderosa pines that dominate the bulk of western forests used to be far less vulnerable to wildfire than they are today. In areas where wildfires were frequent and relatively light, presettlement ponderosa pine forests tended to be open, grassy expanses dominated by a relatively few, big trees. The pines, thickly girded with fire-resistant bark, actually benefited from light fires that kept down competing vegetation and recycled nutrients.

The Forest Service has admitted that it mismanaged these forests. Beginning in 1910, the agency stamped out burning of all kinds. Grazing, logging and fire control converted many pine stands to thickets that sicken in drought and burn right up through their forest canopies in fires. Scientists have found the trees per acre count has soared to as much as 30 times presettlement densities. The Forest Service has said 28 million to 40 million acres of western forests are at risk of unnaturally hot fires.

The 1994 fire year, which cost more than $1 billion in firefighting costs and killed dozens of firefighters, pounded that message home. Federal agencies started actively promoting prescribed burning.

Fuel Removal

So when the Los Alamos prescribed burn blew up in May, many news reports focused not only on the fire itself but also on fuel accumulation that threatens much of the West. As drought drove the acreage burned nationally above 1.6 million acres by late June of this year, concern mounted.

Wallace Covington, a Northern Arizona University fire ecologist who has been documenting the accumulation of fuel in southwestern forests for two decades, took advantage of the Los Alamos fire to sound the alarm.

"There's no doubt where this is headed," he declared. "The fuel loads are getting heavier and heavier every year." If forest density is not reduced on a grand scale, "towns are going to burn up. People are going to die," Covington said in May, as the Cerro Grande fire ravaged Los Alamos.

As he spoke, the Forest Service was making a similar pitch within the Clinton administration. Criticized by the General Accounting Office for lacking a comprehensive strategy for reducing fire hazards in the West, the agency drafted an aggressive one. It admitted that current fuel treatments on about a half-million acres there annually were losing ground against fuel accumulation and called for treating about
3 million acres of western forest annually for the next 15 years.

Conservative Republicans in both houses cheered. Rep. Helen Chenoweth-Hage, R-Idaho, chairwoman of the House Resource Committee subcommittee on Forest and Forest Health, told Forest Service officials, "This is doing exactly what we need."

Muddying the Waters

Buffalo Creek, Colo., serves as a poster child for prescribed burning. The watershed was devastated by mudslides in 1996, two years after an unusually hot fire incinerated its forests. The washouts have cost Denver's Water Board more than $12 million to clean silt and debris out of reservoirs. Erosion-and the bill for dealing with it-continues to mount.

Santa Fe fears the same fate. A land-searing wildfire could unleash mudslides in the watershed from which it draws 40 percent of its drinking water. The city wants the Forest Service to reduce fuel levels in 17,000 acres of the watershed that lies in Santa Fe National Forest.

The Forest Service proposes to thin the forest above Santa Fe mostly by cutting smaller, less fire-resistant trees and conducting controlled burns to reduce ground level fuel. The goal is to reduce the fuel load in the forest so that a wildfire would largely burn along the ground, doing little damage to the bigger trees that hold the steep hillsides in place. The city also plans to reduce fuels in the much smaller lands that the city owns in the lower watershed.

It won't be easy or noncontroversial. Even though residents seem eager to reduce fuels, some are nervous about prescribed fires in the wake of the Los Alamos disaster. They may not have faced the fact that fires are a necessary part of the fuel treatment, says O'Hare, the city's water department administrator.

Lacking a road system in the watershed and having no plans for commercial logging, he said, the city has no way to haul away thinned trees and branches. If they are cut down and left on the ground without controlled burning, they will increase the fire hazard for five or 10 years. Even chipping them on site would leave the forest floor under a three-inch deep blanket of flammable chips.

The city of Flagstaff is a few years ahead of Santa Fe. Since 1997, Flagstaff has worked with the Forest Service and state and private landowners to devise a plan to thin and prescribe burns on 170,000 acres of land on the outskirts of town. It is the biggest fuel treatment program ever proposed on the fringe of an urban area.

Based on research by fire ecologist Covington, the plan has two goals: to create a space around the city where wildland fire can be stopped, and to attempt to restore the original pine forests that greeted the area's first white explorers.

Blazing a Path

But advocates of fuel treatment need to overcome major obstacles.

First, they have to figure out how to pay for it. The Forest Service's comprehensive strategy calls for an almost tenfold increase in spending in western forests, driving up its national costs for planning, mechanical thinning, prescribed burning, and the like from $107 million to $825 million per year.

That amount has set off sticker shock on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. The White House balked at approving the figure, even though agency officials tried couching it as a cost estimate, rather than as a budget request. Although Congress appeared ready to boost fuel treatment spending in the aftermath of the Los Alamos disaster, legislators recoiled from such a large long-term cost.

A request for a lot more money, decreed Chenoweth-Hage, "is not what this committee needs to hear."

Long-time champions of the fuel treatment program are nevertheless relieved to have a credible estimate on the record. "This is potentially very expensive," says Neil Sampson, former executive director of American Forests, a conservation group that champions fuel treatments. "But the longer you don't do anything, the harder and the more expensive it gets to fix."

The second hurdle for advocates of widespread fuel treatment is that fire in forests is inherently risky and smoky. No politician is prepared to say we need to take more risks with fire. But if federal agencies plan for zero risk to lives or property, Sampson says, the program won't get much done and long-term damage from wildfires will mount. Some of the strongest protests against burning programs come from air pollution agencies and local residents who don't want to breathe the smoke. Burning advocates say the risk of fire and smoke will be greater in the long run if thickening forests continue to burn randomly, rather than at times chosen to dissipate smoke and minimize risk. But prescribed burns must survive environmental assessment that wildfires don't.

A third hurdle, related to the second, is that burn programs are fraught with career risks. Federal land managers face little professional risk if they let fuels accumulate until a wildfire rages through them. And there is no career risk in fighting fires. Even unsuccessful firefighters are usually greeted as heroes. But an escaped prescribed burn can be a career-breaker. Just ask Bandelier superintendent Weaver.

Some in the federal firefighting community believe Weaver may a victim of scapegoating. His fire plan wasn't perfect, but it wasn't that bad, they say. The initial inquiry suggested the plan's implementation was poor and that the main cause of the runaway fire was a mistaken decision to burn out vegetation in the path of the prescribed burn.

The way Weaver and others are judged for their performance at Bandelier may influence their peers' willingness to conduct prescribed burns. According to Bunnell, managers are going to say, "Do I really want to accept this risk and responsibility that could ruin my career, hurt my family and cost me my job?"

A fourth problem is the Clinton administration's plan to rule out road building in roadless areas of national forests. The lack of new roads could make it difficult to do much thinning in some areas prior to doing prescribed burns.

Finally, and perhaps most important, thinning and burning proposals draw controversy and tend to get stuck in procedural gridlock. The Flagstaff proposal, for instance, has broad support from federal, state and local agencies, but some environmental groups question the details, and a few of them have so far effectively blocked it.

Forest Guardians, a hard-line environmental group from Santa Fe, led a cluster of groups that opposed the first 10,000-acre thinning project near Flagstaff on Coconino National Forest. They have appealed the plan twice and filed a lawsuit. Forest Guardians and other interested parties say the agency is prepared to withdraw the plan and start over again, but in the past few months, officials have been too busy-literally fighting fires-to tend to the proposed cure.

Santa Fe National Forest superintendent Atencio worries that he might face a similar ordeal in the Santa Fe city watershed. Although the city is anxious to move quickly, he says, "You can't do a heck of a lot in a short period of time."

Lyle Laverty, regional forester for the Rocky Mountain Region, can attest to that. Last year, his region started writing the environmental assessments for fuel treatments about 35 miles southwest of Denver. But this June, wildfire beat them to it. The High Mountain fire incinerated many of the same acres that were slated for treatments, destroying more than 40 homes and outbuildings.

Planning a fuel treatment generally takes 18 months. Appeals are almost automatic, and requirements are so complex that deciding the appeals often delays action another half-year or more or requires that the process start over. Tack on a lawsuit, and a dissenter can easily stall a proposal for three years and run up costs sharply.

Why worry about appeals? Although the Forest Service's fuel treatments have gained at least general support from several mainstream, national environmental groups, such as the National Audubon Society, the Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society, details can be sticky, and smaller environmental groups often raise objections.

Logging Kindles Fear

Usually, resistance stems from plans for cutting down small trees to reduce ground and ladder fuels, which carry fire into the canopies. Some say that tree cutting is necessary so that prescribed fire can safely reduce fuel levels. Agencies can pay for some treatments by cutting and selling some of the bigger trees. But scientists disagree over exactly how much to thin and whether to ban cutting trees larger than, say, 12 inches in diameter. And some environmental critics oppose all thinning as just another form of logging.

Such fears have historical roots. Rep. Chenoweth-Hage has long pressed for more logging and has suggested that selling timber could pay for an otherwise costly thinning program. In 1994, congressional Republicans tacked the notorious "salvage" rider onto a spending bill, lifting environmental review from the "salvage logging" of dead, dying or damaged trees the following year. The rider infuriated environmental groups, who believed that some land managers used it to conduct destructive logging. Some environmentalists still suspect that fuel treatment programs are Trojan horses to slip more loggers into the national forests.

A leading skeptic is Sam Hitt, founder of the Santa Fe-based Forest Guardians. He has mailed appeals as far away as central Washington state's Wenatchee National Forest to block proposed timber thinning sales. He says rural homeowners should take responsibility to protect their own homes by cutting all vegetation within 100 feet to 150 feet, but he has resisted schemes for thinning the bulk of the forest, arguing that wildfires do it better.

"These forests are going to burn. There's no doubt about it," Hitt says. "We should let [wildfires] do their job. Let nature establish the intensity, the extent and the timing of these burns. They're all, in the long run, good for the system."

The Forest Service's Bunnell sees no relief in sight from opponents like Hitt. "Every special interest in the world has the ability to stall us, subvert us and maybe prevent the treatment," says Bunnell. "I don't hear any politician willing to take that on."

Opposition Cools

Despite the problems, western prescribed burning prospects appear stronger than they have in years. In Washington, D.C., The Wilderness Society is preparing a white paper on how best to conduct thinning and prescribed burning and Congress is preparing to fund more of both. In the northwest, Wenatchee National Forest managers are talking of conducting prescribed burns on 15,000 acres at a time, a scale unprecedented there. In California, federal agencies plan to prescribe-burn and thin 140,000 acres a year in the Sierra Nevada Range. And in the southwest, the debate appears to be shifting from whether to conduct thinning and prescribed burning to how to do it.

Martos Hoffman of the Southwest Forest Alliance, a coalition of environmental groups, says "a pretty strong case has been made that action is needed" to thin and prescribe-burn in forests near Flagstaff's homes. Even the Forest Guardians, in what their adversaries hope is a significant shift, have proposed a fuel treatment scheme for the Santa Fe watershed. City officials termed it "a milder version of what we've been planning" with the Forest Service-including thinning and prescribed burning.

Rob Taylor is writing a book about the Tyee Creek fire, a 1994 disaster that burned140,000 acres and cost $65 million in Washington.