Street Roots • Nov. 17-23, 2017
News
Page 5
FOREST FIRES, fro m page 4
contained Aug. 31.
As Michael Krochta, Bark’s Forest Watch
coordinator and biologist, pointed out when
he took Street Roots to survey the site, the
only area that burned was the area that had
been thinned.
While the area had not been thinned
specifically for fuels reduction, according to
the Forest Service, it met a number of the
criteria for a fuels reduction treatment.
As we walked up a steep slope and
around the perimeter of the fire, the ground
beneath our feet was burned down to the
mineral soil, black and soft. Logging slash
left behind to prevent erosion and provide
nutrients to the soil had acted as fuel.
Slash is the piles of twigs, needles and
premature trees that are left behind on the
ground after a logging project
Just two months after the fire’s
containment, vine maple and ferns were
already popping up at the base of trees, and
the sounds of woodpeckers and songbirds
could be heard overhead.
Wide spaces between the young,
homogenous trees that were not removed
during the thin let plenty of sunlight
through to bathe a slope covered with the
barren stumps of many older, larger trees.
“Unlogged forests that have lots of big
trees, wood on the ground and a closed
canopy - the humidity is a lot higher. All
these things factor into creating a forest
stand that’s more resilient to the effects of
forest fires,” Krochta said, as we trudged up
the hill.
Jackie Groce, a U.S. Forest Service
ranger in that district, also took interest in
the Jazz Fire site. She led a team of experts,
including soil scientists, foresters, wildlife
biologists, silviculturists and fuels planners,
on a field trip to take a closer look at what
had happened.
She said the reason the fire stopped
abruptly at the edges of the thinned area
was because that’s where firefighters had
contained it.
“We chose to construct a handline in a
particular area, and that’s what stopped the
fire; it wasn’t a change in vegetation,” she
said.
The fire had also been contained on two
sides from roads that served as fire breaks
and access points for firefighters.
Groce said her team came to the
conclusion that “the treatment was really
effective in keeping a crown fire from
happening,” meaning the fire stayed close to
the ground and not in the canopy, aside
from in a couple small areas. This was, in
part, because during the thinning project,
ladder fuel - fuel that would help the fire
move upward - had been removed. What
they did learn, she said, was that there were
opportunities to manage the slash left
behind differently. In the future, she said,
the Forest Service may find ways to move
the slash away from roads from which
firefighters are trying to contain the fire.
She said it’s about finding a balance
between too much slash, which can pose a
fire risk, and too little, which can allow for
erosion and poor soil quality.
,
“Our sense was that we really wouldn t do
much dramatically different,” she said about
her team of experts’ conclusion.
Both sides of the thinning debate
frequently point to one-off incidents, such as
what happened with the Jazz Fire, to show
B ark Com m unity Organizer Courtney Rae and B ark Forest Watch Coordinator Michael Krochta present a photo petition to U.S. Rep. K urt
Schrader’s (D-Ore.) office in Oregon City, urging him to oppose the Resilient Federal Forests Act. The next day, Schrader voted in favor o f the bill.
how thinning either is or is not effective.
“You have to be careful about anecdotal
information,” warned Dominick DellaSala, a
renowned fire ecologist and chief scientist at
the Geos Institute. “Wind speed can change,
humidity levels can change, and if you don t
account for all those factors, you could
conclude either way. Either the thinning
helped, or the thinning didn’t help,
depending on what was going on with the
fire climate.”
The Geos Institute, based in Ashland,
works with government agencies and
landowners in applying science to climate-
change planning and forest management.
DellaSala has published peer-reviewed
journal articles on fire ecology and climate
change and has been on the faculties of
Oregon State University and Southern
Oregon University.
He said he develops his conclusions based
on peer-reviewed science.
“The studies that have been done on this,
and there have been many of them, show
that if you do thinning in an appropriate way
and under certain conditions, you can lower
fire intensity.”
However, he continued, that comes with a
“long list of caveats.”
For one, you must have average fire
weather, without high winds, with lower
temperatures and without low humidity - all
factors that are exacerbated by climate
change, potentially making thinning less
effective.
“If you have average weather conditions,
if you’ve done thinning so that you don’t
take out too many of the big, fire resistant,
overstory of trees, and you don’t open up
the canopy too much, you can actually lower
fire intensity. And, you have to follow it with
prescribed fire,” he said. “And, you have to
keep going back, because the vegetation
keeps growing back. And so if you don t
continue to thin, because the vegetation is
“We now have the phenomenon of a
going to grow back rapidly when you open
up the canopy to more sunlight, you can
h u m a n -ca u se d fir e s e a s o n on to n o f a
c h a n g in g c lim a te ,” D e lla S a la sa id . “T h o s e
raise your fire hazards.”
He said that even if you put all the right
management techniques in place, when you
combine it with extreme fire weather, it
doesn’t make much of a difference.
“We’re headed into a new fire climate era,
and we cannot thin or log our way out of it,
DellaSala said.
Bell suggests policymakers and forest
managers are asking the wrong question:
They shouldn’t be asking how to stop fires,
which are good for the forest and difficult to
predict or manage. They should be asking
how to protect homes.
For one, DellaSala said, we should stop
building in what he calls firesheds.
“We don’t build on volcanoes, but we
build in floodplains and burn plains,” he
said;
He said Congress should spend its limited
fire budget to work with homeowners to do
defensible space management.
“The studies that are out there show that
when you thin the vegetation around a
radius of 50 to 64 feet, in that range, if you
thin around the home, you build with fire-
resistant materials, you make sure there are
no branches touching the roof, your gutters
are screened, your vents are screened, you
don’t have any firewood on your deck, you’ve
got about a 90 percent chance of that home
surviving a wildfire,” he said. Nothing you
do outside that circle of influence changes
the odds to that home.”
Why wildfires have increased
Politicians and loggers often blame
environmental laws for overgrown public
forests ripe for severe fires, but there are
many other contributing factors.
two variables are driving most of the change
that we’re seeing in wildfire activity today.”
In a peer-reviewed paper published one
year ago, scientists at Columbia University
and the University of Idaho found that since
the 1970s, human-caused climate change
has decreased moisture in forests across the
Western United States. They concluded that
climate change, in addition to fire
suppression, human settlement and natural
climate variability, was responsible for
increased fire activity in recent decades.
According to another paper, published
earlier this year, researchers at the
University of Colorado found that we’re now
living in an age where 84 percent of wildfires
are human caused. This includes fires ignited
by cigarette butts, campfires, fireworks,
target shooting and other human activities.
The human-caused fire season lasts two
months longer than the lightning-caused fire
season, DellaSala said.
In another study a decade ago, Peter
Morrison, a former Forest Service
employee, forest ecologist and founding
director of Pacific Biodiversity Institute,
determined 88 percent of wildfires were
human caused.
Of those human-caused fires, Morrison
found that 95 percent occurred within a half-
mile of a road.
“The most effective thing the Forest
Service could be doing (to prevent fires) is
to limit road construction and decommission
roads,” Bark’s Krochta said.
Ironically, at the site of the Jazz Fire in
Mt. Hood National Forest, the roads that
served as a fire break and allowed
firefighters to effectively battle the blaze
See FOREST FIRES, page 10