Eugene weekly., August 28, 2003, Page 12, Image 12

large fires that have become a fixture on the federal forest-
lands of Oregon and throughout the West.
Today Gardner is pointing at a map labeled “Clark
Incident Wild Fire Suppression Analysis.” The map is the
focal point of the entire operation, a detailed diary of the
fire’s advance across the rugged ravines and ridges of the
Fall Creek watershed, and the Incident Management
Team’s deployments to halt its spread. The map shows
good news. According to the Wild Fire Suppression
Analysis the fire’s has been stopped in its tracks.
“This is a computer driven program,” deadpans
Gardner, “so you know it’s right.”
The Asbestos District
Wildfire in the Fall Creek watershed seems as incon-
gruous as a baseball game at the bottom of the ocean. The
“asbestos district” as Forest Service rangers jokingly call
it, is a temperate rainforest of dew-drenched ferns, moss
draped logs, and cathedral-like Douglas fir, western hem-
lock and red cedar trees. Hundreds of thousands of visitors
come to Fall Creek during the hot summer months, drawn
to the emerald green swimming holes, abundant campsites
and hiking trails just 45 minutes east of Eugene-
Springfield.
Last month, record high temperatures and low humidi-
ty turned the normally lush forest into a tinderbox. On the
afternoon of July 13, someone just downstream of the
Clark Creek Campground ignited brush and grass and
touched off a blaze that quickly became a crown fire, an
inferno that climbed into the dense upper canopy of Fall
Creek’s old-growth forest and leapt from tree to tree,
incinerating the popular Johnny Creek Nature Trail and
Bedrock Campground, forcing campers to flee, leaving
behind tents, clothes, coolers and even their pets.
On July 14, the Northwest Oregon Interagency Incident
Management Team had taken over command of the fire,
which had swelled to more than 900 acres. Flames almost
300 feet tall jumped Fall Creek and began marching north
and east into a steep bowl formed by Slick, Bedrock and
Jones Creeks. Fall Creek canyon, normally shrouded in
thick early morning mist, was now almost totally obscured
by a thick cloud of smoke. Gardner’s team relied on
infrared-equipped aircraft to fix the fire’s location and line
of advance, and began mapping out a containment strate-
gy based on topography and wind direction. They picked
the ridgeline to the northeast of the bowl as the place for
firefighters to make their stand.
FIRE SEASON
A T T A C K O N F I R E S B E C O M E S A N A S S A U LT O N T H E F O R E S T I T S E L F.
STORY & PHOTOS BY JAMES JOHNSTON
EDITOR’S NOTE: Outdoor writer and environmental activist James Johnson is chairman of the Many Rivers
Group of the Sierra Club Oregon Chapter, representing 3,000 members in Lane, Douglas and Coos counties.
Base Camp
It’s July 25, and the Clark Fire has been raging in Fall
Creek for 12 days, transforming the nearby town of
Lowell into base camp for a massive military-style cam-
paign. The outfield of the high school baseball field is a
tent city housing a thousand fire fighters. Semi trailers and
prefabricated shelters house laundry facilities, showers, a
first aid clinic and a cafeteria. Tons of supplies — every-
thing from crates of Gatorade to piles of Nomex shirts —
crowd the sidewalks and parking lot.
Inside, classrooms have been transformed into high-
tech nerve centers that resemble Pentagon war rooms. A
math classroom labeled “Communications” houses a bank
of radios that crackle with staccato reports from “forward
observers,” “overhead support,” medics, and “division
commanders.” Another classroom has been transformed
12 AUGUST 28, 2003
into the “Operations Center,” where serious looking men
and women in uniform are hunched over laptop comput-
ers, the walls covered by charts and maps with names like
“Analysis of Tactical Applications” and “Operational
Planning Worksheet.” Other classrooms labeled
“Logistics,” “Security” “Public Information,” and
“Finance” are jammed with more computers, phones, fax
machines, photocopiers and administrative staff.
Putting out forest fires in this day and age, says Dale
Gardner, in typically understated fashion, “can be a pretty
complicated process.”
If the Clark Fire is a military campaign, Gardner is its
general. A short unassuming man, this is Gardner’s 41st
season fighting fires, and his eighth as the incident com-
mander of the Northwest Oregon Interagency Incident
Management Team, one of 51 teams of fire behavior spe-
cialists and planners responsible for extinguishing the
Forest Fighting
Timothy Ingalsbee is the director of the Eugene-based
Western Fire Ecology Center, and an outspoken critic of
many fire suppression tactics.
“It’s a misnomer that they’re fighting fires, in fact
they’re fighting the forest,” says the former Forest Service
wildland firefighter. “They use all the tools and ideology
of warfare and they assault a forest ecosystem.”
On the ridgeline overlooking the Clark Fire, crews fell
trees and clear vegetation with bulldozers and by hand
along roads and ridgelines. On July 16th, the fire made
quick runs up the steep canyon of Jones Creek on the crit-
ical eastern side of the fire, forcing crews to evacuate. But
heavy-lift helicopters armed with buckets large enough to
hold an SUV kept the flames in check until weather con-
ditions allowed firefighters to complete the line.
When these lines are completed, crews battling big
blazes in the backcountry fight fire with fire. They use a
variety of incendiary devices — everything from hand-
held drip torches to giant flamethrowers mounted on the
underside of helicopters — to torch thousands of acres of
forest in the path of a fire. If the direction of the wind
holds, the fire dies for lack of fuel. Firefighters themselves
torched as much as half of the 5,000 acres of forest burned
in the Clark Fire.
“The public thinks that the Forest Service is fighting
fires,” says Ingalsbee, “but they’re actually starting fires.
It’s a search and destroy mission, logging hundreds of
acres to create a line, then burning thousands more. What
we’re going to find out in the next couple of years is the
collateral damage that’s been done to Fall Creek.”
“Wildfire,” he adds, “not logging and aggressive fire