Wallowa County chieftain. (Enterprise, Wallowa County, Or.) 1943-current, January 22, 2020, Image 16

Wallowa County chieftain., January 22, 2020, Page 16, Image 16

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Newspaper Page TextA16 Wallowa County Chieftain NEWS Wednesday, January 22, 2020 Local ﬁ re management ofﬁ cer back in Joseph Nathan Goodrich returns from ﬁ ghting ﬁ res in Australia By Ellen Morris Bishop Wallowa County Chieftain After a month of bat- tling Australia’s devastating bush ﬁ res, Nathan Goodrich is back home in Wallowa County. The Wallowa Whitman National Forest Wallowa Zone ﬁ re manager was one of 21 USFS ﬁ re experts who helped Austra- lia try to quench its seething landscape. His work was part of an agreement among the U.S., Mexico, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to help one-another control large forest blazes. Goodrich, the ﬁ re management ofﬁ cer for the Wallowa Valley Ranger District, is based in Joseph. Goodrich and the USFS team were dispatched to New South Wales, an Aus- tralian state that is bigger than Texas, but with a hilly and sometimes cliff-rid- den landscape typical of Tennessee and the Appa- lachians. “It’s rolling hills that are heavily forested. The trees are mostly decid- uous, and most of them are eucalyptus,” he said. In Australia, Goodrich served as an operation sec- tion chief, a job similar to his work with the For- est Service. That included dispatching crews and resources as well as conduc- tion suppression operations. Along with a persistent drought and a past ﬁ re-sup- pression policy similar to ours, the trees themselves contribute to the intensity of the ﬁ res, Goodrich said. Eucalyptus trees contain a lot of oil in their wood and even in their leaves. That makes their crowns burn easily. Their bark is thin and almost paper-like. When a groundﬁ re sets it ablaze, ﬂ ames can easily climb up the trunk and into the tree. The highly flammable crowns also send off a Goodrich lot of burn- ing debris, causing spot ﬁ res. “This sort of ﬂ ammabil- ity makes for a very short natural ﬁ re-return interval, and also makes the ﬁ res more difﬁ cult to control,” Goodrich said. “It’s more like the return interval for our grasslands (about 10 years here.)” Fire suppression has pro- duced a much more ﬂ am- mable landscape in Austra- lia, just as it has in the U.S. “The aboriginal peo- ple here managed their landscape in a way not unlike Native Americans,” Goodrich said. “When they left a place, or when the time was right, they would set a ﬁ re. Those ﬁ res burned mostly with low intensity. Now, after a century of sup- pressing ﬁ re, a lot of Aus- tralia has a fuels-surplus problem.” The number and avail- ability of ﬁ reﬁ ghters poses another problem for con- trolling Australia’s bush ﬁ res. The Aussie ﬁ reﬁ ght- ing system relies mostly on volunteers, Goodrich said. In New South Wales, about 70,000 volunteers are signed up and available to ﬁ ght ﬁ res, but fewer than 2,500 are actually work- ing. You need a large pool of volunteers to draw from. The volunteers have jobs and other commitments. Paid ﬁ reﬁ ghters in the Rural Fire Service number about 1,000. There are addi- tional pros in other agencies that include Fire and Res- cue, Forestry, and the Park Service, which is similar to our USFS. Right now in New South Wales, there are 130 large ﬁ res burning, and perhaps 40 teams of about 10 to 20 volunteer and/or profes- Nathan Goodrich Active ﬁ re behavior along Patty Road in early January. sional ﬁ reﬁ ghters available. “It’s a system that was born of the ﬁ re-brigade days,” he said. “It would be like Troy having a ﬁ re bri- gade, and Flora having one and there being one in each of all the little communi- ties,” Goodrich said. After the large ﬁ res of 1994, the Aussies formal- ized the Rural Fire Service for better oversight of the rural brigades. “That means that each team has to ﬁ ght multi- ple blazes,” Goodrich said. “They have to make choices and prioritize which ones to control, to keep away from structures or ignite back- burns, and which ones to just let go until more resources are available.” Those necessary choices, he noted, may mean that the neglected ﬁ res can grow very large. Some of the Australian ﬁ res are huge — in excess of a million acres. On days when the wind comes up, or temperatures are very high, there is a ban on burning of all kinds, including back-burning and even burning in your back yard. “Fires move fast with the wind. There’s no good way to control them,” he said. “You just wait. You are on standby and ready to react to ﬁ res that might impact structures.” Some of the present Aussie ﬁ res have scorched more than a million acres. “In the U.S.,” Goodrich said, “we have a nation- wide total of maybe 50 or 60 ﬁ res underway at a time, not the 130 large ﬁ res that are burning now just in New South Wales. There’s a team on every ﬁ re in the U.S. In our big ﬁ res — which are now considered to be 100,000 acres or more — we have 500 to 700 and sometimes more people ﬁ ghting them. The Austra- lians are managing more ﬁ res with less people than we would ever do.” Fortunately, much of New South Wales’ interior is not densely populated. “The houses are distrib- uted a little like the land- scape coming down from Ruby Peak to Alder Slope,” Goodrich said. “There’s forest. And then there are homes and small commu- nities. Not many homes in the area are built in the urban-wildland interface.” That helps mini- mize loss of human life and property. Nor did Goodrich witness many animals deceased or in grave trouble. “The wildlife all seem to have ﬂ ed the forest,” he said. “With the drought, there’s little food or water there, and so animals have generally moved to farm- land and open areas where they have more resources.” But things are different closer to the New South Wales’ more-densely pop- ulated coast. “That’s where there are more koalas that move slowly and might try to take refuge from the ﬁ res in the treetops,” he said. “It’s also where people have built homes in for- ests. There ‘s much more of an urban-wildland inter- face problem there.” Overall, Goodrich found that the Aussies he worked with managed to keep a positive and often cheerful attitude about things, even when their landscape is in ﬂ ames. He admires Aus- tralia’s national ﬁ re plan, which he feels has saved lives and provides an orderly and practiced way for people who live in ﬁ re- prone areas to respond to the threats of ﬁ res. “The national system was developed after the 2009 Black Saturday Fire,” he said. “More than 100 people died because they waited too long in their attempts to escape the ﬁ re and then the roads were clogged, and they could not evade the ﬂ ames.” Do dogs innately understand some human gestures? By Anindita Bhadra Indian Institute of Science Education If you have a dog, hope- fully you’re lucky enough to know that they are highly attuned to their owners and can readily understand a wide range of commands and gestures. But are these abilities innate or are they learned through training? To ﬁ nd out, a new study in Frontiers in Psychol- ogy investigated whether untrained stray dogs could understand human pointing gestures. The study revealed that about 80% of participating dogs successfully followed pointing gestures to a spe- ciﬁ c location despite having never received prior train- ing. The results suggest that dogs can understand com- plex gestures by simply watching humans and this could have implications in reducing conﬂ ict between stray dogs and humans. Humans have bred dogs with the most desirable and useful traits so that they could function as compan- ions and workers. Trained dogs are highly receptive to commands and gestures. However, it was not clear whether dogs understand us through training alone or whether this was innate. Can dogs interpret a gesture without speciﬁ c training or even without having met the signaling person previ- ously? One way to ﬁ nd out is to see whether untrained, stray dogs can interpret and react to human gestures. Conﬂ icts between stray dogs and humans are a prob- lem and understanding how humans shape stray dog behavior may help alleviate this. 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