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The BulleTin • Sunday, March 13, 2022 A5 COLORADO CHANGING SNOWFALL MAKES IT HARDER TO FIGHT FIRE WITH FIRE BY BRITTANY PETERSON AND MATTHEW BROWN associated Press DECKERS, Colo. — Drip- ping flaming fuel as they go, a line of workers slowly descends a steep, snow-covered hillside above central Colorado’s South Platte River, torching piles of woody debris that erupt into flames shooting two stories high. It’s winter in the Rocky Mountains, and fresh snow cover allowed the crew of 11 to safely confine the controlled burn. Such operations are a central piece of the Biden administra- tion’s $50 billion plan to reduce the density of western forests that have been exploding into firestorms as climate change bakes the region. But the same warming trends that worsen wildfires will also challenge the admin- istration’s attempts to guard against them. Increasingly erratic weather means snow is not always there when needed to safely burn off tall debris piles like those on Colorado’s Pike-San Isa- bel National Forest. And that seriously complicates the job of exhausted firefighters, now forced into service year-round. Their goal is to cut and burn enough vegetation that the next fires won’t be as cat- astrophic as ones that leveled vast forestland and neighbor- hoods in Colorado, California, Oregon, Montana and else- where. Western wildfires have be- come more volatile as climate change dries forests already thick with vegetation from years of intensive fire suppres- sion. And the window for con- trolled burns is shrinking. “It’s been a little bit harder just because of shorter win- david Zalubowski/aP Mile High Youth Corps member John Knudsen set fire to a pile of tree debris alongside U.S. Forest Service firefighters near the Bridge Crossing picnic grounds Feb. 23 in Hatch Gulch, near Deckers, Colorado. ters,” said David Needham, a U.S. Forest Service ranger who led the Colorado burn opera- tion in late February when the thermometer hovered around zero degrees Fahrenheit. Sur- rounding hillsides showed bar- ren scars from past wildfires, including a 2002 blaze that de- stroyed 133 homes and at the time was the largest in state history. “On days like this, we capi- talize on temperature being in the negatives,” Needham said, “Even small snow storms com- ing in definitely helps us with that.” Across the Rockies, piles of slash and trees cleared to re- duce fire hazards span some 100,000 acres, waiting to be burned once the right amount of snow is on the ground. Sometimes there’s too much, making the piles inaccessible. Other times there’s not enough snow and prescribed burns get canceled so they don’t get out of hand like a previous one that led to fatalities. An overnight snow in cen- tral Colorado meant the crew from the forest service and Mile High Youth Corps could burn debris from twice the area they planned. Yet officials said climate change is making it more difficult to find that sweet spot for safe burning. ‘Completely different ball game’ Spring is arriving earlier and snow-covered ground is dis- appearing two weeks sooner, according to Rutgers Univer- sity researcher and New Jersey state Climatologist David Rob- inson, who has examined more than 50 years of snow cover data collected through satellite imagery. “One thing we know about climate change is it is increas- ing the variability and the ex- tremes we are experiencing,” said Robinson. “Out West, once the season shifts, you get very dry, very quickly and it stays dry for months. So you have a real tight window there.” 2020 was the worst wildfire season on record in Colorado, where summers and falls also have been warmer and drier, said Assistant State Climatolo- gist Becky Bolinger. It’s “a com- pletely different ball game in terms of wildfires,” she said. For parts of the Rockies, this winter brought too much snow, forcing officials to de- lay burns. Meanwhile, parts of Wyoming haven’t received enough snow to moisten the ground and allow fuel piles to be torched. Even when there is snow, that doesn’t mean it will last until the debris stops smoldering, said Brian Keating with the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain region. When pile burns turn into wildfires, Keating said it’s usu- ally because snow around when the burn started disap- pears. The next wind storm can kick up embers and ignite landscape that days earlier seemed fireproof. Putting off pile burning car- ries consequences, too. Until the piles are gone, forest man- agers won’t begin another kind of controlled fire called broad- cast burning, which consumes vegetation within stands previ- ously thinned with chainsaws and other equipment. “If we don’t burn the piles, ... that can get kicked down the road another year or two,” said Keating. “And every year, we keep building this backlog of piles because we can’t get to them all.” Another problem is smoke: Burns can be delayed if the smoke will exacerbate poor air quality. Despite such hurdles, burns are crucial to the Biden ad- ministration’s 10-year plan to reduce wildfire hazards across almost 80,000 square miles of public, private and tribal lands. The recently passed infrastruc- ture bill includes $500 million for controlled burns over five years. Prescribed burns and log- ging were used to reduce wild- fire hazards last year on about 4,050 square miles of forest — the most in a decade. By ramp- ing that up, officials hope to get ahead of the problem and use less logging in future years, said Frankie Romero, who oversees the forest service’s pre- scribed burn program. “Once we get into a main- “One thing we know about climate change is it is increasing the variability and the extremes we are experiencing. Out West, once the season shifts, you get very dry, very quickly and it stays dry for months. So you have a real tight window there.” — David Robinson, Rutgers University researcher and New Jersey state climatologist tenance cycle and we can con- tinue to treat that same area while it’s in its preferred condi- tion with a lot less fuel, then it becomes a lot easier,” Romero said. ”We’re going to experi- ence wildfires in the future ... and they’re going to cause problems. The difficult part is trying to remember what those problems would have looked like had we not intervened ear- lier.” Environmental advocates warn that the scale of work be- ing proposed could allow ex- cessive logging that will harm forests and do little to prevent catastrophic fires. But Oregon State University forestry professor John Bailey said the choice is between un- checked wildfires raging across the landscape and aggressive steps to at least partially coun- teract the forces of climate change. “Not to embrace this chal- lenge is choosing a future with a lot of wildfire in it and almost no control over where they start and where they spread and how much smoke is in the air and for how long,” Bailey said.
