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Private Forests Escape Destructive Fires

Posted on: Sunday, 19 August 2007, 09:15 CDT

By Rocky Barker, The Idaho Statesman, Boise

At the peak of one of the worst fire seasons in history, the number of fires burning on private forests in Idaho is effectively zero.

As soon as they start, nearly all of the private forest fires are snuffed by the quick response of a cooperative fire system that began before the great fires of 1910. That doesn't surprise Steve Gurnsey, Idaho land manager for Western Pacific Timber.

The worst fire he's seen burned on the 180,000 acres of forestland he manages for billionaire Tim Blixseth burned only 100 acres in 2003.

It's a far cry from the 708,000 acres burning on national forest lands in Idaho.

It's proof to Gurnsey that the intensive forestry practices he uses work better than those used on adjoining national forest lands.

"By being managed, our lands are thinned, which reduces the fire ladder, which makes it easier to control fires," Gurnsey said. "We have a road system so we have very good access."

But the story isn't so simple, say state fire managers who fight fires across many land ownerships. The thinned and groomed private forestlands like those Gurnsey manages account for just 5 percent of the state's forests, far less than the 64 percent that are national forests.

They are often the most productive forest lands, which generate enough revenue from timber receipts to make intensive management pay.

More than half of the national forest in the state is either roadless or wilderness where access is difficult and the little timber the Forest Service sells costs the federal government more than it returns. Howard Weeks, chief fire warden for the Clearwater Potlatch Timber Protective Association, which is responsible for fire protection on 1 million acres of mixed ownership in northern Idaho, said most of these federal lands would not be suitable for intensive forest management.

"It would not be a good commercial investment to develop those lands," Weeks said.

Most of all, private lands get the highest priority for federal and state firefighting resources in part because they are near communities and forest homes, said Brian Shiplett, the Idaho Department of Lands fire management chief.

"I don't know how many times I've seen dispatchers strip away resources from a growing federal fire to divert them to a new state or private fire," Shiplett said.

But the key to firefighting success for the private forest lands is the quick response in the initial attack, Gurnsey said.

They have good access and 24-hour fire lookouts, a system the Forest Service abandoned for fire surveillance by airplanes. The fires don't explode in the thinned forests, and fire retardant dropped from aircraft falls through the crown of the thinned trees to the fires below.

"We get to our fires before they burn a tenth of an acre on average," Gurnsey said.

Federal forest managers point to their own record of success in initial attack -- putting out 98 percent of all fires soon after they start across a far larger landscape -- as evidence the issue is not so easy as turning back to its previous full suppression policy of the past. And they agree that a more extensive thinning program would reduce the size and scope of fires, especially across the ponderosa pine forests that stretch from Idaho and Montana south to Arizona.

But the rising costs of fire suppression have robbed money from national forest programs, including fuel reduction and pre-commercial thinning budgets. Today, 46 percent of the Forest Service's $4.1 billion budget goes to fire suppression, leaving less than 10 percent for thinning and forest restoration.

Forest scientists agree that full-suppression policies of the past contributed to the huge fuel loads in federal forests adjacent to the private lands. Gurnsey uses prescribed burning along with thinning to reduce the fuels that carry fires into the crowns.

The Forest Services does the same, but now it's also using wildfire for management. The fires are not hurting the forests ecologically and actually provide many of the benefits Gurnsey's management, such as reducing fuels, at a fraction of the cost.

Industrial landowners see the federal policy, which allows more burning as a threat to their own forest investment, said Serena Carlson, communications manager for the Intermountain Forest Association, an industry group. She compares them to a homeowner who makes his house safe from fire but lives next to another who doesn't.

"If your neighbor's house burns and takes you with it, what do you do?" Carlson said.

Gurnsey, a second-generation forester, has worked the same forest for 30 years, rising to manager under its previous owner, Boise Cascade, in 2001. He's proud of his work and of those foresters who worked before him to make the forest productive and healthy.

When the company's foresters first surveyed the timber in 1916 they found 10 merchantable trees per acre, Gurnsey said. In 1928 his father counted an average of 23 merchantable trees per acre.

Gurnsey counted 86 trees per acre when he cruised the same forest in 1983. On the adjacent Forest Service land 200 to 300 trees have grown up competing for water and nutrients and adding fuels that carry slow-burning ground fires into crown fires like ladders.

He agrees fire suppression added to the Forest Service's problems. But he and most industrial foresters believe more active management, not less, is the answer.

Environmentalists like the Idaho Conservation League's Jonathan Oppenheimer don't disagree about need for more thinning and even logging in the appropriate places. But they worry that the timber industry is pushing logging projects in areas where they will threaten water quality, wildlife and other natural values in the name of forest health.

"A clearcut does not fireproof a forest," Oppenheimer said.

Gurnsey no longer uses clearcuts on the Western Pacific Timber lands as Boise Cascade did. He says there is another serious environmental reason for cutting down more trees. Mechanical thinning doesn't fill the air with smoke and carbon, he said.

He gets scientific support from a 2006 paper by a team of scientists led by Anthony Westerling, a forest engineer at University of California-Merced.

The increased levels of carbon and other greenhouse gases are contributing to global warming and the climate changes that are increasing the size and intensity of Western fires, the scientists wrote. American forests account for 20 to 40 percent of all carbon sequestered or captured in the nation.

But the growing fires could reverse the effect and turn the forests overall into carbon sources, not sinks, Westerling's team wrote.

"How much carbon are we putting in the atmosphere right now that could be locked up in homes and timber products?" Gurnsey said.

Rocky Barker: 377-6484For more than a decade, federal fire mangers have changed firefighting policy more dramatically than at any time since the great fires of 1910.

Ninety-seven years ago Monday, 2.6 million acres of Idaho and Montana burned over two days. Today, the goal of the federal government is to return fire to the forest ecosystem to reduce the amount of fuels that build up and contribute to huge fires.

Meanwhile, Idaho's private forests have been relatively free of fire, and managers have kept them healthy for timber production through intensive thinning.

With climate change threatening to transform our forests even more dramatically,both management schemes provide lessons as our population increases and fire behavior moves off the charts.If you are near any fires in Idaho or Montana Monday, pay attention to the weather.

High winds and dry lightning are forecast for today and Monday across the region and are expected to grow many of the fires burning more than a million acres across the Northern Rockies. But history adds its own cautionary tale to August 20, especially in tough fire seasons.

Two of the worst days of forest fires in the modern West came on Aug. 20. Federal experts say history could repeat itself this year. 19 years ago, 80 mph winds whipped fires in Yellowstone National Park into a frenzy burning 165,000 acres in one day, a day known since as Black Saturday.

The worst day of forest fires in the 20th Century came 97 years ago, when similar winds in North Idaho caused The Big Blowup that burned 2.6 million acres in two days and killed 79 firefighters. This summer firefighters have seen extreme fire behavior similar to those two classic seasons.

(Source: Scorched Earth: How the Fires of Yellowstone Changed America)

Source: The Idaho Statesman, Boise

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