Flame War Erupts Over Fire’s Severity

By Dave Orrick, Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn.

May 19–Jim Sanders hears it all the time: If you feds had opened the Boundary Waters to logging after the 1999 “blowdown,” we wouldn’t have all these fire problems.

As forest supervisor for the Superior National Forest, he’s gotten it a lot the last few weeks as frustration and second-guessing have rekindled tensions, and canoe country bulletin boards have stoked the theory.

As Sanders did on a recent afternoon near the frontlines of the destructive Ham Like fire still burning along the U.S.-Canadian border, he calmly reaches into a file folder tucked under his arm and pulls out a computer flash drive with a forest full of data to rebut the notion.

Maps drawn from that data — as well as maps and aerial photos from immediately after the July 1999 windstorm and firsthand accounts by fire personnel on the scene — show the following: In general, the Ham Lake fire didn’t spread along wood from mature trees felled in the blowdown.

In fact, most of the terrain scorched by the Ham Lake fire — inside and outside the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness — had already been burned, logged or otherwise cleared since the blowdown.

What caused this fire to spread so fast earlier this month wasn’t so much timber stacked like massive matchsticks, but stiff winds carrying napkin-sized embers to dry duff, the loamy carpet of needles, moss and other forest detritus that had been parched by one of the worst droughts in recent memory.

“Everything was dried and cured, so the fire just ripped through fast and hot,” says Doug Miedtke, a fire behavior expert with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.

True, fire experts acknowledge, if the entire landscape had been clear-cut and planted with, say, green grass, there would be no forest and, thus, no forest fire. But that extreme response aside, the only fire prevention that could have dampened the fire was rain.

“Could we have done more?” Sanders says. “There was nothing left to do in terms of treatment to keep the fire from burning.”

On July 4, 1999, a freakish weather phenomenon known as a derecho spawned 90 mph horizontal winds that snapped mature trees and mowed down patches of forest within a swath 30 miles long and 4 to 12 miles wide. Most of the woods along the upper reaches of the Gunflint Trail were affected.

Everyone knew the tangle of almost-downed wood — because so many campfire-sized limbs remained suspended, unable to rot — created a threat of massive forest fires.

“It’s not a matter of if, but when, a large significant wildland fire will become a threat to the Gunflint Corridor,” a task force assembled to assess the threat in the blowdown aftermath wrote in February 2000. The Gunflint corridor refers to land in the Superior National Forest but not in the more strictly regulated BWCA Wilderness. The corridor lies along the 60-mile Gunflint Trail that is home to resorts, lodges and outfitters, the lifeblood of the tourist economy near Grand Marais.

Thus began a campaign to clear the blowdown fuel that included property owners removing the timber themselves, commercial logging outside the BWCA Wilderness and intentional fires set both inside and outside the wilderness.

From 2001 to last summer, at least a dozen fires — some controlled burns, some wildfires — burned much of the area north and west of Ham Lake. Some 20,000 acres were burned intentionally.

Some, including then-U.S. Senate candidate Norm Coleman, pushed for logging inside the wilderness, but the specter of logging roads being cleared and trucks roaring along the shores of lakes that haven’t seen so much as a trolling motor in decades was too much to ask for, recalls Jack Hedstrom, co-owner of Hedstrom Lumber Co. on the Gunflint Trail.

“Logging in the wilderness is a moot point,” he says. “It would take more than an act of Congress (changing the Wilderness Act of 1964), it would take an act of God. I don’t think Congress has enough power.”

Still, resentment of government regulations remains.

Plenty of blowdown wood remained jumbled inside the wilderness, especially along the west shore of Sea Gull Lake. The debris caught fire last July near Cavity Lake, and twigs and forearm-size branches helped spread that wildfire, despite the season, when green undergrowth normally inhibits fire growth. Miedtke witnessed it from a plane.

“We saw what could happen,” he recalls of the first major blowdown-fueled fire, which scorched some 30,000 acres. “It burned hot. We flew over and it looked like a big throbbing charcoal pit down there. I had never seen anything like that.”

But that fire lost momentum when it reached areas previously burned. It never left the BWCA Wilderness, and businesses and cabin owners along the Gunflint were spared.

“The prescribed burns saved the day because there was a lot of green in that stuff,” Miedtke says. “Even raspberry bushes can slow a fire.”

That doesn’t work when fire hits before green-up, after a winter with little snowfall, following a year of extreme drought, and with whipping, 30 to 45 mph winds.

That was the situation this month, when, authorities suspect, a human-started fire near a campsite on Ham Lake got out of control on May 5, eventually scorching 76,000 acres and destroying nearly 140 structures.

“This is a different type of fire,” Sanders says of the Ham Lake blaze, noting the weather was the driving factor. “The key is this is May and we’re in the 80s” for high temperatures.

According to Sanders, Miedtke and reports from the Minnesota Interagency Fire Center, updrafts from the fire lofted flaming pinecones, twigs and birch bark above the forest canopy, where winds carried them far ahead of the fire, up to three-quarters of a mile. That might have been the end of the airborne embers in a normal year, but this year they landed on dry duff. Quite literally, the stuff is what you’d want in a tinderbox: crispy leaves, needles and grasses anchored by dry moss.

That allowed the forest floor to preheat, making saplings, diseased coniferous trees and even mature aspens ready to catch fire when the larger flames arrived. Normally, the fire’s advance would be tripped up by the area’s numerous alder swamps, but they were dry as well. By the time the big flames arrived, entire crowns of trees were ready to burst into flames.

In some areas — accurate percentages have not become available — downed timber from the 1999 blowdown was available, but maps show such areas were isolated.

In such conditions, the fire had little problem burning through areas that had burned only a few years before.

“That area just likes to burn,” Miedtke notes.

John Brewer contributed to this report.

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