Governors to tackle wildfire issues

Wildfires blackened entire watersheds in the Bitterroot Valley. Day turned to night in Darby and Missoula, so thick was the smoke. Subdivisions outside the state capital were evacuated; homes burned to their foundations.

Congress responded with the National Fire Plan, a $1 billion effort to both improve the nation's wildland firefighting capability and reduce the danger of future fires.

Pretty soon, though, most everyone outside of Montana had forgotten the fires of 2000.

Then came the summer of 2002. This time, the calls for help came from Colorado, Oregon, Arizona and New Mexico. This time, millions of people in Denver and Phoenix looked up and saw ash falling from the sky.

"It was one thing when Missoula was choking back in 2000, but once smoke started pouring into Denver and Phoenix, that really got people's attention," said Todd O'Hair, natural resource policy adviser to Montana Gov. Judy Martz. "Overwhelmingly, people have said that what they saw last summer was unacceptable."

Which is why there will be standing room only this week when the Western Governors' Association comes to Missoula for a Forest Health Summit. Nearly 400 people have paid the $150 registration fee; dozens more hope to, if organizers can squeeze more seats into the meeting room.

"Now all these other states have smelled the smoke and felt the effects of these horrendous fires," Martz said in a telephone interview last week. "Everyone knows the problem. Now we've got to find some solutions that we can all agree upon. We all have to come to the table and give up something, because the forests have already given up more than anything."

As chairwoman of the Western Governors' Association, Martz made forest health and the growing wildfire danger her top priority. At this week's summit, she'll be joined by another governor - Arizona's newly elected Gov. Janet Napolitano - who shares that sense of urgency.

"Last summer was a horrible example of what can happen if we don't address the forest health issue," said Lori Faeth, Napolitano's policy adviser for natural resources. "Unfortunately, it provided an opportunity for Arizona to learn a lot of lessons the hard way. We were blessed in that we didn't lose a single life, and for that we are thankful. But now something needs to happen so we can protect our forests."

In one fire alone, Arizona lost 460,000 acres of timber, Faeth said. Now 800,000 acres are infested with bark beetles. Napolitano has asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide emergency assistance funds. FEMA's reply: "Call us when something's on fire."

"Our message is that the emergency is already here. We've already got a disaster," Faeth said. "The forest health crisis is every bit as disastrous as when a tornado rips through a Southern state. It's the same level of emergency. Lives are at risk."

A Democrat, Napolitano will begin work at this week's summit as the new co-lead governor on the wildfire and forest health issue. She'll join Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, a Republican, in that effort.

Both Idaho and Arizona have adopted statewide forest health and wildfire preparedness plans, and are at work assessing forests and designing projects. In Arizona, the problem isn't in gaining approval for forest-thinning projects, but in finding the money needed for implementation, Faeth said.

"We have at least 50,000 acres in the wildland-urban interface where we've got approval for fuel reduction, but no money allocated for implementation," she said. "It's very frustrating. It will cost a lot less to take these preventive measures than it would to pay for the aftermath of a fire or to lose a life."

Arizona, New Mexico and southern Colorado also have lost the infrastructure needed to implement fuel-reduction projects, O'Hair said. They have no sawmills, or too few to handle the expected volume of timber. Everything they cut must be shipped out of state.

On Wednesday, the governors will tour several successful forest management projects in western Montana - at Lubrecht Experimental Forest, the Big Larch Campground and in the upper Clearwater drainage. On Thursday, they'll turn to talk of specific problems and possible solutions.

Along the way, they'll get an earful from the timber industry, environmentalists, federal land managers, community leaders and wildland firefighters. For months, there have been rumors of possible civil disobedience by radical environmental groups. At the least, there'll be dueling press conferences and field trips.

On Monday night, the Sierra Club and the University of Montana's Bolle Center for People and Forests will sponsor a panel discussion on how best to protect communities from wildfire, featuring a scientist from the Forest Service's Fire Science Lab in Missoula; the mayor of Roslyn, Wash.; a fire marshal from Kittitas County, Wash.; and the director of a forest restoration project in Oregon.

"I certainly don't think there is a forest health crisis," said Mike Bader, an environmental consultant working for the Sierra Club on the wildfire issue. "Our concern is that people are using the threat of wildfire to justify logging the backcountry. There's this broad, one-size-fits-all approach that way overreaches the truth."

The Sierra Club's fear is that the Governors' Association summit will be used as a platform by the Bush administration to push a forest management agenda that goes too far, Bader said. "The administration's emphasis is on waiving environmental safeguards and ramping up what is really just logging - simple, old-fashioned logging."

On Tuesday, the Native Forest Network and Friends of the Bitterroot will sponsor a field trip for media in town for the governors' summit to the Bitterroot National Forest - for what they hope will be an antidote to the successful project summit-goers will see Wednesday on the Lolo National Forest.

"Our field trip will clearly show that logging on the Bitterroot is systematically targeting the largest, most commercially valuable trees, while leaving the smallest trees and logging slash scattered on the forest floor," said the Native Forest Network's Matthew Koehler. "They are actually increasing the fire risk."

Missoula's diversity of loggers, environmentalists, scientists and government agencies was actually the reason why Martz chose to host the forest health summit, O'Hair said. "Missoula has it all. This is where the debate is, so this is where we wanted to be."

"There is a level of rhetoric, though, that is too high," he added. "Our goal will be to lower the noise a few notches. You can talk it to death, you can throw stones at each other, but you'll still have a problem at the end of the day.

"We want to end the week with a few solutions. We want people to leave feeling like they've learned something or that they better understand where their adversaries are coming from. The discussion could get pretty spirited, but that's good if we all walk away educated."

The Sierra Club and the University of Montana's Bolle Center for People and Forests will host a panel discussion, "Close to Home: Protecting Communities from Wildfire," at 7:30 p.m. Monday at the Holiday Inn Parkside in Missoula. The program is free and open to the public.

Featured speakers include Jack Cohen, research physical scientist, Forest Service Fire Science Lab, Missoula; Ron Wakimoto, fire ecologist, UM; David Gerth, mayor, Roslyn, Wash.; Derald Gaidos, fire marshal, Kittitas County, Wash.; and Oshana Catranides, executive director, Lomakatsi Restoration Project, Ashland, Ore.

One can only hope. As long as they replace the trees...

Uh-oh. That doesn't sound too good. Why can't they clear out the other stuff and sell it to paper manufacturers?

Fire isn't the devil and does serve a purpose but the kinds of fires we are getting are no where near natural.

Oh, they're natural, all right. All-too-natural. My guess is that they're what occurred before man settled the area...

The concept of "management" in the National Parks is to let nature take its course. I kind of like that concept.

And what will you do when one of the resulting wildfires leaves a national park and burns part of a city?

What city? I've visited about a dozen national parks, and I don't recall any cities even close to them. I suppose West Yellowtone, Montana, is the closest I've seen.

The 1988 wildfires in Yellowstone burned about half the acreage. Interestingly, they started outside the park. The combination of drought and some 49 small fires started by lightening strikes that merged into major fires, made fighting them virtually impossible. The main heroic fire-fighting efforts were in the attempts to save the Old Faithful Inn, but it was a shift in wind that actually saved the structure. And then it was more the return of rain and an unusually early snowfall in September that finally put the fires out.

If not a city, then the danger always exists that some public place (such as the Old Faithful Inn) or somebody's home could ultimately be burned down by a "natural" fire that started in a forest in which environmental policies have allowed too much dead wood (firewood, for want of a more accurate word) to accumulate. My point is, the country is simply too settled to allow forests to go wild.

Years of suppresion have resulted in fuel levels that would never happen in nature, hence, not natural. Either we allow irregular "natural" fires to sweep over the land or we take it upon ourselves to reduce fuel by other means.

That is not a "friggin dolt" ... it is a crawfishin', Greenie-Weenie.

Punctuated evolution is real! Watch for lots of new species of enviro-socialists, 'cruddy 'crats, and other assorted intellectual abortions to be stalking the airwaves and pages of media. All will be spinnin the fires like a top.

Since it looks like America will have lots of fire wood in the future, I wonder if we will have enough heart pine to make 'fat lighter' kindling to start all the wood fires in all those BBQ's and wood stoves?

To avoid the tragedy of a national shortage of kindling, I hereby offer "A Modest Proposal":

To avoid the coming shortage of 'fat lighter' wood for kindling, it is suggested that we split fat 'crats as a substitute. An EPA exemption for the resulting air pollution may be necessary.

Logically, you make a good point. Consider that such a time was at least before the Quaternary Extinctions which occured some 11,000 years ago.

All of North America was fire managed by the indigenous peoples by that time. The horizon of anthropogenic fire and fire management imposition seems to receed as more research is done.

The Wilderness Act, the root cause of "wilderness management", "natural fire", ad nauseam, is a myth. The damage from such myth-management is probably going to "myth off' a lot of citizens this year. Perhaps enough will re-examine their faulty premises to make a difference. One must hope.

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