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did little severe burn damage
Tuesday, September 3, 2002
PORTLAND -- For the amount of attention it received, this summer's Biscuit fire did relatively little damage to the land across which it raced.
"There is a lot of unburned area, and there's a lot that burned at a very low intensity," said Greg Clevenger, resource staff officer for the Rogue River and Siskiyou national forests, where the Biscuit fire touched about 500,000 acres.
Satellite images of the still-burning fire have revealed roughly 200,000 unburned acres within the fire's boundary. The fire, among the largest in modern Oregon history, severely burned less than 20 percent of the total acres, said researcher Annette Parsons.
Moreover, the fire appears to have burned many acres mildly enough to sweep out overgrowth left by decades of fire suppression without turning forests into ruins.
In that way, the fires resemble natural blazes that long ago cleared Western forests and may clear the same tinder now targeted by President Bush for thinning.
"It's not to diminish that large fires are going to happen, but to temper it with the idea that these things are also accomplishing a lot of good that may turn out to help us," said Bruce McCammon, a hydrologist who oversees fire rehabilitation for the U.S. Forest Service in Oregon and Washington.
The varied blend of blackened, singed and unburned lands could also lead to debate as foresters decide whether to log singed trees that conservation groups say might survive and serve wildlife.
Officials at the Fremont and Winema national forests in southern Oregon may salvage as much as 160 million board feet of wood or as little as one-eighth of that, depending on how much burned acreage they target.
The final number, said Steve Egeline, resource staff officer for the two forests, will depend on several factors: How severely the timber was burned, how accessible it is, the likelihood of insect infestation in surviving trees and the environmental effects of extracting the trees.
The satellite images reveal what fire scientists and foresters have known for decades -- that fires typically burn in a patchwork pattern.
Even when a fire is roaring, it may suck up so much oxygen it suffocates itself and cannot burn every patch of ground, said David "Sam" Sandberg, the Corvallis-based head of a Forest Service team that studies fire dynamics.
"If you look at a big fire more closely, it's really a whole lot of smaller little fires doing their own thing," he said. "Often most of the land is hardly touched at all."
In all but one Northwest blaze surveyed this summer, more than half the acres were burned lightly or not at all. Taken together, an average of 69 percent of the acreage was burned lightly or not at all, with 19 percent burning moderately and 12 percent burning severely.
The severity rankings reflect damage to soil and the plants that hold it in place. Rehabilitation such as seeding to control erosion usually targets severe burns, where soil was cooked so deeply little vegetation survives.
Where fires burn lightly, though, flames gobble dry grasses and leave roots ready to spring back to life and trees untouched. In the Fremont and Winema forests, site of the Toolbox, Winter and Grizzly fires in July, charred willows and other plants are already resprouting.