By Hal Bernton Monday, July 23, 2001
Seattle Times staff reporter

The deaths of four Washington firefighters in the Thirty Mile blaze have triggered new political scrutiny of a U.S. Forest Service campaign to ease the threat of runaway blazes across the West.

A Colorado congressman has cited the tragedy as a painful reminder of the perilous state of the West's dense, dry forests.

The day after the deaths, Republican Scott McInnis announced a congressional hearing to review the pace of a Forest Service campaign to thin federal forests through controlled burns, chain-saw logging and other tactics.

"We know that doing nothing is only a recipe for more forest fires, more communities at risk and more lives lost," said McInnis, who chairs a House committee on forest health. "In my mind, that's no option at all."

But even with an aggressive program to thin the trees, federal land managers don't expect to reach all the areas at risk of blow-up, or escape all the tough choices in facing such fires.

A case in point is the Thirty Mile Fire. Ignited July 10 by a carelessly tended campfire, it flared in a narrow, steep-walled canyon of the Okanogan National Forest that had never been a high priority for thinning and was not likely to jump to the top of the list anytime soon.

At least 15 miles distant from the nearest structure, the canyon was designated as a natural area, where chain-saw logging would be discouraged.

And it was a difficult area in which to launch controlled burns: often too wet to carry flame during the cool weather, when defensive burns can be safely carried out, and too risky to burn in the hot summer weather, when the wood dried out.

"It is impossible to treat every acre," said Lyle Laverty, the Forest Service coordinator for the National Fire Plan. "There's some places it just doesn't make good sense to go."

Laverty is scheduled to testify at the July 31 hearing of the House forestry subcommittee. He heads a $1.6 billion National Fire Plan that was pieced together by the Clinton administration and Congress in response to the fierce blazes that swept through Montana and other intermountain states last summer.

The plan calls for beefing up forces to combat wildfires and a stepped-up effort to thin forests. The General Accounting Office has cited roughly 40 million acres at risk of catastrophic fire.

The Fire Plan called for reducing the fuel loads on 1.8 million acres of federal lands in the 12 months ending Sept. 30.

The priority is on areas close to homes and communities, where runaway blazes would pose the greatest risk to lives and property.

McInnis is concerned the Forest Service is not moving quickly enough to reach those targets.

"The signals that we're getting from the fields are mixed," said Josh Penry, a House aide on the forestry subcommittee. "So the congressman wanted to hold the hearing to see to what degree we are or are not implementing the policy."

Forest Service officials said the logging program has been slowed by environmental reviews, with the thinning of Montana burn zones not expected to get under way until the end of the year. Conservationists have opposed some of the logging, saying that it will do further damage to soils and streams.

So far, most of the preventative ground action has been controlled burns, which Laverty said account for roughly 80 to 90 percent of the 895,000 acres treated since last October.

In the Okanogan, as in other forests of the West, the controlled-burn programs largely target lowland stands of ponderosa pine and Douglas fir near homes and cabins.

These thick-barked trees are adapted to survive frequent, relatively low-intensity fires that naturally would occur every five to 30 years.

Due to decades of fire-suppression efforts, many of these forests have been clogged with underbrush and small trees that could fuel high-intensity fires.

So in the cooler spring and fall months, Forest Service officials torch these lands to clear out the understory.

When wildfires hit these thinned areas, Forest Service officials hope the flames will drop to the ground and creep through in a low-intensity burn that poses less danger to firefighters and property. That doesn't always happen, but Laverty and other agency officials cite examples from recent wildfires where flames did lie down as they reached the thinned zones.

"You're not going to stop or prevent fire with prescribed burns — but you are hoping to slow the spread," said Dee Townsend, an assistant fire manager who oversees controlled burns on the Methow District of the Okanogan National Forest.

The forest, which encompasses the site of the Thirty Mile Fire, has been on the forefront of the controlled-burn movement.

The forest spreads across about 1.5 million acres of north-central Washington, and controlled burns have been under way for more than a decade.

These burn efforts include at least 5,000 acres in the lower-elevation areas of the Chewuch drainage, according to Townsend.

(Although the stream is known by other names including Chewack River, the one used in some earlier news reports, the U.S. Geological Survey shows the preferred name is the Chewuch River.)

But controlled burns are too difficult farther up the drainage, where the valley narrows to the steep-walled canyon.

The Thirty Mile Fire began at an elevation of 3,475 feet, where the ponderosa pine cedes to a complex mosaic of lodgepole pine, subalpine fir, hardwoods and other species.

Some of these stands, including the one where the Thirty Mile Fire started, burn naturally in relatively long fire cycles that range from 80 to more than 100 years, according to a fire ecology map compiled by the Pacific Biodiversity Institute based in Winthrop.

Most years, they harbor a snowpack deep into spring, so they're too wet to carry the flame of a prescribed burn. Then, in dry years when fire finally takes hold, flames often are big and intense. They leap from treetop to treetop, and may kill entire stands.

"In this type of fire system, it's often all or nothing," said Timothy Ingalsbee, a fire ecologist at the Western Fire Ecology Center in Eugene. "It's normal for the fire to burn with high intensity."

That's what's happened in the Thirty Mile Fire. It initially appeared to be a small spot fire that could easily be mopped up.

But in this drought year, it exploded in a few windy afternoon hours from 25 acres to more than 2,000 and has since burned through more than 8,500 acres.

The fire slowed at its eastern edge as it moved into an area burned in a 1994 wildfire. But it never headed south to the thinned stands of lower elevation ponderosa pines. So there's no test of that defense line.

The rains of last week helped cool the Thirty Mile blaze and allow firefighters to gain control of the fire. During the days ahead, firefighting teams will be demobilized, leaving behind a bleak, charred landscape that, in the decades ahead, will green again.

Herald