Forest fires in the West: a few thoughts

["Hunter Gray" <hunterbadbear@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have a few reasonably salient thoughts on the Western forest fire
situation which I'll get to in a moment or so.  I know about some things --
and forest fires are high on that list.

It's personally extremely hard for me to view, even via cushioned
television, the massive forest fire destruction now underway in much of the
drought-tortured West -- including my native Northern Arizona.  I certainly
know about forest fires.  I wasn't too far at all into my teens when I began
claiming, for several summers in a row, that I was 18 -- the legal age to
fight forest fires.  The US Forest Service in those days was casual and
informal and, even though various officials knew full well how old I really
was [some were the fathers of friends of mine], no sweat whatsoever.  I was
a big, tough and committed kid and that was enough.  In those years I fought
many forest fires and, eventually, was promoted into very important and
isolated mountain-top fire lookout/radio work when I was still 17.  And
occasionally, in the ensuing years of full adulthood, I fought forest fires
as a volunteer at various points.  I'm good with an axe or a shovel, a
Pulaski [axe/hoe], a McLeod or Kordick [hoe/rake] -- or a crosscut or a
chain-saw. I know back-fire burning.  And I know dynamite.  It's been
awhile -- but, living where we do right now in Southeastern Idaho --  we're
always alert this time of year.

But what's going on in Northeast Central Arizona -- around Heber and
Lakeside and Show Low and other little towns, in the White Mountain
country -- is the worst by far and away that any living person has seen in
that region.  There has never been anything like this:  at this point
[Sunday afternoon], over 300,000 acres have burned, around 30,000 people
have been forced from their homes in a half-dozen towns, and there's no
simply no end in sight.  Not too many years ago, my parents and a brother
owned land in the Lakeside region and I had nieces and nephews near Show
Low.  I certainly have friends right there, right now.

If there's any rainy season in the future of this hideous Southwestern
drought, it's still several weeks off -- and it'll be preceded by much "dry
lightning" which always plays fire hell in the woods during these periods.

It takes literally hundreds of years for cedars and junipers and pinon pines
and the much bigger Ponderosa [Yellow] pines to grow to maturity in the
always dry Southwest.  Takes only a minute to destroy one -- leaving simply
a burned out, black shaft.

I've heard, since I was a child, the on-target talk about "too damn many
people" coming into the West.  That's true -- but inevitable.  And some
[certainly not all for sure] big city types -- whatever the longevity of
their Western residence -- are careless, ignorant people.  And it's also
true, to an extent, that the forests long ago became over-protected from
every fire to the point that fires often become intense and high-reaching
and super-destructive in the resultant, comparatively heavy underbrush. And
this means that incredibly fast-moving tree-top to tree-top crown fires are
common -- in contrast to the very, very old days when natural and simple and
minimal ground fires simply cleaned and cleared on a regular basis without
destroying any trees.

Arm-chair strategizing in a horrific situation like this is usually very
questionable.  But I do have these few nagging thoughts based on a good deal
of fire fighting experience.

In the old days -- back when I was 18 for several fire seasons in a row --
we were all highly skilled in the basic use of fire tools.  With the
exception of an occasional power-wagon water-tank vehicle when there was at
least a trace of a road, we worked only with those tools. We traveled in
rough and often very remote country -- quick acting ground troops who
generally moved on heavily booted feet but sometimes by horse or mule, often
ate military combat rations, drank from simple canteens. If there were field
radios, they were walkie-talkies. There were bulldozers in some places --
but the only aircraft involved  were very small planes for spotting and
directing purposes.  [Smoke jumpers, much found even back then in Montana
and Idaho and the drier side of the Pacific Northwest generally, were not
utilized in our Southwest.]

Eventually,  right around the end of the '50s, heavy tanker planes carrying
borate solution and related things  -- and, in the Southwest, based at
Silver City, N.M. -- came into vogue.  And sometimes dumping chemicals
appeared to replace the primary, quick initial reliance on fast-moving
"professional" ground crews.

At around this time, the Forest Service became much more internally
formalized.  An initial indication was the insistence on a recruit really
being 18.  Then, it became mandatory that one could no longer wear his
Stetson or whatever other wide-brimmed Western hat on a fire -- but had to
wear a fairly heavy safety helmet.  But there were far heavier problems
developing than those:

Even though the USFS District Rangers always had college degrees in
forestry, most  Forest Service personnel had had no college at all -- and
many still haven't.  The District Rangers [and the just out of forestry
college Assistant District Rangers], recognizing the value of hard-fought
experience, didn't throw their weight around.  They knew how to listen.

In an old-time fire situation, it wasn't unusual for the Fire Boss to be a
veteran who'd traveled thousands of miles of fire-lines but who'd never set
foot inside a college of any kind.  One of the great Fire Legends in the
Southwest was a Flagstaff man who had come West on Highway 66 as a kid
during the Depression, worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps -- and
eventually became Fire Dispatcher for the Coconino National Forest.  From
him I learned much indeed -- and so did the very great many others who were
willing to listen.

But by the end of the '50s, the newly emerging Assistant District Rangers in
an increasingly formalized USFS -- who eventually became District Rangers --
began to throw their weight around long before they knew where it ought to
be aimed and  landing.  They often missed, there were heavy mess-ups, and
much ill-will between  these shave-tails and the veterans.  But, given the
new ethos of form and structure, the former prevailed.

And, even as that continued and became more and more institutionalized,
there was another related trend: chain-of-command bureaucratization.  In the
Old Days, people weren't afraid to make quick, strategic decisions.  A Fire
Boss didn't feel obliged to clear a basic decision -- e.g., wide-spread
back-firing -- with  officials based some distance away.  Sector bosses and
crew bosses often made quick decisions on their own -- as did basic
front-line troopers on the fire line itself.  There was solidarity and
cohesion -- but not at the expense of individual intuition and logic.

Do any of these negative strains -- those that emerged forty or so years ago
and are now securely embedded in USFS agency culture -- at all responsible
for  the colossal and truly Hellish Arizona catastrophe that's sweeping
across the White Mountains and environs?

All I can say is this:  It's been a prolonged period of far-flung drought in
that entire region -- maybe even unprecedented.  But there've been droughts
before that have been pretty bad.

And the West has had too many people in it for a long time.

And the underbrush hasn't been piling up at any faster a rate than it has
since the beginning of the 20th Century.

And there were bad fires -- and big bad ones -- in My Time.  But not fires
on the scope of these tremendous monsters.  The Woods have not changed. Nor
has the nature of Fire.

 But some things obviously have.

Yours, Hunter Gray [Hunterbear]

Hunter Gray  [Hunterbear]
www.hunterbear.org (social justice)
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´














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