The wildfire fiasco - includes related article - Burning Issues

In our zeal to control nature, we may have pushed her out of control. And now we're taking the heat. Where to from here?

As I raked pine needles at our family cabin on California's Stanislaus National Forest last Labor Day, somebody sponged the blue sky with dishwater. A wash of wispy gray. Then, an hour later, a tarnished, glowering halo where the sun was supposed to be. A flurry of falling ash surrounded me.

That night, with my son-in-law, I drove from Pinecrest to a nearby promontory overlooking the gaping Stanislaus River canyon. The lower Sierras were ablaze--undulating orange peels of almost shocking intensity. The Ruby fire, 11 miles down-canyon, was headed our way. But as I was to discover in an intensive scan over the next six weeks, the Ruby was more than just another forest fire here in the West.

Indeed, it symbolizes a rapidly intensifying wildfire crisis in which fuel loads are dangerously high, huge numbers of homes are easy prey, and far more attention is given to fire suppression than to fuels reduction through prescribed burning and other means.

How bad is the situation? I've been tramping these forests for more than 60 years, and this is the worst I've seen it.

CODE 3

Early that afternoon, my friend Dan Ward, a fire officer for the California Department of Forestry (CDF) in Sonora, had received a terse transmission from a fire lookout: "I see a smoke in Middle Fork!"

Suddenly Dan was racing Code 3 in his fire rig, heading into a rattling dry, incredibly thick matting of forest fuels: duff, manzanita brush, bug-killed trees, and explosive ponderosas. Teaming up with Forest Service incident commanders Gary Cone and Bob Kress, Ward found himself in a wildfire "as extreme as you can get. It was exploding upslope in westerly winds, and by 5 p.m. 80- to 100-foot pines were flaring to 300 feet," he recalls. Alarmingly, green trees, badly stressed by a six-year drought, were burning faster than dead ones.

Hundreds of firefighters poured into the tinderbox over a single, fuel-choked road as air tankers and helicopters dropped retardant and foam. Working through the night as operations officer, Ward ordered his crews to backburn the flanks. Using flares and drip torches, they set fires along the few roads in the area, then let them burn toward the main blaze, thus turning the roadside into protected firebreaks. Several singed engines attest to the hazards of that operation.

When I arrived on-scene next morning, Forest Service, California Department of Forestry, and other agencies had set up an ICP (incident command post) in one of the few clearings within miles. The place reminded me of a Civil War battleground: Exhausted firefighters sprawled in dead sleep after a furious 14-hour battle. Bulldozers, engines, and tankers lumbered back and forth from the fire. A huge outdoor food operation was going full blast. And omnipresent TV crews were cajoling photo ops and sound bytes.

Fortunately, cool air from the upper Sierras that first night had acted as a huge brake at the fire's front, giving crews a chance to "line" the fire (surround it with fire trails). Hence it was now near containment.

The 3,500-acre Ruby fire, started by "one damn cigarette butt," involved 1,900 firefighters and ran up a bill of $1.6 million, to say nothing of huge timber and land-restoration costs.

SMALL POTATOES

Distressingly, the Ruby was small potatoes on the western wildfire scene last year:

* In California, fire crackled along a string of chimney-like canyons in the Sierras, often scorching 10,000 or more acres. The CDF alone responded to 7,800 state wildfires.

* The $18 million Cleveland fire on the Eldorado National Forest roared up American River canyon, devastating timber, taking out 27 structures, claiming an air tanker and its crew, and nearly igniting the fuel-and population-clogged Lake Tahoe basin.

* Near Redding, the Fountain fire, suspected to be the result of arson, careened through state lands, gobbling 64,000 acres as it destroyed more than 300 homes.

* On southern Oregon's Winema National Forest, the Lone Pine fire near Klamath Falls blackened 30,000 acres through prime stands of ponderosa.

* Idaho tallied a whopping 257,000 acres on a lightning-caused fire hot enough to produce "hydrophobic" glass-like soil that can no longer absorb water.

Additional wildfire events in other western states brought the season's wildfire tally to a staggering 2 million acres.

Why so many wildfires? Why so hot, so destructive? Will last winter's heavy snows help this year? What's being done to curb the wildfire monster?

Late one night last summer, as I camped with my grandson on the Winema, the skies near Crater Lake glowed with yet another wildfire. I restlessly monitored its progress, pondering those questions.

Several thousand miles and more than 30 interviews later, I can only communicate my alarm over what I now call the western wildfire fiasco. Tracing its origins and laying out some wildfire-fighting pluses may help us to grasp some of the basics of the problem we face. But the bottom line, I believe, is that we have a monumental dilemma on our hands.