Fire on the Mountain

This summer I had my first personal experience with wildfire, previously having studied fire ecology in graduate school and visited many wildfire sites to study the effects of fire on the forest vegetation. But that was always after the ground had cooled and the firefighters had gone home. On June 21st we witnessed the lightning strike during a freakish dry lightning storm on summer solstice and saw the first column of smoke rise from the Plumas National Forest, just east of Sawmill Peak in Butte County and about 3 miles from my house. The Camp Fire was just one of 41 wildfires in the Butte County Lightning Complex that started on June 21st, and when we left for Quincy for HSMF on 4th of July weekend, Cal Fire was celebrating that the Camp Fire would be 100% contained the following day. We felt like we could finally relax and enjoy a weekend of good music. We enjoyed the festival so much that we had almost forgotten about the fires until the smoke started rolling in during Railroad Earth’s Saturday evening set, reminding us that the fires weren’t entirely under control yet.

The night we returned home, all of the separate wildfires near the town of Paradise (including the Camp Fire) had merged into one huge firestorm. The following morning, the sun was totally obstructed by the smoke, it was as dark as night. Outside it was raining heavy ash and embers along with burnt leaves and twigs that were still warm to the touch. The sky was so thick with smoke that it was hard to breathe and hurt our lungs. The fire was quickly moving in our direction, and the only fire break was the West Branch of the Feather River, a small creek at the bottom of a steep canyon. If the fire crossed the creek it could move up the brush choked canyon in a matter of minutes and the towns of Magalia and Paradise could be in flames. Cal Fire officials admit that it was a combination of hard work and a break in the weather that allowed them to contain the fire and keep it from crossing the West Branch. We lived under a precautionary evacuation order for over a month, the amount of time it took over 2,200 firefighters to finally contain the 59,440 acre Camp Fire. Cal Fire is still actively mopping up hot spots. The cost of fighting the Butte County fires has been estimated around $85 million.

California has spent $390 million dollars this year on fighting wildfires ($310 million over budget) and the federal government has spent $570 million, $340 million of that figure on fire suppression alone. Politicians are proposing possible solutions to pay for the escalating firefighting costs, such as creating a federal emergency fire fund and charging property owners in high risk areas a surcharge to help defray the costs. But there has been little discussion about why wildfires are getting progressively larger and more uncontrollable, and what we should be doing about it. After all, didn’t humans have a hand in creating the problem?

Wildfires have always been a part of the natural disturbance regime in places like California, like hurricanes in the mid-Atlantic. Many native people used fire to manage their landscape, recognizing that many native plants and animals depend on fire for their reproduction. Fire and other natural disturbances are essential in maintaining healthy populations and biodiversity of plants and animals. Historically, the fire cycle in the Sierra Cascade foothills where I live (characterized as mixed conifer forest) is roughly 7-10 years. Fire season was late summer to fall, fires were patchy (where large patches are left unburned), and most fires were ground fires (not canopy fires that burn the tree tops). The ground fires clear the forest floor of saplings and shrubs that have moved in since the last fire but, since they are cooler burning, most of the mature trees survive. The fire reduces the fuel load in the forest and the areas cleared by fire serve as a nursery for new pine and fir trees, which need the fire and the clean soil it leaves behind to germinate their seeds. As a result, historically the forest landscape looked something like a patchwork quilt of made up of patches of trees of different ages, depending on when a given patch last burned. Large scale canopy fires that burned entire forests to the ground were a more rare occurrence.

The United State Forest Service adopted a fire suppression policy in 1919 to protect valuable timber resources, and changed the historical fire regimes with unforeseen ecological consequences. Ironically, the main problem with fire suppression is that it causes wildfires to actually become worse over the long-term. That’s because when forests don’t burn, the forest floor below the mature trees becomes choked with vegetation, dramatically increasing the fuel load and making wildfires more intense and unpredictable. These fires burn much hotter and many more of them become canopy fires, as the fire uses the thick vegetation to climb into the forest canopy and burn the entire forest. The fires burn so hot that they even kill seeds buried in the soil, and move so rapidly, that most wildlife can’t escape to safety. Recent droughts and the effects of climate change are only making these fires more severe, as vegetation becomes more flammable and dry lightning storms become more frequent.

There is no shortage of recent examples of this type of wildfire, or firestorm as the network news is fond of calling them, and the devastation they cause. The wildfires this summer in northern California, that ignited from thousands of dry lightning strikes and burned uncontrollably for months, was certainly typical of this new fire regime that humans have helped create. The issue of how to improve our forestry management practices to decrease fire danger is a complicated issue with many different interests involved. There is the need of the forest to burn every few years, to regenerate itself and remain healthy for the plants and animals that depend on it. There is the need of the communities who neighbor the forest and fear losing their homes to wildfire. There is the need to manage forests for timber and other resources, which could be done utilizing fire as a management tool along with more sustainable harvesting methods to keep forests healthy. There is the risk to our infrastructure that large-scale fires can pose. With climate change predicted to make wildfire conditions even worse, there is an urgent need to find integrated solutions that address all of these issues. We need to do more than just spend more money on fire fighting (ie. fire suppression) and turn a blind eye to the larger problem. We need to resolve our relationship with wildfire and learn to coexist with it.