INTRODUCTION

All over the West various timber sale programs have been promoted by Congress, the Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management with the alleged goal of facilitating firefighter safety and efficiency. The government’s arguments for salvage logging under the notorious Salvage Rider, for example, went beyond the traditional call to recover "wasted resources" to proclaim the fear of "catastrophic wildfires" as justification for logging without laws. However, as pointed out by Dr. Jason Greenlee in testimony to Congress, the effectiveness of salvage logging in reducing the size or severity of forest fires is highly dubious, since typically only large, lumber-grade trees are extracted while all of the slash and other fine fuels tend to be left behind.

As a public relations ploy, the Salvage Rider backfired on Congress and land management agencies. Nowadays, the same fear of fire is being used again, but another presuppression strategy is being employed to get-the-timber-out with false promises that it will put-the-fires-out. This "new" strategy is commercial logging to create shaded fuelbreaks. Several national forests in California are planning and proposing the creation of shaded fuelbreaks called "Defensible Fuel Profile Zones" (DFPZs). The most famous of these proposals has been taken up by Congress in the Quincy Library Group (QLG) bill. This bill proposes spending up to 83 million tax dollars to construct nearly 1,500 linear miles of fuelbreaks across the Lassen, Plumas, and Tahoe national forests in the northern Sierra Nevada. The stated purpose of this massive project: to facilitate firefighter safety and efficiency.

LET’S DO THE TIME WARP AGAIN

Using the rationale of firefighter safety and efficiency, the House passed their version of the QLG bill by a vote 429 to 1. The bill is consequently rolling through the Senate like a runaway freight train. How can so many Congresspersons be wrong? is a common question from Senate staffers. Well, Congress has been monumentally wrong before, as in the Gulf of Tongkin Resolution that escalated the war in Vietnam. This bill passed the Senate with merely two votes of dissent, and led to an epic disaster. I fear that history will tragically repeat itself with the QLG bill. Similar to Vietnam, the QLG bill is promoting a massive escalation of an unwinnable "war" on wildfire, spending millions of tax dollars to uphold discredited pre-suppression strategies from an outdated fire control philosophy.

Congress has never been known for its sense of history, but the QLG bill represents a severe lack of knowledge about similar fuelbreak schemes in California that were tried and failed. First, during the 1930s the Civilian Conservation Corps built the 650 miles of fuelbreaks to create the "Ponderosa Way" in the Sierras. Then, during the 1950s and 60s convict crews built another 2,000 miles of fuelbreaks. This latter plan was part of a Cold War era Civil Defense program to prepare for "conflagration control" in the event of thermonuclear warfare (Pyne, 1996). This program was abruptly ended in the early 1970s because these fuelbreaks were too costly to implement and maintain, and more importantly, because in all but a few incidents they did not work during
actual forest fires.

The main factor accounting for the poor performance of fuelbreaks was the lack of brush maintenance. Soon after the timber was cut, these elaborate fuelbreak networks converted to brush fields of manzanita and other chaparral--a much more flammable, difficult, and dangerous fuel type to cut fireline through than the original forest cover. Evidence continues to accumulate that fuelbreaks in California have never been maintained, not because fuels managers don’t care, but because there is no timber resource or other commodity outputs on these sites to pay for brush maintenance. This is the critical issue that will likely doom the QLG bill as an alleged fire protection plan. Apparently, Congress is ignorant both of California’s history of abandoned fuelbreaks, and the scientific studies that have noted the poor economics of creating vast fuelbreak systems (e.g. Davis, 1965; Omi, 1996).

CHICKEN LITTLE SAYS THE SKY IS BURNING DOWN

According to the proponents of the QLG bill, the primary fuel hazard and fire danger are the dense canopies of green trees that can burn in crown fires. Thus, Congress plans to use commercial logging to reduce tree canopies to 30% or 40% crown closure. Yet, the existing surface fuels that are the primary source of rapid fire spread, high fireline intensity, and high burn severity are being ignored. These existing surface fuels are the untreated piles of logging slash and dense brush stands left behind from decades of high-grade logging in California’s Sierras. The QLG bill mandates a five-year crash program to log out green trees, but it offers no plan to remove this existing load of slash and brush, or control brush from colonizing these exposed, disturbed sites in the future. An authentic fire protection plan would seek ways to reduce this fuel type, not add to it, as the QLG bill would do.

Ironically, in their fear of fire raining down from the sky, the advocates of fuelbreaks are creating the conditions that fuel large-scale, high-intensity wildfires racing across the ground. Research by fire scientists such as James Agee (1996) and Jan van Wagtendonk (1996) demonstrate that the primary variables accounting for initiation and propagation of crown fires are the surface fuel load, fine fuel moisture levels, and the vertical ground-to-crown height. The focus of the QLG bill, however, is on the horizontal density of tree canopies. This is a lesser factor in the start or spread of crown fires, but happens to be the fuel load most amenable to commercial timber sales.

More pertinent to fire crews, the excessive logging will open up stands and change microclimatic conditions in ways that feed rapid fire spread and high fireline intensity. Removing the overstory shade will expose surface fuels to more sun and wind, raising temperatures while lowering fuel moistures and relative humidities. This will cause the fine fuels to dry out earlier in the spring and sooner after rainstorms, resulting in an expanded season of high fire danger. And when firefighters are dispatched to a blaze, they will likely face hotter, drier, windier conditions more conducive to extreme fire behavior and more resistant to control efforts. Most incidences of firefighters being overrun by fire have occurred from flames racing through fine fuels in dense brushfields, rarely from crown fires in closed-canopy forests.

ROAD-RACING WITH SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT

The most dubious aspect of the QLG bill concerns its assumption that since fuelbreaks will be located alongside existing logging roads, this will provide firefighters with greater safety since they can make speedy retreats in the event of an emergency evacuation. Yet, these roads were originally built to access timber sales, not to aid fire suppression. Thus, roads in the Sierra Nevada commonly switchback up steep slopes, cut across mid-slopes, follow stream courses at the bottom of narrow canyons, and run through previously cutover areas where units are covered with slash, brush, and even-aged plantations. In short, these roads are often located in the worst places to contain headfires in the kinds of extreme fire behavior situations that are being used to justify the fuelbreaks.

Since the QLG bill fails to prioritize treatment of the existing surface fuel hazards, fails to provide long-term funding for monitoring and maintenance of the fuelbreaks, and fails to fund prescribed burning of the landscape blocks between fuelbreaks, then it is highly likely that these fuelbreaks will be extremely unsafe and inefficient areas for firefighting crews. The claim that adjacent roads will allow speedy evacuations of crews will likely tempt some Incident Commanders to put firefighters into risky situations that demand such emergency retreats. When the call comes to bug out of these fuelbreak fire pits, it will be a challenge for a convoy of school buses to safely speed away from the scene on those steep, narrow, dusty Forest Service roads.

CONCLUSION

I genuinely dread the day when some Incident Commander is going to be handed a map of these untreated, unmaintained, hot, dry, windy fuelbreaks, and will stage fire crews to hold the line in advance of some raging headfire. After millions of tax dollars invested to build these things, how could an IC refuse to utilize them even if he/she knew better? As a suppression strategy, these "indefensible fuel profile zones" present wildland firefighters with the same dilemma they confront on interface fires: the flexibility and mobility they need to do their job safely and effectively is sacrificed for a rigid, static strategy to defend these "Maginot lines." It is truly shocking that Congress never bothered to get the input from ground-level firefighters in whose name this massive logging-for-firefighting boondoggle is being waged.

There may be a few specific places where some kind of fuelbreaks might be appropriate, such as directly adjacent to communities, or in efforts to initiate understory prescribed burning across large landscape blocks. But these do not need to be quarter mile wide commercial timber sales across thousands of acres of public forests. The problem with the QLG bill and other similar fuelbreak proposals throughout the West is that they are too extensive and fail to address the repeated failures of past fuelbreak programs. Rather than protect forests from fire or facilitate firefighter safety, as politicians are claiming to the public, these new fuelbreaks would actually do the opposite. They would add to the existing surface fuel hazards, increase the risk of large-scale, high-intensity wildfires, and increase risks to firefighter safety. I believe most firefighters would agree with me that unless Congress, the USFS and BLM are willing to commit to funding and implementing long-term brush maintenance within fuelbreaks and understory prescribed burning of surface fuels between fuelbreaks, then these "new, improved" DFPZs should not be cut at all.

What will firefighters say in the face of a certain public outcry against these costly, unsightly, and ecologically harmful fuelbreak timber sales? Is it necessary to fragment forests in order to make it safe for firefighters? In my opinion, the QLG bill is a personal affront to wildland firefighters: it mocks their professionalism, experience, and environmental ethics. It is time for wildland firefighters to stand up and speak out on this issue with utmost urgency. Let’s not allow Congress to use firefighters as yet another ruse to boost inappropriate logging on public lands. Let’s not replay the Vietnam War debacle with these phony "fire free zones" in our national forests. Let’s learn from the past by not repeating the same discredited pre-suppression strategy that has been tried and failed numerous times before.


Timothy Ingalsbee is a former seasonal firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service, and is now director of the Western Fire Ecology Center. He can be reached at fire@efn.org