A history of wildfire management

On June 15, the Daily Inter Lake had an editorial titled "New fire division a bold step toward smoke-free summers." It seemed supportive of a new proposal to enhance federal forest fire protection and clean up our smokey summer air by creating a new federal bureaucracy to coordinate all federal forest fire management. 

This new federal effort is supposedly going to enhance forest fire control management between various federal, state and local forest fire fighting agencies. 

I wish this new effort the best of luck. But, in my humble opinion, this is not likely to clean up our sometimes smokey summer air in the Flathead. That is only wishful thinking. Seldom is the solution to a local environmental problem solved by decisions made within the beltway of Washington, D.C. 

Currently the Forest Service has forest management and forest fire fighting expertise at the national, regional (Missoula) and local level (Kalispell). Other federal land management agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, 50 state fire management agencies and local fire departments spend millions of dollars every year coordinating fire management and fire suppression activities. Adding another layer of bureaucrats won’t solve our air quality problems.  

I am a professional forester. My experience fighting forest fires started in New Mexico in the spring and summer of 1957. During subsequent years, I fought fires in the Cascade mountains of Washington state, in Minnesota, in Montana, in Idaho and in Alaska. 

In 1961, my fire-fighting crew of native Americans fought a fire in the Brooks Mountain Range, north of the Arctic Circle. That was great wilderness work experience for this young fella. We spent tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars and put the fire dead out. This fire was 50 miles from the closest town, not near any human development and there were no national treasures that needed protection. It was a terrible waste of public money. But the federal policy then was that all forest fires were bad and should be put out. 

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, forest fires were deemed public enemy No. 1. When a fire started on a ranger district, all hands dropped whatever they were doing and helped put the fire out. 

Then in the 1970s and 1980s, the view of forest fires slowly changed. This was the beginning of the current environmental era. 

Many forest fires are natural, caused by lightning. The emerging science was that land managers should evaluate all lighting caused fires to see if they should be left to burn as Mother Nature intended or should be put out. It started what became known as the let them (fire) burn policy. 

There is no question that many large uncontrolled wildfires are natural, started by lightning. But are they always bad or threatening to public development, private development or other important human values?  

The "let them burn" policy led to the world class forest fires in Yellowstone National Park in 1988, which generated world attention. Park managers had adopted a "let them burn" policy for some fires. One thing they forgot to do, was to look at the calendar. It might be OK to let a natural small fire burn in early September when cooler and wet fall weather was imminent. But should they have let natural fires burn in early July with two months of hot dry weather ahead? The park didn’t do this and nearly a million acres of Yellowstone burned.  

More recently, a small lightning fire started on the upper slopes of Lolo Peak, which overlooks the Missoula Valley. It also overlooks the Forest Service’s Aerial Fire Depot. The Aerial Fire Depot is the greatest concentration of forest firefighting skills and equipment in Montana. 

Fire managers could have had this natural fire on Lolo Peak out or under control in an hour or two. I followed the history of this fire with particular interest because this is where my wife and I filled our elk tags when we first moved to Montana. 

Land managers studied this fire and the surrounding forest habitats and decided this natural lightning-caused fire should be left to burn. It was predicted to spread to a few acres, then burn itself out. 

Well, things didn’t quite work out as planned. This small fire exploded, raged on for weeks, burned thousands and thousands of acres and cost hundreds of thousands of public dollars to control. Worst yet, Missoula and Bitterroot valley residents had to breathe dirty polluted air for several weeks. 

The proposed new fire bureaucracy that will coordinate all national forest fire suppression activity will be staffed by the same fire experts currently on the payroll of the Forest Service, Park Service and BLM. Many fire experts in the Forest Service are currently used during the fall and spring seasons to do fire work such as logging slash cleanup from timber sales and wildlife burns. So, each federal agency will still need to have fire skills at all organizational levels.  

In summary, it is my opinion that the proposed new federal forest fire organization will not clean up our summer air. The only way to really assure clean summer air is for the start of a new ice age or for humans to stop lightning. 

Neither of those actions are likely to happen in our lifetimes.