Yellowstone Fires and their Legacy
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By Rocky Barker
With six out of the eight years among the worst 10 fire seasons since 1960, firefighters are living, said BLM fire operations chief Tom Boatner, in a new world. It’s a world where every year is what we call a bad fire season. The indefinitely bad season, he called it.
I am hearing fire experts tell me they are seeing fire behavior they’ve never seen before. That’s scary. The last time I heard that was in late August,1988 when fire bosses told me the same thing.
Nineteen years ago today the top fire behavior experts in the country gathered in the old depot in West Yellowstone to offer a prediction on how the month of August would go in Yellowstone where already more than 200,000 acres of forest had burned. These “fire gods,” as Superintendent Bob Barbee called them, based their forecast on computer models developed to predict how a fire would behave under different weather and fuel conditions.
They plugged Yellowstone’s vegetation maps into the computers and historic weather patterns and came up with the very best science of the day. No more than 200,000 acres more acres would burn. I quoted one of the team saying essentially “there’s nothing left to burn.
Within a few days 200,000 more acres burned then the fires slowed down. It appeared like the prediction wouldn’t be far off then, on Aug. 20, Black Saturday, 165,000 acres burned in a day.
A week later I quoted fire bosses saying that they were seeing fire behavior they had never seen before. The fuel was the driest in history and off the charts of their computer models.
The weather also was far different than historic patterns, most notably a series of huge wind storms without cooler temperatures or precipitation.
By the end of the season more than million acres burned and the fire behavior experts reprogrammed their models with the new data.
Today, I’m hearing the same thing. July was the hottest month in the West since the 1870s. Moisture levels in the fuels are at a record low. The humidity doesn’t rise at night as it usually does because of the hot temperatures.
The fire behavior computer models data set doesn’t include the conditions on the ground.
This is the new world. We live in it.
We had better adapt to it.
For the latest update go to the National Interagency Fire Center. The
fires in Greater Yellowstone in 1988 were the first of a series of huge
natural events that changed the way Americans view nature and their control
over it. I spent most of August and the first two weeks in September covering
the fires in 1988. Island/Shearwater Press has published my book, Scorched
Earth: How the Fires in Yellowstone Changed America. It reaches back to
the beginning of Yellowstone and how fires shaped conservation and environmental
history.
I have since continued to cover
fire and its role in the forested ecosystems of the West from Idaho to
Arizona. The key lesson I have learned is
the important role fires plays in western forest ecosystems. It is different
in the higher elevation like Yellowstone where fire comes rarely but with
ferocity. In the lower elevation ponderosa pine forests, fire was far more frequent
before we came along. In 2002, we faced a threat across much of the region.
Most seem to have forgotten the lessons of Yellowstone. The 1910 fires prompted a century
of firefighters to see their task as the moral equivalent of war. For them
and the nation Yellowstone was their Vietnam. The debate over Yellowstone was
between allowing fires to burn or fighting them from the start. Yet today
that debate has been largely resolved. Today the 20th Century’s
fire suppression program in national forests and parks is universally
challenged. Yet today firefighters are jumping on every fire at a rate even
higher than in 1988. Still they can’t stop the fires they call
catastrophic.
Lost is the main lesson of
Yellowstone when conditions are right no one can stop forest fires. Like
floods man only can put off the inevitable. The current debate is over how
much we allow nature to take its course and how much do we intrude. The issue
is recognizing our limits to control it. In between lay the value judgments
over where and how we can live with fire. A century of suppression has made
conditions right in low elevation forest types that previously were
relatively fireproofed by frequent fires. But Yellowstone’s
high elevation forests are hard to get started but when they burn they
usually burn big. Fighting fires there is not only wasteful but
counterproductive.
Lost also is the great waste of resources spent then and now to put out fires
they know are beneficial, they can only hope to herd. The money would be
better spent on clearing areas around homes and communities and on preventive
burning and thinning where human values like commercial timberlands needs to
be protected. Perhaps the only way to remedy the wasteful situation is to
dismantle or completely reorganize the firefighting bureaucracy. Finally, 19 years later
Yellowstone is still changing. Ecologists like Don Despain were largely
proven right about the role of fire in ecosystem restoration. Their work and
the growing public understanding of it is helping Americans learn a new story
about fire. This rough, rough draft of a book
I started in 1996 has been continuously revised in an effort to include the
events since 1988. But now I include only the later chapters. Check up on the
current fire situation at the National
Interagency Fire Center in Boise. Or check out Randal O'Toole's keen
insight on fires at The Thoreau
Institute Fire site.
I cover all
of these subjects in my book but I suggest you also read about the
future of forestry in the The
Next West . |
IN the 2007 season -- the 19th since Yellowstone burned -- politics spread through fire policy faster than a wind driven range fire. Idaho politicians blame everything but nature for the giant fire in my story on the 
The book also inspired the television movie: |
Greg Stahl
in the Mountain Express
Bob Wallace
and Rocky talk about fire
Northwest Experience |
