Fire, a natural element that over centuries has shaped the health and appearance of biodiversity in the Sierra Nevada, is being used to help restore well-being to forests and public lands where decades of diligent and effective fire prevention have resulted in a fuel buildup.
Wildfire raging out of control through dry, fuel-laden forests can be catastrophic, threatening human lives, destroying birds and animals, homes, businesses, and valuable timber, damaging soil and watersheds, and dirtying the air. But at the hands of resource managers and firefighters, fire is a tool to rid forests of excess fuel and disease and clear the way for fresh new growth.
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The California Biodiversity Council, at its Local Biodiversity Forum and Council meeting June 6-7 in the Sierra community of Nevada City, focused on fire and ecological conditions in the northern-central Sierra from the Gold Rush to the “growth rush.” Speakers and panelists with different perspectives reached some similar conclusions, such as:
The Council meeting coincided with the delivery to Congress June 7 of the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project (SNEP) report, the most comprehensive scientific study of the mountain range. Some of the speakers at the Council meeting and Forum had worked on the SNEP and reflected its findings in their presentations.
Pre-settlement Era Fires
Doug Leisz, a retired U.S. Forest Service supervisor of
the Eldorado National Forest, told the Forum that evidence
gleaned from the past indicates a very complex fire scenario. In
pre-settlement times, before fire suppression, fires
ignited by lightning or careless campfires occurred frequently
and often burned for months over large areas at low to
moderate intensity. These fires created more open-spaced forests
than exist in the Sierra today.
But not all Sierra forests were open 150 years ago, Leisz said. To the contrary, some forests were dark and nearly impenetrable. Accounts of the exploits of early explorers and Yuba River miners complained of having to push their way through thick stands and heavy brush of the density that fuels intense wildfires.
“The fuel loads were obviously sufficient to produce big fires, and I conclude they must have occurred,” Leisz said. “Some areas must have burned with high intensity. I believe there were many variations in the return frequencies of fire patterns.”
Leisz, relating some findings of the SNEP report for which he was a consultant, noted that 20th century forest fire records don't confirm the popular expectation that large, severe fires are growing larger, and small fires are getting smaller. This pattern occurs only in the central western Sierra, which has experienced the greatest population increase in the mountain range.
Planning Ahead for Wildfire
Since people are moving into and around flammable
wildlands, forests cannot be left to nature's patterns precisely
as
they were in the past. Strategic planning must relate to the
realities of growth today and in the years to come.
Tim Duane, a University of California, Berkeley professor and SNEP consultant, and Pat Norman, a Nevada County planner, described to the Forum how human access to the forest provided by highways across the Sierra transformed a sparsely populated region whose lifeblood was mining to a rapidly growing string of communities offering a woodsy, back-to-nature atmosphere.
“Throughout the Sierra, we're seeing this transformation,” Duane said.
The clamor for homes in and around the forest with privacy that spacing and greenery affords has shaped the course of fuels management, they explained. People with $300,000 homes want both privacy and fire protection, but narrow winding roads that shelter houses from public view afford poor access for fire trucks.
Nevertheless, observed Bob Erickson of the Yuba Watershed Institute, “Some people would rather risk being burned out than lose their privacy and feeling of being remote.”
Dealing with fire risk through land-use ordinances came gradually to Nevada County. The first zoning ordinance in 1971 required some setbacks, but didn't explicitly address fire, Norman said. After the disastrous 49er Fire roared through the Gold Rush country in 1988, charring 33,000 acres and destroying 312 structures, Nevada County adopted new housing development standards for access, fuel modification, and clearance around structures.
But even with safety requirements, people need to be aware of fire danger and know what do about it. Capt. Dwight Piper of the El Dorado Hills Fire Department told the Forum that his department is trying to educate their community of 15,000 people about fire danger and steps to take.
“Some residents don't know they live in a high-risk area,” Piper said. “Others know, but they don't know what to do. Our goal is to increase knowledge and motivate homeowners.”
State Fire Plan
By clearing away material that fuels flames and inhibits
healthy timber growth, resource managers can prevent
catastrophic fires and help to enhance biodiversity.
“It's hard to retrofit,” said Hank Weston, chief of the Nevada-Yuba-Placer Ranger Unit for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “We need to plan wisely up-front.”
The new 5-year State Fire Plan calls for working in partnership with stakeholders -- those directly affected by the plan -- to help identify the assets, risks, and critical habitat, and decide who should bear the cost. Various assets of the Sierra, such as water, are valuable to people living elsewhere.
The CDF launched a pilot project in areas of Placer and Nevada counties under its command that divides the land into 450-acre squares for pre-fire planning and uses computer technology to locate and rank
areas of heavy fuel and simulate the movement and destruction of a wildfire. CDF has mapped and ranked the entire ranger unit, which covers Nevada, Yuba, Placer and Sierra counties.
“Now we can actually see where we have high fire risk, an unacceptable level of (fire protection) service, and many assets to protect,” CDF Forester Kelly Keenan told the Forum.
A simulated fire north of the North Fork of the American River and Interstate 80 predicted 50-foot flames of high intensity moving at 3 mph, inflicting heavy damage on soil and other natural resources, and consuming 900 acres the first day. Because the area has 200 homes, power lines, and other infrastructure, the damages could be expected to greatly exceed a fire in the same area last year that consumed 600 acres and cost $2.5 million to suppress, Keenan said.
Fire and Biodiversity
Fires occurring under favorable climatic conditions and
in ways that don't threaten lives and property are nature's own
cleanser and purifier, ridding the forest of disease and
unhealthily thick vegetation.
“Fire is an element of biodiversity by definition because it is a natural process,” said Linda Blum, an environmental consultant to the Quincy Library Group and the League to Save Lake Tahoe. “But in the Sierra Nevada and other places in the West, fire is probably the most significant missing element of the ecosystem because of fire suppression,” Blum told the Council during a panel discussion of fire use in planning for natural resources and human development.
Blum, speaking from an environmentalist's perspective, said fire suppression was instituted to protect timber as a valuable resource and commodity and “has enabled us to establish productive forests,” but not without drawbacks. Logging, for example, is more injurious to the ecology than fire because it requires the building of roads that disturb natural drainage patterns and compact the soil, and it spreads forest “pests,” she said.
“We're at a turning point. We obviously have to start doing things differently,” Blum said. “It's time to think not only `fire safe,' but also `fire permissible.' When fire breaks out, our immediate response is to put it out. Then we go in and build roads and log it. We take a place that has moderate to low disturbance and impose a very high disturbance.”
Community Actions
Reducing fire fuels with up-to-date machinery has
enormous potential to increase biodiversity and protect property,
said
wildlife biologist Ted Beedy of Jones & Stokes Associates,
Inc., a planning and consulting firm.
Beedy, a Forum panelist, said the North Fork Association in Placer County is working to reverse the effects of long-term fire suppression that unintentionally reduced wildlife habitat values and biodiversity in the Sierra forest.
When fuel reduction methods such as logging with horses and helicopters, and setting bonfires proved impractical, the association brought in state-of-the art machinery that prunes and logs the understory of smaller white fir and cedar with less impact than other types of logging. The machines can process two or three acres a day, Beedy said. But while the technology is efficient, marketing the biomass will remain difficult until plants are located closer to the timber source, he said.
Resource conservation districts (RCDs) -- nonregulatory local government agencies -- work closely with communities and individual landowners to provide educational and technical assistance with conservation efforts such as watershed restoration and fuel reduction.
In Placer County, for instance, the RCD is working on fire safety strategies with Meadow Vista, a Sierra foothills community of 4,000 people living on 7,000 acres near 200,000 tons of burnable forest fuels.
“We could lose Meadow Vista in an afternoon,” Placer County RCD Director Stan MacDonald said.
Prescribed Fire
Burning by prescription for fuel removal is a common practice
that is becoming acceptable as people realize that one
way or another, there is going to be fire. A likely alternative
to prescribed burning -- intense wildfire -- is far more
menacing, costly, and potentially catastrophic than fire
controlled by professionals under favorable weather and climatic
conditions.
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“People recognize that fire is something they have to deal with and accept,” Wayne Harrison of the California Department of Parks and Recreation told the Council.
Inevitably, the more prescribed burning, the more smoke spiraling into the air, which can be unhealthy, annoying, and perhaps in violation of clean air standards. But overall, prescribed burning creates less smoke than wildfire and fewer particles to be drawn into the lungs.
“We're going to manage it, minimize it, and the smoke is going to be temporary,” said Rod Hill of the Northern Sierra Air Quality Board in Grass Valley.
To address prescribed and wild fire, air quality, and resources, officials formed the Interagency Air and Smoke Council, an unofficial partnership that includes the Air Resources Board, CDF, Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, Department of Fish and Game, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and others.
Their goals are to protect public health, minimize the impacts of prescribed fire, promote public understanding of the need to burn, and restore the viability of wildlands using prescribed fire under proper conditions, after considering appropriate alternatives, such as mechanical removal.
Robert Harris, U.S. Forest Service supervisor for the Lake Tahoe Basin, noted that the Tahoe Re-Green Project, a fuels reduction campaign to remove dead and dying trees on public and private lands in the basin, encourages different treatments for wildlands than around homes.
Prescribed burning is helpful in state parks around Lake Tahoe to eliminate diseased, dead, and dying trees. But on private property where fires cannot be set, homeowners use tree removal services.
Assistant Resources Secretary Terry Gorton, a leader in organizing Tahoe Re-Green, described the partnership of 19 local, state, federal, regional, and nonprofit forestry, firefighting, and conservation agencies and groups established in August 1995. At the property owner's request, professional foresters mark trees to be removed. Afterward, where appropriate, healthy young seedlings are planted in their place.