Understanding prescribed burns will improve outcomes
In the past 30 years, prescribed burns east and west of Santa Fe have killed a firefighter, destroyed 235 homes in Los Alamos, produced dense smoke that shut down Albuquerque, destroyed the only silviculturally managed ponderosa pine stand on Rowe Mesa, given us the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon disaster and more. Does any other region have a similar history? I don’t think so, but I don’t know. Not only do I not know, neither I nor anyone else can know because useful records are lacking.
How do fire managers learn about past prescribed burns on lands for which they are responsible? Historically, this information was handed down from one person to the next. Fire managers, perhaps more than other agency managers, tended to be homegrown, starting under the supervision of an older generation and rising to positions of greater responsibility. Supervisors might have spent 20 years watching how fires burn on their own slice of land.
Although this remains true to some extent, it is less common than in the past. How, then, does one develop local expertise and identify recurring problems? Agencies keep records, fire atlases, of when and where fires occur. These do not describe how those fires evolved, whether they went as expected, what was successful and what was unsuccessful. Did current fire managers study the prescribed burn in Las Dispensas in the 1990s that took off through the tree crowns while the firefighters could only stand back and watch?
I am a strong supporter of prescribed burns and fires managed for resource benefits, and I also believe we have a problem in our region. Perhaps the fuel models are inappropriate. Perhaps the software routinely used for planning prescribed fire is inadequate, as suggested by the recent investigation. Perhaps agencies need to add local weather stations into their prescribed fire budgets, or perhaps these should be available without charge. Perhaps there is a recurring issue with poor judgment or with fire managers from places where spring is the best time to burn. Without records, data and analyses of prescribed burns in our region, we are stuck at “perhaps.”
After a string of escaped prescribed burns in Northern New Mexico, many more than the public is aware of or that prompted agency reviews, I started inquiring about how to research these fires. I wanted to know, for example, where I could find the model runs. One modeler told me there was no way he would maintain records of every run; there were too many. Someone else told me all the records sit in warehouses in Idaho. The missing piece is a post-burn summary, designed to be useful and accessible to future fire managers and researchers, of what went right and wrong during each burn. The report would be easily referenced by fire planners and burn bosses and be responsive to local operations on the ground, not intended for upward reporting. Such summaries are required by several state natural
resource departments.
When the environmental impact statement for the Southwest Jemez Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Project was open for public comment, I wrote that the frequency of escaped prescribed burns should be addressed. The agency response was that things are different now, a dismissive reply. The Hermits Peak/ Calf Canyon Fire demonstrated that things are no different now. Northern New Mexico needs analyses of prescribed burns in recent decades, a review of the common denominators of both successful and unsuccessful fires, and the agencies need to create the records to make that possible.