‘Tempting fate’
In Flagstaff, the fear is not the inferno alone — it’s the years of flooding that could follow
FLAGSTAFF — Wally Covington turns off the main highway, into a neighborhood on the eastern side of the San Francisco Peaks. Farther up the slopes, the charred skeletons of trees and cracked earth mark the outlines of the 2010 Schultz Fire.
The flames stopped short of the subdivisions off U.S. 89, places with names like Timberline and Fernwood. It was what came after the fire, the devastating and deadly floods, that would change the way this high country community viewed its forests.
Covington, the director of Northern Arizona University’s Ecological Restoration Institute, turns down streets that appear stuck in time.
He drives past homes with sandbags still in the yards, as if the residents are expecting the water to come again.
After the fire, torrents of water washed through this neighborhood. Boulders, dead trees and sediment, carried by the water, and without a grown forest to slow the flood, crashed into the houses.
“It’s a really sad situation,” Covington said. “A lot of people were ruined financially.”
The overall financial impact of the fire and floods was estimated at as much as $147 million.
For one family, the cost was immeasurable. Shaelyn Wilson, 12 years old, fell into a wash and was swept away by the water carrying boulders and wreckage.
Now, years later, one home is still surrounded by concrete barriers with the message “DO NOT REMOVE!” scrawled over and over in black spray-paint.
Withering, blackened trees, some of them starting to fall, stand next to spindly new pines, no more than a foot or two tall. Life next to death. They’re scarce in some places, and some areas still experience flooding connected to the Schultz Fire.
Neighborhoods near the Schultz scar flooded in July, washing boulders, trees and limbs through the road .
The scene is a reminder of what Flagstaff has to lose: a swath of the world’s largest contiguous ponderosa pine forest, clean drinking water and one of Arizona’s three public universities, the very lives of those who live there. When the forest burns, everything about the place is at stake.
It’s also a guidepost to what the city and its residents decided to do after the Schultz Fire — a plan to protect the city by strategically thinning parts of the pine forests where the work can best help reduce the risk of wildfire.
Voters agreed to spend $10 million on the project, a small investment compared with projected losses of more than $1 billion if the worst scenarios play out — catastrophic floods that could wipe out business districts and neighborhoods and contaminate a critical water supply.
“The fire event will be short-lived,” said Paul Summerfelt, Flagstaff wildland fire management officer. “Our real fear is not that three-week fire, not the flame. It is the years afterward of everything coming off that hill, and what it means to the city.”
The approach is a shift in thinking since resource managers began looking for ways to restore health to the state’s ponderosa pine forests.
Wildfires have singed more than 1.5 million acres over the past 20 years, and climate change and relentless drought make them more inevitable, more costly and more consuming.
Since the first of the mega-fires, the Rodeo-Chediski in 2002, officials and constituents have looked at thinning the forest as a way to save it. But the task’s enormousness has stymied some of the most ambitious plans.
Thinning does work, when it’s done correctly. Wildfires behave as they did 100 years ago in places where the forest is thinned efficiently.
So some communities have decided to hone their efforts more strategically by targeting the places with the most value and saving the important parts of the forest — even if other parts are lost.
That’s where Flagstaff stands — a city still recovering from 2010’s disastrous Schultz Fire and subsequent flooding. A city hoping to prevent a repeat before it’s too late.
Flagstaff grew and prospered amid the ponderosa pines and incorporated the trees, with their signature rusty orange bark, into the core of the city’s identity. Northern Arizona University’s mascot is the Lumberjack. Countless events each year are billed as celebrations “in the pines.”
But the trees are more than a symbol. Without the trees as a buffer, watersheds could flood during a storm and funnel torrential waves of water into the city, wiping out parts of downtown Flagstaff and the NAU campus.
Downtown could be all but destroyed, leaving 5 million annual tourists with nowhere to stay. Half a billion dollars in tourism revenue washed away. Historic U.S. Route 66 submerged.
On the other side of the city, floods from burned forests could contaminate Lake Mary, which provides about half of Flagstaff’s drinking water. If Lake Mary is imperiled, officials might need to drill 11 new wells, dredge the lake and expand the water treatment facility, according to a cost-avoidance study.
The cost: $17 million to as much as $37 million.
Flagstaff has been here before. The Schultz Fire wreaked havoc on the city and its budget. The fire, subsequent flooding and mitigation alone cost a combined $59 million among city, county, state and federal agencies, according to a cost assessment from NAU.
But there are other factors beyond response and mitigation. Homes burned, habitat eroded, property values plummeted and a little girl died.
The conservative estimate puts the total cost between $133 and $147 million. For context, Flagstaff’s operating budget for fiscal 2018 is $302 million.
It could all happen again. Next time could be worse, officials warn.
“Every summer, we’re rolling dice,” Summerfelt said. “Every year that we sit on this situation and not act, we’re tempting fate.”
The Arizona Rural Policy Institute and others created a cost-avoidance study in 2014, warning of the disaster to come.
“This study assumes that post-fire flooding would be similar to a 500-year flood in the drainages below Dry Lake Hills,” it says. “Funneling previously unseen amounts of storm runoff through downtown Flagstaff, Northern Arizona University, and many of the city’s neighborhoods.”
The study noted the side effect of many fires in recent years has been “the pollution of water sources by post-fire runoff and loss of reservoir storage capacity.”
It paints a bleak picture, and there’s a possibility it isn’t bleak enough.
“The initial flows would be laden with ash and mud and would threaten hundreds of homes, businesses, and government buildings,” the study says. “These boundaries are only estimates and the actual reaches of a flood would be unpredictable.”
The study identified the cost of a catastrophic flood at between $573 million and $1.2 billion.
But predicting exactly where the fire could burn is its own challenge.
“You can’t identify 100 acres of ponderosa pine that isn’t heavy and ready to burn, until it’s already burned,” said Covington of NAU. “The potential for loss of life is much greater than it was in the Schultz Fire.”
It leaves a city doing what it can to protect its beauty, its jobs and its people.
The warning blares in all caps, just off mile marker 328 on Interstate 17, the main north-south road into town.
“READY, SET, GO!” the billboard’s red, yellow and green words signal. “Prepare now. Be alert. Evacuate!”
Get ready for the forest to burn, officials warn.
Get set for a 500-year flood, research suggests.
Go before it takes you, your home and your belongings, they may have to say.
Two years after the Schultz Fire, Flagstaff continued to prepare for the worst, but the city and its residents also decided not to wait without acting.
In November 2012, voters handily approved a $10-million bond, called the Flagstaff Watershed Protection Project, to prevent this from happening a second time. The idea was to pay for work up front and avoid a disaster and its billiondollar price tag.
Thinning, prescribed fire and logging were all covered in this project. Limit the fire’s potential to spread. Don’t just protect the trees, but — as the name suggests — protect the watershed.
FWPP is under the umbrella of the Four Forests Restoration Initiative — a project overseen by the U.S. Forest Service and known as 4FRI — and officials with both efforts are working hand-inhand.
Plans call for crews to treat areas in the Observatory Mesa, Dry Lake Hills and Mormon Mountain areas. Thin the trees, protect the watershed.
That’s where it gets expensive.
“It’s mud and rock and water in places we don’t know where it will go, quite honestly,” Summerfelt said.
But thinning forests isn’t as easy as cutting down trees.
Logging is more of a memory than an industry in Arizona. Thinning of several hundred acres in Dry Lake Hills was stalled after the contract holder defaulted. Thinned forests grow back into overgrown forests. There’s a budget shortfall, and the project might need more taxpayer funding. Areas along the Schultz scar still need maintenance.
It’s not easy, but it’s just about their only hope.
Covington was here before the fires were this bad. In many ways, he predicted them, too.
He can see the pines from his office at NAU. He’s been around since 1975, two years before the Radio Fire, which burned nearly 5,000 acres and seemed gargantuan at the time.
“People actually said, ‘Fires can’t get much bigger than that,’” he said.
The Schultz Fire burned more than 15,000 acres.
In his four-plus decades at the school, Covington has devoted himself to studying fires and ecological restoration. He saw the writing on the wall when he moved to Flagstaff, too.
“Shortly after I started, I looked at the situation and said, ‘Oh my Lord,’” he said.
Over time, fires have gotten larger, and it’s not by chance.
Heavy livestock grazing affected grassy fuels that let fires burn through an area every three to five years. Crown fires burned the tops of trees and, as a result, stands of forest were less productive. Ten to 15 years later, those stunted trees grew back and served as more fuel.
Conditions keep getting worse for Flagstaff, too. Fuel accumulates as trees grow, climate changes, temperatures increase, wind speeds vary, drought intensifies and wet thunder storms create ripe conditions for a fire.
“In ’76, we had a pretty severe drought and people were saying ... ‘We’ve never seen it this dry before,’” Covington said. “And now, we long for that kind of drought.”
Gov. Doug Ducey, at a press conference with state forester Jeff Whitney, one of Covington’s students from the 1970s, requested double the funding for wildfire prevention this year.
“I think that’ll help a lot,” Covington said.
It doesn’t take much to start a wildfire. The Schultz Fire started as an abandoned campfire. Shortly after, a storm cell rolled in.
The culprit was never found.
“If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” Covington said. “Just devastating ... (But) it really did educate people that it’s not just the fire.”
Out on Observatory Mesa, northwest of town, healthy forest butts up to the overgrown.
The area has been a major target for the city’s watershed protection. The city acquired the land from the state in 2014 and uses it for recreation: hiking, mountain biking, watching wildlife and spending time under the trees.
The area provides a snapshot of everything that’s at stake for the city, and it’s a key area to protect.
Observatory Mesa holds two tributaries to the Rio De Flag watershed. If the watershed isn’t protected, it could give way to a disastrous flood down-
town. The floods could be 10 feet deep, said Matt Millar, FWPP operations specialist.
Officials have thinned the area regularly and are closing in on their goal of treating about 2,300 acres.
Thinning can’t be done in one swift move. It takes time to target the right areas, preserve the right growth and continue to maintain it.
“The initial cost a community bears of a fire is after the firefighters go home,” Millar said. “The forest operates on a slower timescale than the timescale we operate on.”
As Millar hikes through the forest, he points to areas he’s been involved in treating, which is nearly everywhere.
Antelope prance just off Forest Road 515 on the way onto Observatory Mesa, seemingly unaware of the threats facing the forest.
Although officials are working to avoid a catastrophic fire, the ecosystem needs fire to survive.
“We need fire still in this ecosystem very regularly,” Millar said. “Just not the kind that burns through the crown. That’s not what they evolved with ... Prescribed fire in a stand that hasn’t had fire in a while is a very blunt tool.” This is where disaster meets relief. Crews wielding drip torches spray flames to prevent something much worse.
It’s the first controlled burn of the year, called the Howard Burn Project, aimed at 800 acres of land southeast of the Mountainaire community. Crews meet early in the morning for a briefing, the Forest Service, Flagstaff hotshots and other agencies working together.
The crews, coffee in hand, gather around the box of doughnuts and look at the map taped to the side of a pickup truck. On it they can see where they’re burning and where they’ll have to stop if the wind turns against them.
Sunglasses, hardhats and a lot of bright yellow shirts identify the crew. They’ll split off soon and focus on different areas of the forest, some equipped with axes, some using drip torches to burn the shrubs.
Controlled burns simulate the lowburning fires that once swept forest floors of debris and undergrowth, removing fuel that could continue to accumulate and feed more dangerous fires.
Matt Ortiz walks along the road, swinging his arm left and right every couple of steps. Every swing brings a new flame, every flame brings hope that one much larger won’t consume the forest in the coming summers.
A firefighter for nine years and a Flagstaff Hotshot, Ortiz started firefighting after his construction job took a dive during the Great Recession.
“I’ve just been swinging because a lot of it’s really patchy and it takes a lot to get that grass to move around,” he said.
In some places, smoke turns the baby-blue sky grey. There’s a sharp line between the two, but the grey encroaches on the blue with each new burn.
The burn is visible from I-17, where drivers coming to and from Flagstaff can find its billowing smoke.
Wind shifts, and the crew waits for a couple hours, sitting on stumps and eating lunch.
It’s the long, meticulous job of keeping the forest alive.
Last December, the only bidder on a Dry Lake Hills thinning project south of Humphreys Peak defaulted after discovering what it would take to construct a mill to process the wood cleared out of the 642 acres in need of treatment.
This set the project back, though a Phoenix-based logging company won the contract in May. Dakota Logging, which has experience in northern Arizona timber sales, has one year to finish the work.
4FRI and the logging industry as a whole in Arizona have their share of obstacles. 4FRI started with the goal of bridging the gap between conservation and industry by healthily thinning the forests and creating jobs doing it.
The Forest Service can’t afford to do all that thinning on its own, which is where the private sector steps in.
“I think nobody went into 4FRI fully understanding the economic challenges of doing this work,” said Diane Vosick, policy and partnerships director for NAU’s Ecological Restoration Institute. “They thought they were just going to bring back that old industry model and that we would be able to just keep moving in terms of doing work.”
The initiative has struggled with efficiency. The old model of thinning went after old, overgrown trees. The new model goes after the tops of trees, the slash and other small pieces that pose a threat to the forest. The small pieces aren’t exactly money-makers, though they make up about half of the thinning.
“We’ve had a very sobering lesson the last five years of this grand experiment, failing to fully understand how complicated it is to create a brand new industry,” Vosick said.
“We have this issue of 50 percent of the material, with nowhere to take it ... the biggest market for this stuff right now is Mexico,” she said. “Everybody that’s in Arizona and New Mexico is competing for that same Mexican marketplace, which is a low-value marketplace.”
Some of the wood also goes toward pellet production, though it’s nowhere near as lucrative as a full-fledged logging industry, officials say.
Getting the industry back on track could take years. Waiting to thin forests isn’t feasible when officials fear they could burn down at any moment, either.
“I think all of us are committed to seeing industry re-established in some form,” Summerfelt said. “But, at the same time, we need to realize the reality of what we’re up against. And we can’t wait. That fire could occur well before we have industry established.”
Rebuilding industry is one thing, operating on a fixed income is another. The FWPP faces a budget shortfall, though officials say they planned for one.
The city has spent more than $3 million of the $10 million bond and has treated nearly 40 percent of the targeted land. But officials say that land was the low-hanging fruit, large swaths of state and city land that’s easy to reach and easy to thin. Federal land will require more firepower and more funding.
Slightly less than $5.2 million is in bond-fund leverage, Millar said.
“We knew five years ago when the bond passed that we were going to come back to the community at the five-year mark to have a conversation about where we are and what we need to get there,” Summerfelt said. “We started that conversation last summer.”
Officials aren’t sure where they’ll get additional funding, whether it will be another bond or another funding mechanism, but they’re confident it will come through.
“It’s not unexpected that we’re in the position we are,” Summerfelt said. “We had always hoped ... that our cost estimates were good and we were going to be there. But, the reality is ... we’re going to need additional funding to finish all the planned work.”
Although the FWPP has tackled forest-thinning as a project, it’s not something that will truly ever finish. Long after crews leave a thinning job, the forest — and everything in it — keeps growing.
“Fundamentally, trees grow,” Vosick said. “If we don’t keep particularly using prescribed fire in order to reduce the number of seedlings that take hold after you’ve thinned, we’ll find ourselves in this exact same position again in 30 to 50 years.”
Experts agree forests need regular treatment; hand thinning, controlled burns and mills are all used to keep them healthy. But they’ve found that attracting timber companies is easier said than done in Arizona’s forests.
“Our biggest challenge was the upand-down of the market,” said James Perkins, part-owner of Perkins Timber Harvesting in Williams. “One of my main goals in my life before I die is to see Bill Williams thinned, because I have the capability of doing that … but right now, the Forest Service doesn’t have any money to do that.”
Perkins has logged in Williams for 52 years. He was there in the industry’s heyday, and he’s seen the market ebb and flow.
He runs the business with his family. Transporting and selling logs isn’t as lucrative as it used to be. Selling chips has proved worthwhile, so they’re in the process of building their own sawmill, he said.
“These trees don’t have a lot of value,” Perkins said.
The issues and default with Flagstaff’s contract reflect a broader set of issues facing forest health in the western U.S.: The trees aren’t always great for business, and there aren’t a lot of economic incentives for industry to set up shop.
In some ways, the forest thinning from early in the 20th century paved the way for today’s overcrowded forests.
By focusing on fire suppression rather than using fire as the tool trees evolved with, forest managers let trees continue to grow. And grow. And grow.
“For decades and decades, the goal was to try to suppress fires,” said Pat Graham, the Nature Conservancy’s Arizona director. “With fire suppression, the trees ended up growing. We used to have 40-60 ponderosas per acre, then we had 1,000 per acre.”
Graham said the forests are caught between a rock and a hard place. Loggers need to thin more than before, do it a faster pace, and know that they aren’t going to make a killing in the process.
“We need to go faster and at a bigger scale,” he said. “And by the way, it’s not worth very much.”
And it’s not that way by chance. The industry is in this pickle, in part, because its practices have “flipped the economic model of historic forest management on its head,” Graham said.
“Before, we were harvesting only the largest, most-valuable trees from the forest and kind of leaving the rest of it to be piled up and burned,” he said. “Today, you’re leaving the largest, mostvaluable trees in the forest and you have to leave the stuff you used to pile up and burn. So, there’s really not a lot of economic incentive for the industry.”
It’s a simple equation. Larger trees equal more wood, and more wood equals more money. Leaving the large trees behind is like leaving sacks of money in the forest. It isn’t exactly attractive to business.
That’s a problem for the government, which relies on the private sector to bid on contracts and make the big investments in mills, logging and the like.
“There was a day when industry needed the Forest Service,” Graham said. “Today, the Forest Service needs industry.”
No matter how much Flagstaff prepares, nature can still be unpredictable. Officials have targeted key locations in their thinning, but it’s not a catch-all.
In a 2012 resiliency and preparedness study from the city, officials warn that the threat of fire is only going to get worse as time goes on.
“The Southwest is undergoing a dramatic demographic change, with the population of Arizona growing by almost 25 percent in the last 10 years,” it says. “We are in the grip of a drought that has persisted for more than a decade — exacerbated by increasing temperatures, extreme precipitation intensity, snowpack reductions and other climate-related changes.”
Falling in line with other research, the study suggests the outlook may not be gloomy enough.
“In the past two years, Flagstaff has experienced record warming, severe winter storms, record low moisture, catastrophic wildfires and subsequent flooding events,” the study says. “As climate and related extreme weather con-
ditions change, so will the demand for city services, smart economic growth and community development.”
Faced with upward of $1 billion in damages, the city is eager to avoid a repeat of the Schultz Fire’s aftermath and the issues that could’ve prevented it.
Ninety-six percent of survey respondents said their properties had never been damaged by the flood or runoff prior to the Schultz flooding, according to the cost assessment study. As a result, “virtually no one in the area had, or was required to have” flood insurance.
After, half the residents surveyed had flood insurance.
Nine percent reported personal injury due to the fire and flooding, while 13 percent reported sickness. And officials remember, their voices often tinged with pain, a 12-year-old girl died.
If the threats posed at the forest, at the city and at the people seem like part of a doomsday scenario, that’s because they are, they say.
“Even that economic figure does not represent everything,” Forest Service District Ranger Mike Elson said.
Much like the Schultz Fire’s effects are still felt in Flagstaff, a more catastrophic fire could be felt 100 years down the line, he said.
Wally Covington gets out of his car and walks through the Schultz Fire’s long black scar, still prominent eight years after its last ember was put out.
He’s concerned the next fire will deal a deadly blow. The Schultz Fire still burns the city, though it’s long extinguished.
Fires aren’t just a flash in the pan. They’re events, drawn out long after they’re extinguished.
He climbs back in his white Ford SUV and drives back to campus. He was here long before the Schultz Fire, and he hopes the protection efforts will be in time to stymie something worse.
“You’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop,” he said. “Another fire, another fire, another fire.”
Officials expect this summer to be brutal, its fires intense. They hope they’re in time.
“All of this indicates,” he said, “that we need to get on this in a hurry.”
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