To control forest fires, states light more of their own

RUST IC» Tramping over a charred mountainside here one foggy morning, Matt Champa glowed with satisfaction. “Deer and elk will love this,” said the U.S. Forest Service “burn boss,” gesturing to a cluster of blackened trees that eventually will fall and create more space for forage plants.

Champa and his team set fire to this area last month, part of the 1,900-acre Pingree Hill prescribed burn on the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests and Pawnee National Grassland to improve wildlife habitat and create space that firefighters could use to defend nearby residents and the Cache la Poudre River from a wildfire.

The Forest Service and its partners hope over the next decade to carry out a series of such prescribed burns in northern Colorado to protect communities and the river, which supplies water to about 300,000 people.

Public and private landowners across the West increasingly are using prescribed fire to reduce wildfire danger. More than 3 million acres were treated with prescribed fire in Western states in 2017, up from approximately 2 million in 2011, according to a survey by the National Association of State Foresters and the Coalition of Prescribed Fire Councils Inc.

But mountains, a dry climate and air pollution concerns make it difficult to safely set the region’s forests on fire. Burn bosses who manage prescribed fires struggle to assemble teams because federal, state and some local firefighters qualified to work on a burn could leave anytime to fight a wildfire elsewhere.

And controlled burns can be unpopular, even dangerous. After a 2012 Colorado State Forest Service burn sparked a wildfire near Denver that killed three people, then-gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, suspended prescribed burnings.

Yet experts who study public lands say low-intensity, controlled fires are a crucial tool for reducing wildfire risk — particularly as more people move to forested areas and climate change fuels hotter, drier summers. Controlled fires can clear out large swaths of trees and undergrowth quickly and inexpensively and create a better environment, over the long term, for native plants and animals.

“Prescribed fire is a critical tool, because it’s the most effective way to reduce fuels to make people and communities safe,” said Brett Wolk, assistant director of the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute at Colorado State University. “It also is the only way to restore ecological processes in the forest,” he said, such as removing debris on the surface and creating opportunities for new plants and trees to grow.

Nationwide, however, the cost of fighting wildfires has for years crowded out federal funding for other forest activities, including prescribed fire. Congress last year created a wildfire disaster fund that should help address the problem starting in 2020.

Although President Donald Trump has called for more fire mitigation work, he didn’t propose substantially more funding for it in his latest budget.

Colorado spent $40 million putting out wildfires in 2018, but the state forest service spent about $7 million on work that would make forests healthier and could reduce a wildfire’s intensity.

“If we don’t resolve how we invest our funding, and we continue to try to suppress our way out of the issue, we’re not changing anything,” said Jonathan Bruno, senior operations director for the Coalition for the Upper South Platte, a nonprofit based in Lake George. “We’re literally just throwing water on the hot stuff — and doing it again and again.”

Fighting fire with fire

Years of destructive wildfires have state, federal and private landowners asking what they can do to reduce fire risk.

Northern Colorado environmentalists and foresters redoubled their efforts to push for more tree thinning and prescribed fire — treatments that often happen in sequence, with fire clearing away debris left on the ground after men or machines cut down trees and brush — after major wildfires swept the state in 2012.

More than 5,000 fires ignited in Colorado that year, including the devastating Waldo Canyon fire near Colorado Springs. In northern Colorado, the High Park wildfire torched more than 87,000 acres along the Cache la Poudre River, destroying more than 250 homes and setting the stage for widespread flooding the following year. Ghostly, blackened tree trunks still cover many of the mountainsides along the river.

The High Park and Hewlett Gulch fires spurred the creation of the Coalition for the Poudre River Watershed, a nonprofit focused on reducing wildfire risk and keeping the river and its tributaries healthy.

Now the group is teaming up with the Nature Conservancy, local government agencies and the Forest Service, among others, to launch a partnership focused on identifying, planning and implementing prescribed fire treatments in the area.

“There has been an evolving and growing conversation around prescribed fire,” said Jen Kovecses, the coalition’s executive director.

While cutting down trees and brush helps thin the forest, she said, controlled burns can treat larger areas faster. Plus, she added, “wildfire is actually a key ecological process.”

Western forests evolved to regularly burn and regenerate, but decades of policy focused on putting out wildfires has helped foster overgrown forests of dense, thin trees — fuel for massive, high-intensity fires.

Prescribed fire experts try to ensure burns don’t blaze out of control. Accidents such as Colorado’s Lower North Fork fire are “extremely, extremely rare,” said Mark Melvin, chairman of the Coalition of Prescribed Fire Councils. Although his group doesn’t collect data on prescribed fires that escape, he said, he can’t think of another fire that killed anyone.

Champa’s team prepared the final Pingree Hill burn area by cutting down some trees, lopping off low-hanging tree limbs, and digging a dirt track or a fire line to contain the fire on one side. Some 25 firefighters monitored the flames as they moved downhill; two firetrucks were parked on the dirt road nearby, just in case.

Yet despite the benefits of controlled burns, they are less common in Western states than in other parts of the country, particularly the Southeast. There, prescribed fires tend to be smaller and easier to execute, Melvin said. Prescribed fire also is widely accepted in the South for cultural and historical reasons, a 2018 Forest Service report said.

Topography and weather are part of the problem in the West. To safely set a prescribed fire, firefighters need to assess the steepness of the slope, relative humidity, fuel moisture, wind speed and wind direction. In the mountains, where the weather is unpredictable, it can be difficult to find a good day to burn. During a drought or a heat wave, setting fire to the forest becomes dangerous.

“We have to be cognizant, we have to be very careful when we’re doing this,” said Scott Mclean, deputy chief of communications at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.