Felice Pace

California Governor Schwarzenegger wants to build two new dams - Sites and Temperance Flat. They are being sold as necessary to cope with the reduction in Sierra Nevada, Cascade and Klamath Mountains snowpack expected as a result of climate change. New and “enhanced” storage is being marketed by Lester Snow, director of California’s Department of Water Resources (DWR) as part of a “portfolio approach” which also calls for urban water conservation, better groundwater facilities, improved wastewater processing and research into lowering the cost of desalination. The dams are to provide increased capacity in order to catch earlier runoff that – according to climate change data and predictions - will no longer be held in mountain snowpack.

Schwarzenegger and Snow are counting on the climate change predictions to be fairly accurate. If the actual climate does not follow the predictions, the new and “enhanced’ reservoirs might never fill. Furthermore, increasing surface storage would result in more extensive water loss through evaporation. In 1998 the measured evaporation from California reservoirs was about a million acre feet - that’s enough water to cover a million acres of land with a foot of water. That’s a lot of water but the amount will rise if new and “enhanced’ reservoirs are developed. Furthermore, if climate change results in higher summer temperatures evaporation from all reservoirs will increase.

(Read on …)

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

Most of Colorado’s lodgepole forests will be dead in 5 years, victims of drought and voracious pine beetles. The thought is crushingly depressing, especially considered alongside the state’s dying aspen. And all those dead trees create a serious fire hazard, a danger that is only intensified by global warming.

Rep. Mark Udall has a solution, not for the depression, but for the lodgepole carcasses: Turn ‘em into fuel. The dead trees will emit carbon either way, whether burned on the ground or in gas tanks; might as well get some mileage out of them (other potential uses are woodstove pellets and furniture).
(Read on …)

Marty Durlin

Online Editor

The Washington Post reports that homeowners who followed fire-preventive building and landscaping rules survived the recent fires in California, while nearby houses that paid less attention to those regulations went up in flames.

While one house survived in Rancho Del Rio, a next door neighbor’s house is “a heap of ash and twisted metal…the hubcaps of a car in the driveway had melted into streams of silver-colored lava.”
Building requirements included boxed eaves, fire sprinklers, spark arrestors on chimneys and noncombustible roofing materials rated Class A.

Landscaping required fire-resistant plants such as monkey flower and sage. And it required that homeowners cut down eucalyptus and pine trees, with their oily bark, dry leaves and needles. Palm trees act “like bombs in a fire, when those embers get up in them,” said Kurtis Anton, a builder.
Other fire-resistant flowering plants that grow well in California include California redbud, ceanothus “concha” (California lilac), common yarrow, and French lavender. Trees include coast live oak, California sycamore and toyon. For perennials and annuals, choose California fuchsia and beard tongue, and for groundcover, try wild strawberry.

“We wanted some prettier plants, but they said no,” said one homeowner. Her home, in a Rancho Sante Fe development named Crosby (after Bing), was undamaged.

There are more than 3 million homes in the state classified as being at “very high” or “extreme risk” of wildfire.

You can download a 50-page booklet developed by the Metropolitan Water District and The Family of Southern California Water Agencies, with more plants and advice on how to keep them pruned and maintained.

Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

By now, everyone knows that a good portion of southern California is aflame. 500,000 evacuated thus far, more than 1,000 homes burned, two killed. And the flames aren’t slowing down.

Some of the best coverage:

LA Times: They’re in the thick of it, and have spectacular images on the website, plus good Google maps showing the fires with regular updates.

Get the southern view with the San Diego Union Tribune.

Very cool satellite view from NASA — it shows how the Santa Ana winds, counterintuitively, are pushing the fires towards the ocean.

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

Two new studies show that the U.S. Forest Service is wasting huge amounts of money and, sadly, firefighters’ lives to defend homes in the WUI, the wildland-urban interface where more and more Westerners choose to build. The agency says it spends up to a billion dollars a year protecting homes in the woods — and last fall, five firefighters died trying to save a vacation home that had been classified as “nondefensible.”

Headwaters Economics just released a study on the costs of firefighting in the WUI. Some highlights:

• Only 14% of forested western private land adjacent to public land is currently developed for residential use. Based on current growth trends, there is tremendous potential for future development on the remaining 86%.
• One in five homes in the wildland urban interface is a second home or cabin, compared to one in twenty-five homes on other western private lands.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

The Cascade wildfires in central Idaho have burned more than 250 square miles. Soon they’ll merge with the 75-square-mile Landmark fires, reports AP. Up to a thousand firefighters are still deployed on that front. Some shot video of flames licking and roaring up to the edge of a firefighters’ camp. Dramatic. Working through a group called Firefighters United for Safety Ethics and Ecology, they’ve posted it on YouTube. Worth a look, to help us understand the forces and risks of our fire policies, here.

It’s a growing genre: wildfire crew videos. You can watch another crew’s wildfire video — and be warned, it comes with rock ‘n’ roll — here.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

And guess it was inevitable … I wonder, are they designer firefighters, arriving in custom, swooshy fire trucks and cute outfits? One more sign of the times, here.

Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

Sizzling, scorching, torrid, flaming — they all describe the West right now. A heat wave stretched from Boise to Tucson in late June and early July, bringing record-breaking, triple-digit temperatures to places as unlikely as Billings, Mont. Phoenix reached about 116 degrees last week, but the big records were broken in the coolest part of the day: day after day of minimum temps in the 90s.

Now, the heat wave seems to be subsiding somewhat, but it’s left a lot of fires in its wake. Most notably is the Milford Flat fire in central Utah, which had burned 300,000 acres — or 469 square miles — as of this morning, making it the largest ever in the state. Thus far this year, some 2.48 million acres have burned. That’s more than the ten year average, but less than in ‘06, ‘05, ‘04, and ‘02.

For all of you natural disaster junkies out there, here’s a list of fire-watching resources:

Ray Ring’s “A losing battle” HCN feature story, along with related articles

More past coverage from High Country News

Goat Blog postings relating to wildfire

National Fire News (updated roster of current fires and other stats, along with links to other resources)

Active Fire Map

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Of the recent news in our region, two tragedies stick in my mind. Both occurred in Utah, and both were lethal.

First, on the night of June 17, a black bear tore into a family’s tent and dragged away 11-year-old Samuel Evan Ives, in a campground two miles up a dirt road in the Wasatch Mountains.

According to the AP:

… The boy, his mother, stepfather and a 6-year-old brother were sleeping in a large tent in a primitive camping area, about 30 miles southeast of Salt Lake City. The stepfather heard a scream, and the boy and his sleeping bag were gone. … The sleeping bag was pulled out of the tent (and) the boy’s body was found about 400 yards away.

Then, the evening of June 29, a wildfire in the foothills of the Uinta Mountains turned into “a cyclone of fire,” roared through a hay field and burned to death three farmers, who were trying to use sprinklers to save the field. It was also a family tragedy: The victims included 63-year-old George Houston, a retired U.S. Forest Service staffer who’d fought a lot of fires, and his 43-year-old son, Tracy Houston. They saved Tracy’s son, 11-year-old Duane Houston, by telling him to run for his life while they lagged behind.

Details on the bear attack, then the fire, and in both, the families:

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

With a couple hundred homes near Lake Tahoe burned down by a forest fire this week, and other wildfires taking hold in the West, let’s do a multimedia fest:

(1) For the rush of what’s like to battle wildfires, in a raucous 9-minute webvideo, click here.

(2) For a map of today’s wildfires at a glance (and you can click on the hotspots to get specific info), begin here.

(3) For a satellite view of the Tahoe smoke plume, updated regularly, click here.

(4) For satellite views of other states, updated regularly as the fire season continues, begin by clicking here.

For our previous posts on wildfires, with links to global warming, click here and scroll down.

Editorial note: Wildfires are serious business. The hotshots’ YouTube show is more than a bit of leavening: It’s a window into the hotshots’ psychology, what it takes for some people to get out there and risk injury and death against the flames.

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

Should burned forests be logged and then replanted, or left alone to regenerate naturally? That question has swirled for years in the wake of big fires in the Western woods. Forest managers have argued that forests recover more quickly when they’re salvage-logged and then replanted, but more recent research challenges that conventional wisdom.

Now, a new study from Oregon State indicates that salvage logging and replanting actually increases the severity of later fires:

(The researchers) found that fire severity was 16 to 61 percent higher in logged and planted areas, compared to those that had burned severely and were left alone in a fire 15 years earlier. The study was done in areas that had burned twice – once in the 1987 Silver Fire, and again in the massive 2002 Biscuit Fire, one of the largest forest fires in modern United States history.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Paul Pringle of the LA Times paints a colorful profile of Scott Bowman and the airborne battle against the West’s first big blaze this year:

“I’m exhausted,” Bowman said Wednesday after nearly 14 hours in the sooty skies, repeatedly dousing the fire line as it advanced on backyards in the Los Feliz area (of metro LA) and threatened storied attractions such as the Griffith Park merry-go-round.

“There was just so much smoke up there,” said Bowman, who made more than 100 solo runs in his Bell 412, dodging power lines, treetops and similar hazards that keep some fire agencies from flying after dark.

Bowman dumped 360 gallons each time, often with pinpoint precision that depended entirely on his naked eye and the sort of instinct that comes from years of drills.

… Bowman hails from a family of L.A. city firefighters; his grandfather signed up in 1926, his father in 1951. Bowman himself has 27 years with the department, the last seven with the elite helicopter squad, whose rigorous training regimen weeds out many applicants.

Thus, the writer provides this good personal perspective into the ongoing wildfire crisis.

Meanwhile, no less than five former chiefs of the U.S. Forest Service have provided an authoritative, scathing perspective on wildfire policy. They ran the forest agency from 1979 to 2007, and they recently told Congress that as wildfires get worse pretty much every year, thanks to global warming, the wildfire battles threaten to destroy the agency itself — consuming budgets for many other necessary duties and etc etc.

I analyzed the policy crisis in High Country News in 2003 and nothing has changed since then. I don’t tout my work that often, not in my character to do it really, but this particular story still has the most insight into wildfires, under the headline, “A losing battle.”

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

This year’s State of the Rockies Report Card was just released by Colorado College. Every year, undergrads at the school study important issues affecting the Rocky Mountain region (defined as Colorado, Idaho, Arizona, Nevada, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming). Their cheery conclusions, unfortunately, are all too familar:

The elements of a “perfect storm” loom on the horizon for the Rocky Mountain West: drought, diseased and infested forests, struggles for water, new demands for domestic energy production and a population growing at 4.5 times the national pace.

Other findings from the report:

• Twenty-one million acres of the region’s forests suffer from pine beetles, blister rust and other diseases.
• The region’s population grew 9 percent from 2000 to 2005 (the national growth rate was 2 percent).
• Irrigation sucks up nearly 90 percent of the region’s water; the next largest use, public water supply, takes only 6.4 percent.
• More than 90 percent of federal lease and royalty payments for oil and gas development last year went to states in the region.

Plus there’s a nicely-done summary of the history of land management in the Rockies.