Proposal To Cut Planned Burns Sparks Dispute Forest Service Says Practice Can Be Done Safely Year-Round

Reigniting a dispute over intentional burning of national forests, Rep. Bob Smith of Oregon wants the Forest Service to stop setting fires in the West during the three hottest summer months.

But agency officials say they have no immediate plans to back off their increased use of controlled burns as a way to clear dead timber and reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires.

If anything, the prescribed burning may be stepped up this summer as the acreage burned intentionally nearly doubles over the next few years.

“We typically do it in the spring and fall. But there is a lot of opportunity to do summertime burning and stay within the prescriptions and not cause resource damage,” said Tom Patton, top fire ecologist at Forest Service headquarters.

As a key backer of the Northwest’s timber industry, the Republican Smith, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, would prefer that the maximum amount of wood be removed through salvage logging.

In addition to providing raw materials for timber-starved saw mills, he says such logging is safer than setting fires, which sometimes get away from well-intentioned forest rangers.

Last summer, Smith said, the Forest Service intended to let a fire near Hells Canyon keep burning until it had charred about 10,000 acres near the Oregon-Idaho border.

“But it was August. It was 90 degrees. Winds were whipping to 40 mph. It burned 50,000 acres, shockingly,” Smith said in mock disbelief during an Ag Committee hearing earlier this month.

“If it is in July or August or September in the West, there is going to be a problem. Is there any reason to have prescribed fire in the height of fire season?” he asked Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck.

Dombeck said fires are intentionally set only when weather conditions are right and when no people or buildings are in the vicinity.

Dombeck said controlled burns allow the agency to fight fire more on their own terms.

“If there’s a disaster, Mother Nature takes its own course,” he told a House subcommittee earlier this year. “There’s no ability to control the situation.”

The administration is seeking $30 million to $50 million to fortify the burning program in fiscal 1998, which begins Oct. 1. Those funds would allow for prescribed burning of 850,000 acres to 1.3 million acres.

That’s up from an estimated 750,000 acres this year and an average of about 300,000 in each of the previous 10 years.

Controlled burns were made necessary by decades of “extensive, overzealous if you will, fire suppression,” Dombeck said.

While Smith wants the fires out for the summer, Rep. Sam Farr, D-Calif., wants some to keep burning.

He questioned why the Forest Service put out a recent fire on the Los Padres National Forest in California, which had been scheduled for a future controlled burn.

In many cases, some dead and dying timber must be cleared through salvage operations before a fire can be safely set, Smith was told by Ann Bartuska, director of the Forest Service’s forest health protection staff.

In Eastern Oregon, Eastern Washington and much of Idaho, only about 10 percent of the lands facing fire threats can safely be subjected to prescribed burns without some preliminary cutting, she said.