Prescribed Burns Vital For Forest Management, Health

For more than 50 years Smokey Bear has effectively taught us that “only you can prevent forest fires.” If you listen to what Smokey has been saying, what I’m about to tell you may sound wrong, especially coming from a U.S. Forest Service official: As good land stewards we need to start more fires on purpose - for a purpose.

Fire is an important ecological element of America’s wild lands. For thousands of years fire has shaped the forests and rangelands of the Pacific Northwest, creating the landscapes we all enjoy. Many plant and animal communities evolved with fire. The existence of some depend upon fire. However, in the last 80-100 years, we did our best to prevent fires, creating a very different and dangerous landscape. As a result, our forests and rangelands face larger, hotter and faster-moving fires than ever. It is inevitable that these forests and rangelands will burn. The question is, when they burn will fire be a friend or foe?

The recent fire in Los Alamos, N.M., is a tragic example of fire the foe - destroying homes, threatening lives, and damaging natural resources. Ironically, this fire began as a friend, a prescribed fire intended to clear flammable vegetation and prevent just such a disaster.

When used by professionals as a land management tool, prescribed fire - the friend - has many benefits:

Protecting the quality of drinking water flowing from municipal watersheds.

Restoring or improving wildlife habitat.

Preparing sites for tree planting.

Increasing forage for livestock grazing.

Protecting old growth forests. Reducing the risk to communities adjoining public lands.

Prescribed burning can also reduce the impact of smoke on people’s health. By selecting the time of year, wind direction and atmospheric conditions, fire managers can reduce and better disperse the smoke produced. Finally, it just makes good sense. Prescribed fires to accomplish these benefits cost an average of $60 to $95 per acre, while costs to suppress fires average $205 per acre - with less certain benefits and greater risks to people and their property.

On average in the Pacific Northwest, the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management use prescribed fire on about 160,000 acres per year. That’s just a drop in the fire hose; we should be burning almost a million acres each year to restore and maintain proper ecological conditions. To do that we will need your continued support.

The recent federal moratorium on new prescribed fires in the west provides a good chance for us to pause, review how we plan and conduct prescribed fires, and find out what we can do to make certain the experience at Los Alamos is not repeated in the Pacific Northwest. When we resume use of this important tool I want you to know that we will continue to take precautions to ensure our fires stay within the intended burn area. We will do this primarily by:

Completing a thorough assessment of the risk involved with each project and the actions that will be taken in the event things go wrong.

Operating only when the site-specific weather forecast is favorable.

Ensuring, given the combination of weather and fuels, that the available people and equipment are able to handle both lighting the fire and suppressing any fires outside the burn area.

Finally, after these requirements are met, we will use a small fire to test whether the fire will behave as expected.

In reality, successful application of prescribed fire remains both art and science. We rely on experienced professionals to know when it is right to burn and when it is not. Fortunately, we have the best wildland fire management professionals in the world making those calls. However, despite all of our expertise and precautions, things occasionally go wrong and a prescribed fire escapes. Over the long term, just half of one percent of prescribed fire projects in the Pacific Northwest have escaped to become wildfires. Of those, even fewer caused significant damage. In my book, that is a risk we have to continue to take if we are going to save lives, protect private property, and restore the health of our forests and rangelands.