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| FIRE FIGHT | |
 July 1, 2002  |
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The huge forest fires in the West this year have triggered a debate over how to keep them from being so damaging. Betty Ann Bowser reports on the conditions that helped spark the wildfires. |
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This is how Rick Cables of the U.S. Forest Service describes them: |
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| A system of fire suppression | ||||||||||||||||||||
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BETTY ANN BOWSER: Fed by record drought conditions in the West, this
fire south of Denver spread 17 miles in six hours. The Rodeo Fire in
Arizona doubled in size in one day. REP. MARK UDALL: Fire is a part of these ecosystems in the West. Dr. Wayne Shepard of the Forest Service took the NewsHour to an area of forest that was overrun in the recent Hayman Fire south of Denver. DR. WAYNE SHEPARD: Before the fire reached here about a 1/2 mile it was a crown fire. It was really cooking -- coming down the hill destroying all the trees in its path. When it hit the thinned area west of here the wind shifted it allowed the fire to drop in under the trees and burn on the forest floor. BETTY ANN BOWSER: Almost to lay down? DR. WAYNE SHEPARD: It laid down. That's the term the firefighters use. It laid down and it burned under the forest here, not in the crowns of the trees. And so as we look back through here you see a lot of green -- even small trees -- a lot of those trees will survive and almost all of the large trees will survive in this area. |
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| Thinning forests | ||||||||||||||||||||
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BETTY ANN BOWSER: The Hayman Fire almost stopped in its tracks in another
part of the forest where the government had thinned the trees with a
controversial 8,000 acre deliberate or prescribed burn last year. But
it's an imperfect science. In another section of the forest that was
treated and thinned out, all of the trees were destroyed. BETTY ANN BOWSER: Is it sort of like improving your chances at the roulette table in Las Vegas? DR. WAYNE SHEPARD: I would say so. Yes. Congressman Scott McInnis, who represents the area where the three
Colorado fires are still burning, blames environmental groups for slowing
the process down. RICK CABLES: In the Forest Service our people try to design projects -- we call them bullet proof or they will stand up to the scrutiny of the appeal process in the courts. So we build documentation that's very onerous, it's expensive; it's voluminous. We create these documents that will sustain themselves and that we can survive a court challenge or an appeal. All that is time, energy, that's directed away from getting the work done on the ground. |
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| The Forest Service and environmental groups | ||||||||||||||||||||
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BETTY ANN BOWSER: Greg Aplet of the Wilderness Society says very few
Forest Service thinning programs have been opposed by environmental
groups. He cited a 1999 Government Accounting Office report based on
Forest Service data. BETTY ANN BOWSER: And Sierra Club Regional Director Steve Smith says
his organization has been unfairly portrayed as obstructionist. BETTY ANN BOWSER: As the policy debate continues, so does the risk. The Forest Service estimates right now in Colorado alone conditions are ripe for 40 more big, destructive and potentially deadly fires this year. JIM LEHRER: Betty Ann's second report will examine the impact of building homes in the forests. |
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BETTY
ANN BOWSER: Mother Nature is driving wildfires in the West with such
ferocity that firefighters compare them to the perfect storm -- they
even create their own tornadoes and weather systems.
MERRILL
KAUFFMAN, Ecologist, USDA Forest Service: I would not be at all surprised
if we had such a fire to hear that hundreds of people's lives will be
lost in those kinds of fires and along with a lot of firefighters and
law enforcement people trying to get those people out and to protect
them and so forth. There's simply-- these fires move so fast, so explosively
that people hardly have time to understand that there's a bad fire and
by that time their point of egress may be lost, they may be overrun
by fire. 
August
20th 1910 hurricane force winds blew fires through Idaho and Montana
destroying three million acres and killing 87 people in less than two
days. Americans were so frightened by the fires that the U.S. Forest
Service made its primary mission fire suppression and eventually its
poster boy, Smokey Bear.
REP.
MARK UDALL: Smokey the Bear was such an icon for all of us that we couldn't
see what was really occurring. We got to this situation because we suppressed
fire for 100 years. We're in the midst of a drought cycle that's probably
the most severe in at least 100 years and we've had a real pattern of
growth in Colorado where a lot of people have moved here; we've doubled
our population in the last 20 years from about two million to over four
million. And a lot of those people are living in this so-called red
zone area where forests are more prone to catastrophic fire particularly
if you suppress fuel loads and you have a dry climatic pattern.
BETTY
ANN BOWSER: Through all those years of fire suppression, thousands of
acres of acres of new forest were able to grow in the mid elevation
areas of the mountains with trees that were not as fire resistant. 
DR.
WAYNE SHEPARD: Thinning a forest doesn't work in all situations. You
know, that's not the cure-all if you will to preventing wildfires. It
certainly probably contributes to the lessening effect of wildfires.
There are many other factors involved: The climate, the weather, the
direction the wind was blowing.
REP.
SCOTT McINNIS: They obstruct us at every point in an attempt to try
and thin a forest. They interpret thinning a forest as logging a forest.
The Forest Service has to deal with litigation every day of the week.
These national organizations like the National Sierra Club, the Aspen
Wilderness Workshop kind of people, they throw these lawsuits at them
you know right hand over the left hand and so the Forest Service has
to take a lot of resources to defend themselves in litigation.
GREG
APLET: The Forest Service reported that they were implementing 1,671
fuel reduction projects. Out of that 1,600, 20 had been appealed not
just by environmentalists but also by industry interests and by individuals
an so forth. But approximately 1 percent of those fuel reduction projects
had been appealed by anyone. And of the those the majority, the issues
had been resolved and the project was proceeding. So the allegation
just doesn't hold water.
STEVE
SMITH: The Sierra Club has not appealed or objected to a fuels reduction
project that's close to where people live around communities, around
individual homes or clusters of homes. We have indeed objected to misdirection
of that fuels reduction money when it's applied farther into backcountry
or into roadless areas where it's not going to have as strong an effect
on that fire intensity reduction as it can have if you do it where people
live.