Wildfires
Photo by Marcos Gomez
This has been a stressful couple of weeks. As fires have raged throughout western Oregon, I have been on high alert, and my nerves have been on edge. I have not left our forest in almost two weeks, double checking our fire truck and watching and waiting, ready to deal with a potential fire start. As is natural in any trying situation such as this, we want to find a reason for why this is happening and assign blame. This is part of the process of coping and coming to terms with the devastation and finding a way to move forward. The question I hear over and over is did bad forest management cause the Labor Day fires?
In a word: no.
The data shows that a combination of strong east winds and extremely low humidity are what caused these fires. Plain and simple. 30-40 mph winds from the east blew for over 24 hours, bringing record low humidity in the single digits to the region. For comparison, the 1933 350,000 acre Tillamook Burn fire started with 20 mph east wind and humidity in the 20% range. This is the perfect recipe for rapid fire spread.
Quoting Jim Trett, the Mayor of Detroit: “The Forest Service and BLM which owns all of the land surrounding the town of Detroit had done a very good job of clearing a fire break around the city. We felt comfortable with what they had done. This fire was just so big, the fire break wasn’t going to stop it. I don’t know what else could have been done to keep that fire out of our community”
Short of scraping the land bare, there is no type of forest management that could have stopped these fires. Having a discussion about the type of forest management that we as Oregonians want on both our public and private forestlands is important. Good forest management can indeed help to slow less severe fires and reduce the loss from a fire when it does burn. But those conversations are moot in this particular context.
The Beachie Creek Fire is a great example of a low intensity, naturally occurring fire changing course drastically due to a once-in-a-century windstorm. This fire was started by lightning on Aug. 17 within the Willamette National Forest. It smoldered for three full weeks, slowly growing to 469 acres. Despite the efforts of firefighters during this time, rough terrain and the demands of more severe wildfires elsewhere meant that fire crews were unable to extinguish it. The winds on Sept. 7 and 8 caused this fire to explode overnight, to 131,000 acres.
It is certainly important to acknowledge the influence that individuals take in causing fires. There are well over 1,000 forest fires in Oregon every year and the majority of these are human-caused. 99% of wildfires are put out before they grow to any size, though. This means that in every wildfire season, firefighters are up against the same causes and conditions that we are seeing this year, except that with a strong east wind and low humidity event like we had, there is absolutely no way to put a fire out. Any ignition source will grow rapidly out of control.
From a human perspective, these fires were indeed catastrophic. Human lives were lost, thousands of homes and structures burned, millions of board feet of merchantable timber burned, many of our favorite recreation areas dramatically changed. The level of destruction is hard for me to comprehend. Ever since I was a kid, I would go up the Santiam canyon into the Cascades to hike, climb, mountain bike, snowboard, snowshoe or camp. Most of these trips included a stop in either Detroit or Gates for pizza or a hamburger on the way back from a long day or weekend of adventures. I have so many fond memories from the Santiam Canyon: my first overnight backpacking trip, seeing my first bear, long weekends hiking and camping with friends. This place was paradise for a guy like me and most everyone else in the greater Salem area who wanted to get into the mountains. My two boys are just at the age when I was looking forward to introducing them to the wonders of these mountains. What I will get to show them will be very different from the wilderness that I explored. And I just spent my weekends there. My heart aches for the thousands of people who lived there and lost their homes and neighborhoods.
From an ecological perspective, though, fire is a natural and important part of any forest ecosystem, even if fires come along as infrequently as they do in this area. The ability for a forest to recover from a fire is incredible. It is going to look really awful to us humans this winter, but in a couple years the forest floor will be bright green again and covered in new seedlings starting to take off. We will be pleasantly surprised to find all of the patches of green forest that the fires overlooked. A whole new range of plants will arrive after the fire and will start doing the work to rebuild this ecosystem from the ground up. The examples of Mount Saint Helens’ recovery over the last 40 years and the beginning glimpses of the recovery in the Gorge are testament to this.
The ability for a forest ecosystem to recover after a fire is where the debate over forest management has real and tangible implications. No management scenario could have prevented these fires. An older, more complex and diverse forest will, however, fare better during and after a fire. The federal forests and wilderness areas — and to some extent the state forests as well — are managed for older trees with more structural complexity. These forests will not burn with the intensity that a young conifer plantation will. This results in more green (especially live seed trees) left after a fire and a quicker recovery.
Regarding the idea of salvage logging, there is an incredible amount of valuable timber slowly dying in these burned areas. As a forestland owner myself, I completely understand the need to log the burned areas to recoup some value from these forest assets. The science, however, is clear; salvage logging both hinders the ability of a forest to recover and makes the burned area more susceptible to fire in the future. Finding a balance between short term economic viability and long term economic and ecological health is not easy, but we need to acknowledge that salvage logging is a short term gain at the expense of the long term health of our forests.
Forest carbon is another consideration. Significant portions of the burned areas here in northwest Oregon are part of one of the largest reserves of above ground carbon in the world. These older and more complex forests hold an incredible amount of carbon and are a critical tool in helping to sequester the excess carbon that we have in our atmosphere. When a forest burns, it changes the carbon balance and some of the carbon is released. Again, leaving the forest alone to substantially recover on its own is the best way to help these forests hold as much carbon as possible. Very little carbon is actually released during a forest fire, as less than five percent of a tree’s biomass is actually consumed in a fire. The rest of the biomass slowly decomposes, sequestering a large percentage of that carbon in the soil. The forest stops absorbing carbon for a time as it begins to regrow, but only a small percent of the carbon held in the forest is actually released right away. The dense smoke from fires is mostly composed of particulates which are very unhealthy for humans but are not particularly bad for the climate.
Which brings me to my last point. Forest fires are increasing across the west due primarily to a changing climate, and they will continue to increase. These fires are a harbinger of what is to come. Longer, dryer, hotter summers dry out our forests more, creating ever drier fuels. Add to that the increased likelihood of extreme weather events like the winds of Sept. 7 and 8, and you have a recipe for a continued increase in forest fire potential.
As much as we want to point fingers and blame a person or a set of policies for these fires and all of the resulting destruction, the fact of the matter is that all we can do is blame the wind. The important conversations that we should instead focus on are:
How do we work to rehabilitate these burned areas most effectively?
How can we grow and manage forests so that when they burn they can easily grow back?
As a society, how do we find ways to live in a world where these events are becoming ever more common?