I would have to agree. With many of the 30 something year old BC’s coming up the food chain with less than 5 years of captain time, I do believe the term ‘normalization of deviance’ comes to mind… at least for me…
As a safety, I’ve had more than enough opportunities to give an ‘emergency’ lecture to a less than experienced BC regarding tactics, strategies, and fire behavior.
Stay safe and stay hydrated my friends. It’s about to get real nutty out there.
That they do.
The execution of normal VMP and using wildfire to meet these needs are a very slippery slope. Before I retired recently, VMP projects, either burning or vegetation modification, took at least 12 to 18 months for approval. Then expect a lawsuit from one of the extremist environmental groups. That along with getting landowner approval in SRA when multiple properties are involved gets very labor intensive. VMP is not what it used to be folks.
Let anyone hear that we are letting a wildfire burn for VMP purposes and let the games begin. It is a little different when you protect private tax paying property vs federal land that the govt owns. Make no mistake, there are ways to adjust suppression tactics, but careful consideration must be made.
CEQA anyone?
Well said, firedog1, speaking to the state side of the house in trying to manage wildfires for something other than suppression. Complicated to the extreme.
And then sometimes fires just decide their own fate for a bit, as this fire appears to be doing.
Sadly the E-Fund can’t be used for VMP’s due to the numerous reasons stated. The Garza in 2017 was the exception to the rule. Single property owner, draw down of resources, difficult access, environmental concerns(naturally occurring asbestos) Having spent the last 28 seasons doing this as a living in one form or fashion, it seems all the old is new again. However in 2020, with everything going on, Common Sense is not nearly as COMMON as it should/could/or needs to be.
Stay safe everyone
Affirm. It’s just not happening. VMP should stand for ‘Vegetation Management Promises’. No offense to the people who have sat in the seat at each unit, but California hasn’t had a meaningful VMP program in the last 20 years, and the jury is still out on the current reboot. It just hasn’t been supported by CAL FIRE at any sort of meaningful scale. I’m not suggesting we remake a broken government program in the middle of a going fire. But I feel we - as fire experts - have a responsibility to teach the leaders and public what we know about where and when indirect tactics can achieve the most cost-effective and beneficial outcomes. So I will bring the topic up every time I see a fire where it could be a reality.
Remake the program in the middle of fire season. Do it. We’re already remaking Crews program And yes teach leaders and public , Only if they WANT to listen and understand. New motto. 2020 What’s Next.
This has been forecast for a long time and not enough succession planning has been done across the board it seems. I know that to be true with my own dept and can see it elsewhere. Classes don’t equal experience and we’re coming towards the end of the baby-boomer retirement era. There’s gonna be a lot of young folks out there that promoted to fill fill the holes because there wasn’t much choice. Now more then ever we need the tutorage of the guys retiring out to pass along their knowledge and unfortunately with the new CICCS a lot of those folks will be removed from teams.
This is like the “who is better Joe Montana or Tom Brady” conversation.
Remember that " CAL FIRE’s" VMP program is conducted on private ground… so its just not that easy as it is for federal agencies to do burn projects. With that, the last decade has exhibited extreme weather that has led to extreme burning conditions, even in the traditional " off season". A VMP is meant to be a targeted project to clear a certain type, species or coverage of vegetation. If we are looking to slick everything off- well then yes “let them rip” in July- see the Reading Fire for how that goes…
There is a stark contrast between backing off and building a larger box and conducting a “VMP” two separate programs and pots of money.
With regard to the argument about the lack of experience… I have worked for CF for 28 years. I will tell you that the firefighters that we have now have gained an unparalleled amount of experience in the last decade. There has never been a time in the history of the fire service in California ( except maybe when FIRESCOPE was formed) where firefighters have been exposed to more dynamic, complex and challenging incidents that required them to find out of the box solutions. They have access to tools and information that people did not have even 10 years ago. To be honest- I would take a 30 y/o BC who began their career in 2010 than someone who has spent 30 years trapped in a antiquated paradigm…
Speaking of paradigms- it is easy to throw rocks when you do not work for a government agency and understand the physical, financial and political limitations that are placed on us…
Here are some photos in the vicinity of the Mineral Fire. How big a fire is too big? If this land historically burned every 20-40 years, did this landscape commonly have really a few really large fires, or were there many small ones?
One thing is certain, the Mineral Fire will open up a lot of wild pig habitat. Should be some good hunting territory for the next several years in that area.
‘Throwing rocks’ is one way to hear it. But it is possible to work outside of an agency and still understand the limitations. My career (as a fuels planner and hazard reduction contractor) has coincided with the decline of the VMP program. It’s a different view, but we have both watched the same revolving door spit VMP coordinators up and out to more rewarding positions every year or two. There have probably been at least a dozen VMP Coordinators at NorthOps in the last 20 years, and the pre-fire engineers doing fuels planning at the Unit-level often promote out in less than 2 years.
Your point on hotter and drier weather and shrinking burn windows is spot on, but we also have a lot of land we could be burning in peak fire season (TGU did thousands of acres of summer rangeland burning in the 1980s). I agree that from an administrative perspective, VMP and indirect attack are two completely different animals. The biggest difference, though, is that we are actually really good at indirect attack.
Everyone likes to blame CEQA and greenies for our failure to scale up and actually implement big projects, but CAL FIRE just hasn’t made VMP a priority. If they had staffed the program with non fire-retirement foresters over the past 20 years and been willing to spend a fraction of what we spend in a single season putting fires out in the hinterlands, we have might have made some progress.
And who was going to pay for that staffing? When we have fires that are burning down homes and killing people, you have to put the money into suppression. I am not sure that you can use historical fire progression as a benchmark for how things are now. Totally different environment…
Cost per acre of suppression is double to 10x that of VMP. The fact remains, the agencys have been reactionary the last 10+yr as opposed to anything resembling proactive. It just not VMP/Wildland. Look at what Denver FD has been able to do/save being proactive with Strength/excersis/hygiene and lowering their W-C costs/claims by having a certified Strength & conditioning employee.
Regarding costs, like I said, it’s a matter of priorities. We are going to throw a thousand people and many millions of dollars at the Mineral Fire over the next few days. Those people and resources could be burning star thistle in Bidwell Park, cutting brush in Shingletown, doing 10,000 4291 inspections, or buying 100,000 firesafe attic vents tomorrow if they weren’t headed to FKU to save of a bunch of chamise, ticks, and poison oak.
It really comes down to politics. There is plenty of money for suppression but little to no money for fuel reduction which has been proven time and time again to reduce the damage from a major fire in all aspects of things related to a highly destructive fire. As a State, we keep doing the same thing hoping for a different outcome but when it comes to actually making the conscious decision to enable responsible VMP burns, we cannot seem achieve that.
We expect homeowners to provide adequate clearance under 4291 but that where is stops. Whether we perform VMP burns in a controlled environment or we spend much more time, money, manpower and much higher safety risks when a wildfire occurs which also has a much higher impact to the ecosystems, it will burn at one point or another.
Your opinions are not based in reality. You have to be more pragmatic than that when you have the absolute responsibility to do a job. Sitting on the sidelines and cherry picking solutions that have no nexus to on the ground conditions is nothing more than an exercise in debating 101.
The facts are simple- the fires and fire environment have precluded any large scale fuel management over the last 10 years. We are barely able to turn the equipment over for annual maintenance.
You cannot apply a simple solution to a complex problem. Over simplifying the magnitude of the problem and attempting to reduce it to some simple solution that calls for more fuel reduction ignores a huge majority of the issue- the part where peoples lives, their property and their livelihoods are threatened. Fuel reduction will never keep up with growth or with our changing climate. It grows back after it is removed…
If you allow fires to burn in the current conditions, the fuels that replace it may most likely be worse… There has been a lot of recent research that points to the severity of the fires dramatically altering the forest landscape. This is not just simply a fuel issue- and looking at it that way ignores the impact of climate and weather.
My opinions are rooted in what I have seen in my career. I think the complexity of our fire control system in California paralyses us, making us think every solution has to be as complex as our mutual aid system. Your agency tells you to keep 95% of all fires under 10 acres, even though we have the resources and information make much more nuanced decisions. To borrow your phrase, a program of full suppression “oversimplifies the magnitude of the problem and attempts to reduce it to some simple solution”.
The VMP program was designed to help ranchers burn brush to improve their pasture conditions. It was never meant to be a fire-use program, and we muddy the waters when we cross the two terms. That said, the idea we can use in-season wildfire to achieve resource benefits is very much a reality.
I disagree with your premise that fires and the fire environment have precluded any large-scale fuels management in the past decade. It’s just in how you define ‘managing fuels’. I have worked on wildfires on the Klamath, Six Rivers, Shasta-T, Lassen, Plumas, Modoc, Tahoe, LP, and Mendocino NF that achieved MAJOR fuels reduction and forest health benefits DURING FIRE SEASON.
More than 70% of the acres burned in the 2015 Shasta-T lightning bust (175,000 acres+) and 2014 Happy Camp Complex (134,000 acres) were low or moderate severity. The 2008 Cub Fire cleaned up a roadless area in Deer Creek Canyon we would never have been able to get burned or thinned otherwise. Even the (SRA) Mendocino Complex, Carr, Camp, and King Fires had large areas of indirect attack where the burning operations had beneficial effects on thousands of acres of forests and fuels. We have a lot of leeway to get good work done with indirect tactics.
It is true too much high-severity fire can cause problems with weeds and type-conversion to annuals in some systems, and I’m definitely not saying we should let everything in the backcountry burn all the time, but we’ve got literally millions of acres of SRA in California where we could use more indirect attack or in-season prescribed fire. We shouldn’t let the complexity of the current system blind us to that. We are currently successful at suppressing fires under incredibly-challenging conditions. Think of what we could pull off in prescribed fire with the level of support we put into suppression! Imagine being able to use heavy airtankers and type 1 helicopters on prescribed burns. Change is possible. Don’t take no for an answer.
This discussion has turned into an argument between an apple and an orange. Federal agencies manage both VMP and wildfire on Federal Land. State and Local Govt fight wildfire on private land. It is totally different. Right or wrong the law defines a wildfire as a public nuisance and CF is required to suppress fires in the SRA. How is it possible for a Govt person to decide to allow private property to burn for the greater good? When in the rare circumstance a property owner expresses an interest in more acres burning for management objectives, that can be considered in making the objectives for a particular incident. The big elephant in the room on allowing wildfire to burn for management objectives is the amount and duration of resource needs, not to mention the escape possibilities.