only a few of us old timers remember the story.
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The private land in Orleans is SRA (jurisdictional responsibility), but federal DPA (direct protection for fire response).
Is the private land not SRA but Fed DPA…Not too much private land there, that is not surrounded by Fed land or BIA…
We eventually got permission to burn in Orleans last Friday, but missed two days of burning, with a cost to the incident of over $100,000 (over 100 firefighters stood down, even though our burning conditions were safe). Navigating the politics of getting our fire on the ground took an enormous amount of wrangling by the entire C&G of our Type III team. As forecast, the major winds never mixed down into the canyons of the Klamath River.
Given the extreme wildfires we all have experienced in the past two years, it is understandable people are afraid of fire, but fear of fire, and the resulting policies of full suppression, are the biggest causes of our current crisis.
In addition to suspension of burn permits on SRA lands, NorthOps suspended all burning in Northern California National Forests during last week’s wind event, even in areas outside of the forecast high-risk weather. The Six Rivers NF fire staff in the Orleans area petitioned the Forest FMO for an exemption and he said (paraphasing here) ‘There will be no exemptions. We know you have good conditions to burn, but this is a political decision, the optics of burning when there are red flag conditions around our borders are not good’.
Fall burn windows are tough to hit, and we can’t afford to waste a single day. We started the week with units (10 days after 0.5" of rain) which were still too wet to burn. The same dry front that brought the high winds to the Central Valley delivered the lower humidities that dried out our units enough to actually burn. We went from daytime minimum humidities Monday and Tuesday in the mid 50s to minimums in the 20s once the front arrived. Dry continental winds are the thing that dries out NorCal’s forests after early rains - they create the burn window. If we have blanket Region-wide burn bans any time there are red flag events in the fall, we’ll have a really hard time getting burning done.
We have the tools to understand and manage risk in how we plan and implement rx fire, but we need our leadership to have the courage to make science-based decisions, and stand behind the people who are working hard to put fire back into the landscape.
Here is a copy of the letter we wrote and sent to a wide number of CAL FIRE and other Nor Cal fire leadership.2019 Klamath TREX Burn Suspension Relief Request 10-9-19 Final.pdf (1.5 MB)
More info on the Klamth River TREX here:
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Here is the problem with your view point- you are only viewing this from your perspective. You are not looking at this from the FMO, or Unit Chief perspective. If you do not have skin in the game with either the financial responsibility, or the political waves that come from an escape, I am not sure your opinion is anything more than that.
No one believes that there is and has been a build up of fuel, I just think everyone is hanging their hat on that. The issue we have is a weather issue. This fire season seems to be proving that, change in weather, not many large fires this summer.
Short term fuel is the only part of the triad we can change, long term weather is our problem.
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We had the written support of the Unit Chiefs in HUU and SKU, and also from the local SRF district fire staff, but the exemptions were quashed at the Region-level. We had the conditions (and data) on our side - we have been burning for the past 3 days with no issues - if anything, conditions have been too wet. My point is we need to make burn-ban decisions based on science, not politics or fear. This is my opinion, of course. I speak for nobody else. Not sure I understand what you’re saying about fuels, but of course it is about weather - we had the right weather to burn, along with an NWS forecaster embedded in our team, but politics trumped data.
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Pyro, was it second hand knowledge that the Forest FMO said it was a political decision? Or did someone out Orleans office say it was a political decision.
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I saw the email, those were the exact words: “this is a political decision”.
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None of us want to admit it, but politics is a thing and can have real life implications. I know they should not, but thinking that way would be to ignore human behavior.
Everyday if you are in a decision making position you have to decide what hill you want to die on. Apparently that particular day it was not located in Orleans for those who had to make that decision.
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Unfortunately politics reigns down on practically every decision that is made. Look at global warming. Science be damned. Boots on the ground keep up the good fight though!!
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Lots of moving parts and different agendas compete daily. NOPS had to decide between availability for the wind event down south and the potential for losing another burn after the Eldo’s oops. They went with what was seen as the safe option.
If there was another Tubbs or Thomas fire, there would be no resources to hold on to the burns up there or be able to respond. Catch 22, not enough resources to do both.
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That makes sense in a weather vacuum, but the whole point I’m pushing is we had minimal risk of losing our burns in the Klamath Country. And if we did, we had a full Type III organization with 100 firefighters and half a dozen engines - plenty of resources for the conditions (mild winds, low fire danger in NFDRS, near freezing nights, overnight RHs in the high 70s)…
Most of the data or figures we used in our justification letter came directly from the ONCC GACC’s own website. The people at our coordination centers have access to some of the best weather intel in the world - we need to use it to inform these decisions., otherwise we’ll never get ahead.
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Excellent article out of Wired just hit the internet Wednesday.
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Curious. What’s a fire stopper?
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They’re marvelous wonderful people. Just beautiful people. I’ve met them, they do the best work, really they do
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I’m glad POTUS supports doing burns. Now if he could get his Federal agencies to up their annual acreage about 99%…
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It would be nice to see CalFire get back into the business of burning…real acreage, helitorch, terra-torch, 100’s or 1000’s of acres at a time…
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Environmental benefit plus excellent opportunity for PTB’s to get worked on.
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Torching Conventional Forestry: The Artful Application of Science by John R. Mount
The absolute best book on “real” forestry practice I have ever read. I was lucky enough to grow up in a logging family whoworked in and around the area that Mr. Mount managed for Southern California Edison.
What this man did with a small group of people with boots on the ground science and forestry techniques is astonishing to me. The land produces timber, provides for recreation/habitation and brought back many species of wildlife including spotted owl, great gray owl and osprey, even when many “experts” told him it couldn’t be done.
His theory based on restoring and maintaining a pre-human intervention landscape and habitat while maintaining human co-existence and “paying the bills” through logging practices that maintain an uneven aged forest is brilliant.
The best part, his hands on approach to land management brought him to his understanding of not only a want, but need for fire in the landscape. Through his decades of land management and forestry work, Mr. Mount deduced that fire is not a tool but an integral part of his landscape.
Main point being… With a little work and a lot of paying attention we can take care of the landscape through multiple practices and provide safe habitation for humans. It can be done.
Great book, thought this would be an appropriate place to share, given the topic. Hope you guys read it, I know its on Amazon.
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There was an article posted on the KCRA webpage last evening regarding a Rx burn in the Sly Park Recreation area yesterday. https://www.kcra.com/article/el-dorado-county-control-burn-calfire-california/29897492.
I want to preface everything that I am about to say as being 100% supportive of the burn and the cooperative effort between CF and Sierra Pacific.
While 30 acres is 30 acres better than we were before the burn, we are never going to get ahead in the fuel reduction with 30 acre burns. This wouldn’t have altered the King Fire in the least, especially on the day of its big march.
My issue is that the public perception with an article such as this is that the view is going to be that these types of plots are going alter the intense fire behavior and fuel loads. Every bit helps but there needs to be much more both in quantity and acreage treated if there is going to be a positive change in the very disastrous position we are currently in.
Perhaps, these small plots will help create the view with the public and the politicians that Rx burns are not all bad and we build from it but I look at the task ahead and just don’t see that 30 acres are going make a significant impact in the overall land that needs to be treated.
Just one person’s view.
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