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Introduction; (music playing in background)
Male news reporter: One thousand acres burned, 33 homes have been destroyed by fire. Also
destroyed: 21 barns and 45 vehicles. Female reporter: Firefighters say a deep layer
of brush is making the forest floor burn like charcoal. Terrified and confused, animals
are running both in and out of the danger. Female reporter 2: Well by later tonight firefighters
are hoping to gain 100% control of the largest wildfire complex currently burning in Oregon.
It’s already burned 45,000 acres and firefighters hope to gain control of the blaze after rainfall
on Sunday helped slow the spread of the fire. Firefighters hope to save nearly 200 homes
threatened by the fire
At some point in time, you have been in your houses in the evening and you have been watching
the news, and on that news report you have watched video clips of uncharacteristic high-severity
fire burning through the landscape, consuming thousands of acres and in that video clip
you see that lives are threatened, and houses are threatened and, how does that play into
a historical role? Is that the type of fire behavior that we saw throughout the western
United States? (Mellow, guitar rock music plays)
Historically, particularly in Ponderosa Pine dominated ecosystems, we saw low-severity
fires. If we could go back in time we would see surface fires burning through the understories
of many of our forested ecosystems.
Many years ago Native Americans, they were
very in-tune to that natural role of fire and they exploited it through hunting and
gathering, and they also saw spiritual significance about how fire burned and where it burned.
Right now our larger landscapes are very homogeneous. We have this continuous, forested landscape
that is overstocked with trees due to decades of fire suppression and what prescribed fire
can do is it brings in a variability and a mosaic within that landscape and the more
of the mosaic that we can bring into this landscape, the more the benefit there is for
wildlife and the more assurance that we’re maintaining a habitat for all of the species.
Fire was the most important factor in maintaining those forest features and so if we understand
that, then we put fire back into these systems. Trying to restore again, those functional
components of fire, establishing the diversity of species, of the species that exist under
the forest structure. (thoughtful, symphonic music plays)
If you can imagine your backyard: so each spring you go in and you trim your trees,
you take out the dead branches and you allow the tree more growing room. In the summer,
you mow your yard many times. In the fall, you rake the leaves. So what I’d like you
to do is envision allowing your lawn to continue to accumulate leaves and branches and allow
your grass to grow freely throughout the year. And then what we’re going to do, we’re
going to fast forward 10 years into the future. Now look at your yard, the grass is tall,
seeds from your neighbor’s trees have seeded into your lawn taking out more lawn space.
You have increased accumulation of leaves and litter at the bases of your trees. Now
if you were to try and take your lawnmower in there you wouldn’t be very successful
without doing some type of prior treatment. So as these ecosystems dependent on fire to
maintain the amount of fuel accumulation, the amount of leaf-litter and needle-debris
that you saw in your backyard, as your backyard depends on you for maintenance, so did the
forested ecosystems depend on fire to maintain this ecosystem in a state that’s in a healthy
condition and sustainable.
(Menacing, 80’s-era heavy metal music plays) From a fire manger perspective, the mission
of our service is to benefit wildlife and wildlife habitats. But as a fire manager I
also have to look at wildfires and the safety of my crews and part of that is how can we
change dynamics of the vegetation that is out there on the landscape through fuels manipulation,
through changing the fuel-loading or how the plants, shrubs, trees, whatever they are,
how they line up against one another. We have the ability to make the wildfire environment
safer for our crews when they do need to go out and suppress fire.
So, smoke is a by-product from all the burning that we do whether it’s the prescribed burning
or the wildfires. It all creates smoke. One of the things that we talk about and discuss
here is the trade-off of whether or not prescribed fire smoke is a bad thing and compare that
to wildfire smoke. So with a wildfire, certain things are out of our control. Certainly we
want to contain the fire as soon as we can and catch it but, sometimes we may not have
that ability, we may not have enough resources, the fire behavior may just be too much for
folks to get in there and get around it so we’re very limited on the amount of control
that we have of the smoke when we have a wildfire. The trade-off here is that we could potentially
go out here and do some prescribed burning and cause a lot less smoke and at least the
smoke that we’re creating is manageable. (Menacing, 80s-era heavy metal music fades)
(Upbeat, hopeful acoustic guitar music plays) Aspen stands are important for a lot of different
wildlife species. Again, due to decades of fire suppression, a lot of our Aspen stands
are not in very good health. So, often we purposely burn our Aspen stands and Aspen
is a tree that re-generates very well. They are actually stimulated by prescribed burning.
What it does is it burns the understory, which can become decadent over time and you get
new growth and that new growth has more nutritional value and it also increases the abundance
of the forage such as the wildflowers or the shrubs or the Aspen
Here we’re standing in a recent prescribed fire located on the Lakeview Ranger District
on the Fremont-Winema National Forest, it was burned in September of last fall and here
you can see there is a Mule Deer that’s already come back and is using this area.
They’re probably keying in on this Aspen stand that’s been burned right here next
to us where we have nice re-generation of young Aspen.
I’m standing on the north-end of Sycan Marsh, adjacent to where I’m standing within 50
meters is National Forest Land. This fire, one of its objectives looking at a watershed
scale was to restore the hydrologic regime; water coming from clouds coming to the ground,
getting absorbed or getting used by these plants. When we have overstocked stands, we
often are looking at situations where there isn’t really any extra water, there’s
no residual water to be used and so then the marsh if all the water is staying up here,
it’s not moving through the watershed and moving back onto the marsh. And so this is
August of 2011 and one year ago at this time Sycan Marsh was basically dry. One of the
objectives of this burn was in restoring the hydrologic regime. As we burned through this
area we actually monitored the water elevations in the marsh and as we burned the first day,
we monitored the change and there were actually incremental increases in the water elevation
each day we burned out here over a 2-week period of time, showing first-of-all that
this watershed is resilient if we allow it to have the availability of water to come
in and percolate through the soils and come back into the wetlands systems, and that it
does move through here and that secondly the plants themselves out in the marsh are lush,
they’re green, there is water standing in the marsh right now providing habitat for
probably close to 200 species of water-fowl. With this restoration we’re managing the
uplands but it’s to benefit the streams and the wetlands. Part of the bigger picture
then, is as we manage these whole watersheds and systems, we’re trying to make sure that
all these pieces are functional to what we’re trying to accomplish.
Well John, it’s been great working with you over the last ten-plus years. I remember
when you started working with the Nature Conservancy up at Sycan Marsh as a burn boss for us so
we’d be able to apply some of those prescribed fires on treatment areas. The Coyote area
was one of the first ones that I remember. I think that’s probably one of the biggest
benefits is all of those different agencies working together and you know, just us being
able to share the expertise. We’ve got folks that have got decades of prescribed fire experience
and then, working with folks like the Nature Conservancy who are trying to do the right
thing on their land, it just makes sense to partner with them and work together. Fish
and Wildlife, the Forest Service, The BLM, and the Oregon Department of Forestry: all
are cooperators with the Nature Conservancy, working together to do the right thing on
the lands.
Because prescribed fire is an art and not an exact science, we are continually learning.
We are adapting our approaches; we are evolving with the science. We are always going back
to burns that we have implemented in the past to continually learn from those strategies
and tactics that we used. If we look at the upper Thomas Creek prescribed burn, this area
is a small fraction of our entire National Forest Systems, we can use prescribed fire
as a management tool to meet management objectives and schedule the times that we used prescribed
fire to meet those management objectives and overall treatment effectiveness. But what
we can’t do is schedule wildfires. (Upbeat, hopeful acoustic guitar music continues)