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Outside Magazine June 2003

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We're Toast
Last summer, U.S. wildfires cost $1.6 billion to stop and claimed the lives of 23 firefighters. The statistics were depressingly familiar, but the expense and sacrifice did nothing to solve the problems of overgrown forests, misguided government suppression policies, and misspent resources. Is there a way out? Maybe. But only if we get serious about rethinking the role of flame in the woods.

By Douglas Gantenbein


	A tree burnt in Oregon's Biscuit Fire. (Kurt Markus)

SCORCHED EARTH

On a cool morning last November, I rode in a green Forest Service van through a valley where the Illinois River cuts into the deeply folded hills of southwestern Oregon. Behind the wheel was Tom Lavagnino, a 50-year-old public information spokesman with the Forest Service office in nearby Medford.

We drove in fog along Highway 199, then turned west to enter the 1.16-million-acre Siskiyou National Forest. About 15 miles from here, on July 13, 2002, a lightning bolt shot down from a summer thunderstorm, spearing a mountaintop grove. Temperatures were near 100, and drought had oven-baked the forest's Douglas firs, ponderosa pines, and cedars. Several more strikes followed in the days ahead, touching off spot fires that burned lazily at first, occasionally torching trees with a loud cellophane crackle. Then, aided by wind and dry fuel on the ground, the fires grew and started to move.

Lavagnino turned a corner and the tawny forest floor suddenly gave way to charcoal-black. Ponderosas stood skeleton-like, stripped of needles. Across the valley, burned patches of trees formed a dark checkerboard against the green of stands that survived. The ridge opposite was punctuated by fire-stripped timber. So was the ridge beyond that, and beyond that.

"It's hard to imagine just how big this fire got until you get to a spot like this," Lavagnino said. "The farthest burned ridge you can see is 20 miles away."

By August the flames had grown into an Ÿber-blaze called the Biscuit Fire, named for a local stream, Biscuit Creek. From the day it started until it was declared under control on November 8, it burned across 471,130 acres—nearly 8 percent of Oregon. At the Biscuit Fire's height, 7,150 firefighters and support personnel were on hand to fight it, and the Illinois Valley was crawling with water tankers, fire engines, and crew buses. Some 40 helicopters carried water and red flame retardant from hastily assembled field bases, along with a half-dozen lumbering, slurry-dumping planes. The bill for the manpower and hardware: $155 million, the most ever spent—anywhere—trying to stop a forest fire.



	Quartz Fire, February 2003 (Kurt Markus)

Similar stories played out across the West last summer, one of the busiest fire seasons in history. In June and July, Colorado's Hayman Fire burned 137,760 acres—a state record—and cost $39 million to fight. In Arizona, the Rodeo-Chediski blaze chewed through almost 470,000 acres, another record, costing $49 million. All told, 7.2 million acres burned in the summer of 2002, the bulk of them in the mountainous western forests. The price tag hit $1.6 billion, surpassing the previous record of $1.36 billion, set in 2000, when 8.4 million acres burned.

There was a high human cost as well: 23 firefighters died last season, bringing the number of wildfire fatalities since 1990 to 228, more than all the climbers who have died on Mount Everest. One of the victims was Milt Stollak, a 56-year-old pilot I had met in 2001. A stocky, laconic man, Stollak flew a PB4Y-2, a World War II-era four-engine bomber, fitted with tanks and nozzles for dumping thousands of gallons of slurry. On July 18, while Stollak was flying over a fire near Estes Park, Colorado, the plane's left wing separated from the fuselage, sending it plunging to the ground and killing Stollak and his co-pilot, 39-year-old Rick Schwartz. A month before, a C-130A plane—a 1950s-vintage four-propeller aircraft belonging to the same Wyoming company that owned Stollak's craft—crashed in a similar accident, killing three. In the year's worst mishap, a group of five firefighters died en route to a blaze, on June 21, when a van taking them to Colorado's Hayman Fire swerved off I-70 and crashed.

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