 |
| Tom Brownold |
The Pumpkin Fire devoured all 14,757 acres of the Kendrick Mountain Wilderness Area outside Flagstaff.
|
AT ITS PEAK, Cerro Grande drew over 9,000 personnel from dozens of city, state, and federal agencies. Still, all the hoses, picks, axes, and shovels that the Boise, Idaho–based National Interagency Fire Center could muster—called up from the ranks of the U.S. Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of
Land Management, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs—did little as the fire cut its enormous destructive swath across the slopes of the Jemez Mountains. But once Los Alamos burned, the next victim—apart from Roy Weaver, Bandelier's superintendent, who paid for having approved the ill-fated fire by resigning from the job he'd held for ten
years—was the philosophy and practice of prescribed burning. On May 12, while Cerro Grande was still in full swing, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman announced a 30-day suspension of prescribed burns on all federal lands west of the 100th meridian (roughly western Kansas), a ban that at press time remained in
effect for the National Park Service.
To many land-management officials, prescribed fire is such a vital tool (when administered correctly) that discontinuing it would be a push beyond folly into madness. As Erv Gasser, one of the Burned Area Rehabilitation Team leaders brought in to repair the apocalyptic postfire landscape around Los Alamos, puts it, eliminating prescribed burns "would be
like taking away a hammer from someone nailing two boards together." Paul Gleason, a wildland fire management specialist for the National Park Service who's been chasing flames for 36 years, happened to be in Bandelier on May 4, studying forest fuels for another prescribed burn that the Park Service was planning, and ended up as incident commander when the
fire went out of bounds. Part of the problem in Los Alamos was a gross underestimation of the fire's potential complexity, Gleason said, which was abetted by a woeful communication system. "The people that were executing the prescribed fire are experienced burners," he said. Once the fire turned wild, though, "they had problems with contingency resources.
They weren't getting the help they needed." If the complexity of the Bandelier burn had been properly understood, he added, additional firefighting crews could have been in position to help when things went haywire.
Not surprisingly, such contingency issues boil down to money. Funds for a prescribed fire, which costs roughly $100 per acre to carry out, are allocated in each park's budget. Only when a burn gets out of hand and is officially declared a wildfire does the federal purse open, and only then do manpower and equipment, such as air ops (slurry bombers can
cost several thousand dollars per hour), flood the area. The suppression and rehabilitation bill for Cerro Grande amounts to more than $758 per acre so far, a total of $32.5 million. But that figure pales next to the compensation, as much as $455 million, to be doled out by the federal government to Los Alamos residents who lost homes and property.
|
