Building Fire Resiliency through Prescribed Burning

SEELEY LAKE – If the way the nation takes care of its forest is likened to health care what would it look like? Fire Scientist Mark Finney made the comparison. He feels that the way fire is treated on the landscape would be equivalent to removing all doctors except those for emergency care including emergency rooms, paramedics and ambulance services.

"Those would be absolutely necessary for health care and those would save lives," said Finney during a presentation to the Missoula County Commissioners Feb. 8. "But the general state of health in the population would be terrible. All of us would be desperately ill waiting for finally some stimulus to make us pay a lot of money for treatment and emergency care. That is what our fire management program essentially is. With the consequence that our wildlands that are fire dependant are also in a desperate state."

"We can be an emergency services organization but it is going to be a pretty incomplete package," said Seeley Lake Ranger District Fuels Assistant Fire Management Officer Dave Tingley. "To take that one to the micro-level of a project area, if we are going to give it the full health care treatment, prescribed fire is part of that."

Prescribed fire is one tool in land managers' toolbox to reduce fuels, dispose of logging slash, prepare planting sites, improve habitat for wildlife or livestock and control insect and disease. It is conducted under specific conditions, determined by specialists in silviculture, fuels, timber and wildlife, needed to achieve management objectives. Ignition patterns, weather conditions, ecological effects and fuel consumption are specified as well.

"Rarely is there a prescribed burn that we are achieving only one objective, whether that is fuel reduction, wildlife enhancement or to get rid of logging slash," said Tingley. "Usually it is a tool used in conjunction to achieve multiple objectives."

The prescribed burn plan, created specifically for each burn unit, identifies parameters including temperature, relative humidity, fuel moisture and wind, resources and qualifications for those resources required to burn the unit. They also go through a day-of checklist including smoke management, other agencies and contingency resources and scout and size-up a burn area prior to burning.

"We minimize the risk by having all those factors in place," said Feigley. "We want to be within prescription and parameters outlined so the objectives are met and we aren't wasting taxpayer dollars."

Finney shared benefits of fire on the landscape under mild conditions that cannot be achieved through other treatment methods include:

• Removes non-merchantable surface fuels that wildfire requires to spread.

• Removes litter and duff that is a continuous fuel bed and burns a long time.

• Removes rotten wood – the receptive material for embers and smoke production.

• Scorches/kills lower limbs of trees and ladder fuels. Tingley said this is significant because it changes the ability of a fire to transition from a surface to a crown fire.

• Top-kills brush reducing ladder fuels and increasing forage.

• Reduces wildfire intensity allowing firefighters the opportunity to successfully control ignitions. This is especially important in the wildland urban interface and areas used for potential defense lines.

• If conducted on a landscape level, it reduces the chances of "large fire" behavior.

"The end result is if you remove these kinds of fuels through burning, we have very thin flame zones and they spread very slowly and with very low severity even under extreme [wildfire] conditions," said Finney.

Tingley said an alternative to broadcast burning would be to pile and burn all the fuels on a site. However this generally costs $400-500 per acre, twice the cost of burning the entire area, and smoke amount from the piles is still the same. The area also missed out on the multiple benefits from broadcast burning.

Finney said that the scientific literature is succinct, "Often mechanical activities are necessary before you can introduce fire. They are necessary to change those dense forests into open ones and change the fire resistant individual species before fire can be used. But if all you do is logging it is insufficient."

Finney shared a case study from northern California. In the Blacks Mountain Research Forest, land managers treated the area with no treatment, thinning only and thinning with burning. The Cone fire of 2002 burned through the treatments under extreme conditions five-years post treatment.

In the unthinned, unmanaged areas, the fire burned through as a crown fire. In the areas that were thinned and burned, the fire burned through the understory with little tree mortality. What surprised researchers was the areas that were thinned but not followed with prescribed fire. While the intensity of the wildfire was lower, there was still 100 percent tree mortality.

Finney again saw similar examples of the effects of prescribe fire effectiveness when he looked at the 460,000 Rodeo-Chediski Fires of 2002 in Arizona east of Flagstaff. In the burn units that had been burned in the decade previous to the fires, the wildfire went around the prescribe burn units even though the entire area had been harvested and thinned previous to the fire.

"Yet the only places that the Rodeo and Chediski wildfires really changed their behavior were in the places that had recent prescribed burns," said Finney. "So again in this case, they had timber harvest before they were able to prescribe burn but it was not sufficient alone."

When looking at the Rice Ridge Fire, Finney pointed out that if 50 percent of the landscape had been harvested, they would be able to see a difference in the way wildfire burned through the area.

Feigley said that every fire team that came to fight the Rice Ridge fire was looking for those opportunities in old fire scars, areas that were managed and areas that had burned through prescribed burning.

"The areas that had been previously logged by Plum Creek, the fire just blew right through," said Feigley. "You can argue that logging does reduce fuels but it doesn't do it as well as when you follow up with broadcast burning."

Feigley said that the spring and fall burn windows in Seeley Lake are so small and fall is the best time to meet the objectives laid out for the district. She would rather spend money in the spring and fall versus the millions of dollars spent fighting fire on Mother Nature's terms.

Tingley said the single most limiting factor for prescribe burning is smoke. They put in for "smoke" with a quantified estimate of emissions. The Montana Idaho Airshed Group either approves, limits or disapproves the area burned based on smoke dispersal and predicted effects from the burn.

"If people would tolerate some level of smoke now, that would be beneficial long term for not having a summer like last summer again," said Feigley.

Tingley added that if a lightning strike were to hit in one of the areas treated with prescribed fire, even though it still may ignite, firefighters have the opportunity to get in there and put it out. Nationwide firefighters have 98 percent suppression success rate, yet the two percent of fire that escape initial attack burn 95 percent of the acres.

"That really says something that we can feel good about the fact that we are putting these fires out. It also validates the hundred year old debate about fire needing to be on the landscape because this is a fire adapted ecosystem," said Tingley.

"We are managing fire under emergency situations instead of managing fire the way we want to be managing fire," said Feigley. "We need to be a fire adapted community, we need to be resilient to fire, we need to make our forest resilient to fire and one of the best ways we have to do that is to use prescribed fire as a tool, not waiting for wildfire to do that for us."

For Finney's full presentation as given to the Missoula County Commissioners during the Feb. 8 meeting visit http://missoulacomt.civicclerk.com/Web/Player.aspx?id=1995&key=-1&mod=-1&mk=-1&nov=0.