INTRODUCTION

Lightning started the Big Bar Fire on the Shasta-Trinity National Forest in Northern California in August 1999. Rain put it out that November. In the meantime, the U.S. Forest Service spent about $80 million trying to put out the mostly low-intensity wildland fires even though they were in designated wilderness and inventoried roadless areas.

Firefighters constructed fifty miles of fire lines with bulldozers and 100 miles of hand lines, cutting trees with chainsaws and digging to mineral soil with hand tools. They dropped 280 tons of fire retardant from air tankers, including 100 tons of a cyanide-containing slurry. They also cleared a football field of trees and vegetation for each of the more than 50 helicopter landing spots. They torched hundreds of acres of land for burnouts, a technique in which firefighters burn vegetation around the perimeter of the fire. And they burned approximately 40,000 acres of backfires, which are set along the inner edge of a fire line to consume the fuel in the larger fire’s path.

Timothy Ingalsbee, director of the Western Fire Ecology Center for the American Lands Alliance, and Christine and Anthony Ambrose, forest monitors with the Environmental Protection Information Center, studied the Big Bar Fire to document the Forest Service’s fire-suppression tactics. They submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Shasta-Trinity National Forest shortly after rain put the fires out. They struggled with getting the agency to agree to provide the documents and eventually enlisted the help of Senator Barbara Boxer. In February 2000, they copied about 2,000 pages, which helped them reconstruct each day of the fire and identify the daily and total costs of private contract crews and equipment such as helicopters, air tankers and bulldozers. What they found in the documents confirmed what they already knew: aggressive wildland fire suppression is expensive, ineffective and damaging to an ecosystem.

Ingalsbee and the Ambroses used some of the information they gathered as support for a lawsuit several environmental groups filed to prevent a 1,000-acre logging project proposed by the Forest Service in a burned area along the western border of the Trinity Alps Wilderness. They argued that logging was unnecessary as a safety or fire prevention measure because it was miles from any community and that the Forest Service hadn’t addressed evidence that showed logging would damage soil and fish habitat in an area that was already harmed by vigorous fire suppression efforts. They said the logging plan ignored the 1995 Beschta report, in which a group of university and agency scientists recommended the prohibition of logging in severely burned areas.

In April 2002, a federal district judge stopped the logging plan for the third time; she said it violated the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Forest Management Act.

What follows is what Ingalsbee and Christine Ambrose have to say about documenting fire suppression.-— Jamie Pasarro

The direct environmental impacts of firefighting have never been systematically documented or disclosed in an analysis pursuant to National Environmental Policy Act, or monitored for indirect and cumulative impacts. Typically, the U.S. Forest Service prepares a “quick and dirty” Burned Area Emergency Rehabilitation Report, but rarely are rehabilitation treatments effective in erasing the damage caused by the dozers, drip torches, chemicals and chain saws that are standard firefighting fare. Consequently, documenting the actions and impacts of fire suppression depends on volunteer citizen monitors.

Below is a list of critical data sources and simple to increasingly technical methods for documenting firefighting and its results.

1. Obtain a fire map and walk the fire lines. The total length of fire lines can be calculated from maps, and your location can be referenced according to the various fire line divisions identified on the map (e.g., Division A, B, C). Using a camera, tape measure and clinometer, photograph and measure the width, depth and slope of hand lines and dozer lines, safety zones, drop points and helispots.

Look for evidence of interior fire lines that were abandoned but not rehabbed. Photograph other impacts, such as large stumps, burned hose, broken tools, flagging or litter that may have been left behind. Document any decommissioned roads that were reopened during suppression.

2. Ask for the firefighting records under the Freedom of Information Act and reconstruct daily suppression actions. A complete list of fire records and sample requests is available on the Western Fire Ecology Center’s website (www.fire-ecology.org/citizen/Fire_FOIA.html). Key documents to examine are the Incident Action Plans (also called the daily/nightly shift plans and maps), Wildland Fire Situation Analyses (WFSAs), Fire Behavior Analyst Reports, Fire Weather Reports, Incident Commander Strategic Planning Notes and Burned Area Emergency Rehabilitation Reports.

Critical impacts to document are fire operations and retardant use. Look for key words such as fire ops, burnout, helitorch, air ops, helicopter and air tanker to identify areas that were backfired and burned-out or sprayed with retardants. Look for documents showing the amount of chemicals used and the daily or total costs of aircraft.

Areas that were deliberately burned in firing operations can later be compared with fire severity and proposed salvage logging units to see how they overlap. Areas that received retardant drops can later be compared with the presence of invasive weeds.

3. Request geographic information systems data under the Freedom of Information Act and compare that data with information from the documents listed above to reconstruct firefighting actions and fire progression. GIS layers of special management areas or sensitive sites (e.g., wilderness and roadless areas, endangered species habitat, old-growth groves, riparian zones, steep slopes) can be queried and compared with sites of suppression actions.

GIS data layers can be “clipped” to produce both maps and tables displaying acreage of backfires and burnouts and length of hand line and dozer line in miles or feet.

To raise awareness about the environmental impacts of firefighting, use your photos, measurements and narrative descriptions to produce reports for your local community, decision makers, news media and elected officials. The more evidence that citizens can document, the sooner we may gain accountability from fire commanders for the strategies and tactics they choose, and the better the case we can make for ecologically sound proactive fire and fuels management as a means of preventing environmentally damaging reactive fire suppression.

For further assistance in post-fire-suppression monitoring, contact the Western Fire Ecology Center (fire@efn.org) or the Environmental Protection Information Center (christine@wildcalifornia.org).