Review by Ed Quillen
Wildflire – April 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
In Fire’s Way – A Practical Guide to Life in the Wildfire Danger Zone
by Tom Wolf
Published in 2003 by University of New Mexico Press
ISBN 0-8263-2096-1
IN A SENSIBLE WORLD, perhaps, there would be no need for this book, because it would be illegal to build houses on five-acre lots in a fire-prone forest. But that’s not the world we live in. People want to live in the woods, and the market accommodates that desire. Thus the proliferation of mountain subdivisions, and the harm to lives and property when there’s hot weather, a drought and some wind.
So what’s to be done to minimize this damage?
Tom Wolf, a former Custer County resident with a background in forestry (and occasional contributor to this magazine), makes a good case here that Red Zone residents — he’s one of them — should take responsibility for themselves, rather than hope that the feds will ride to the rescue when there’s a wildfire.
Fire is a natural part of forests, and it won’t go away. Over time, suppression increases the fuel load, making the inevitable fire that much harder to put out.
Instead, Red Zone residents should construct their homes in a sensible way — no shake shingles, for instance. They should prune their woods, and clear their land around the dwelling.
This is all sensible advice, but it has its limits: the property line. Neighbors can get together to protect themselves, but there’s still a good chance that the federal land managers have been busy elsewhere, so that the surrounding forest is a tinderbox. You may save your house, but will you still want it if your view is that of blackened tree skeletons?
Often, the U.S. Forest Service thinks in terms of timber sales, rather than forest health. But Wolf offers examples of co-operative management in Montezuma County, Colo., where the county government bought a federal timber sale, and conducted the cutting for fire reduction, rather than maximum timber production.
The county “resold the five timber sale units to a local logger … [who] lopped and scattered slash in place for subsequent prescribed burning. Since then, the Forest Service has broadcast-burned the slash….
“What did these ecologically guided loggers accomplish? A future forest of bigger, better, fewer trees,” as well as one that had a diversity of species and ages, along with wildlife habitat.
But that was an experiment, and no matter how well it worked, those activities cost money — money that is unlikely to be recovered from log sales, since there’s not much commercial use for the small-diameter trees that get harvested in these operations.
Wolf focuses on New Mexico and Colorado, and provides a blow-by-blow account of the Cerro Grande fire in 2000 that struck part of Los Alamos; book deadlines are apparently such that there’s nothing here about the big 2002 fires in Colorado, so you’ll have to look elsewhere for the stories of Hayman and Missionary Ridge.
My favorite chapter was one of confession about how he started a forest fire when he lived in Brush Creek Estates overlooking the Wet Mountain Valley. Wolf had cleared the land around his house, and needed to burn brush. He checked with the sheriff and Forest Service; all agree that a May afternoon, a week after a snowfall, was a good day to burn. And then the wind came up; the brush-pile fire turned into a threatening wildfire.
“I learned that no amount of preparation can spare you when conditions are right and when the fine fuels are there. I also learned that a combination of thinning and defensible space can work — it just means lots of ongoing maintenance, some luck, and a good volunteer fire department.”
In other words, landowners, no matter how well intentioned, can do only so much on their own. They need to cooperate, as with volunteer fire departments. And if they’re going to take further responsibility, as Wolf recommends, then federal timber-management policies have to change so that Red Zone residents can protect themselves.
That’s a big order, and it would be interesting to speculate about what sort of legal and political changes would be required. But meanwhile, if you’re a Red Zone resident, there are things you can do for yourself, and In Fire’s Way lays them out in a clear and informative way.
— Ed Quillen