Article by Patricia Nelson Limerick
Wildfires – July 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
from the Wirth Forum, Feb. 16-17, 2001, Center of the American West
For the West, the Summer of 2000 added up to a prolonged reminder of the untamed power of fire. Money, public attention, and firefighters were directed to a number of serious and severe fires in the region. With the archaeological sites at Mesa Verde and the nuclear labs at Los Alamos at risk, fires at “celebrity places” focused public concern on the accumulated fuel load of forests in which fire suppression has been the reigning policy for decades. Nearly everyone recognized that recent history has left the West with a very big fire problem, but not everyone agrees on the proper response to this dilemma.
In its mission to be helpful in understanding Western issues, the Center of the American West convened a group of experts to pool their understanding of wildlands fire. While a few presenters came from elsewhere, the majority of the participants represented “local talent” — University of Colorado professors with a shared interest in fire, and, given the fragmentation and specialization of academic life, few opportunities to learn about each other’s work.
Fire Behavior
John Daily, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of the Joint Center for Combustion and Environmental Research, gave the first presentation titled “How Fires Behave.” He explained the mechanics of fire, including the stages from pre-ignition to extinction and the essential ingredients: fuel, heat and oxygen.
Important variables in the spread of fire involve the density of the fuel, and the effect of wind and slope. Wind strongly enhances the rate of spread by forcing the plume of hot combustion gases to bend over and more rapidly heat the territory in advance. Likewise, when fire moves up-slope, the flame is closer to the ground and thus more effective at pre-ignition — in which fuel is heated, dried, and pyrolyzed (subjected to chemical changes caused by heat). “Fire loves to run with the wind and go uphill,” Daily said, “and most fire blow-ups occur because of wind and/or slope.” “In addition, fire can create its own local winds that can speed things up substantially.”
Firefighters work to control fire by removing one of the essential elements. The reason firefighters use water is that a crucial phase of pre-ignition is drying the fuel. Fire retardants slow the rate of chemical reaction and thus slow the rate of spread. Digging fire lines and setting back fires removes fuel. (While not practical in fighting wild fires, removing oxygen works, too. The famous Red Adair put out oil well fires by using explosives to deplete the oxygen near the well.)
Daily explored the great variation in the rate of spread of fires, relating the fire’s speed to human locomotion. For example, a brush fire in strong wind might spread at 250 feet per minute; a human in flight from it would have to walk briskly. Chaparral burning in a Santa Ana wind in Southern California might go 800 feet per minute, a marathon pace. Dry, short grass burning in a strong wind can travel at 1200 feet per minute, the human equivalent of a four-minute mile. Blow-ups, when fire moves at this fearsome pace, cannot be predicted, and here Daily used the examples of the fatal Mann Gulch and South Canyon fires.
Daily also presented a table on the number of fires and acres burned over the past eighty years. While the number of acres burned has been contracting, the number of fires has become a little greater. “The vast majority of fires are set by humans,” Daily said, “so Smokey the Bear isn’t all wrong.”
Blazes Make Grasslands
Carl Bock, Professor of Environmental, Population, and Organismic Biology, began his presentation on “Fire and Grasslands” with the declaration that fire is a “determinant of grasslands.” If you don’t burn tall grass sites, trees grow, as one can see in woody invasions along foothills.
At Wind Cave in South Dakota, Bock watched a group of bison react to a controlled-burn. They were, he said, “really relaxed.” A small group was caught on a knoll; they waited calmly until a lead cow chose a route and ran flat-out toward, then through, the fire. They all rushed through, and on the other side, started licking the burnt ground.
Bock’s subject shifted to the recovery of grasslands after a fire. “How long do fire effects last?” he asked. Not long; they are often ephemeral. Alluding to two growing seasons at a research site in Arizona, Bock said that the grass cover comes back very fast — and liberated by the temporary suppression of grass, other vegetation (herbs, forbs) take advantage of the opportunity. The responses of birds are very species-specific, depending on their nesting and foraging requirements, and their preference for open landscapes or relatively closed-in landscapes.
How much “direct mortality of animals” do grasslands fires cause? “Relatively little.” Lots of animals succeed in escaping the fire, and soil proves to be a good insulator. Snakes are the main “victims,” usually lost to suffocation.
Fires sustain grasslands, keeping them as grasslands. The response of organisms varies by their habitat need. Given these variations, it would be just as bad an idea, Bock concluded, to burn all grasslands at the same time, as it would be to burn none. Grasslands should not all be managed in the same way.
Custer’s Last Stand
Professor Jane Bock, from Environmental, Population, and Organismic Biology, then gave a presentation on “Vegetation, Fire, and Custer’s Last Stand.” In 1984, Bock was called upon by the National Park Service to assess the impact of a fire that burned the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Park officials wanted her to figure out what the area had looked like at the time of the battle, in the hope that they could restore it to its “original” state.
Bock was able to draw on a rich photographic archive, including previously unprinted negatives. At the time of the battle, she concluded, there was some grass, and lots of sagebrush. The significant presence of both bison and Indian horses in the mid-nineteenth century played a big role in producing this distribution of plants. Thus, one way to restore the place would be to have Indian people graze horses on the site. In other words, landscape conditions and fire regimes in the seemingly distant past were already much shaped by human activity.
“Immoral” Fires
Professor Yan Linhart, from Environmental, Population, and Organismic Biology then gave a presentation on “Forests and Fire: Early History and Policy.” Linhart, it turned out, had been trained as a forester, and dreamed of being a smoke-jumper. He recognizes fire as a recurrent event that has taken place for many millennia. Drawing on biological evidence, it’s clear that many plants (organisms which “can’t run away and hide from fire”) have adapted with mechanisms to complete their life cycle and reproduce.
Yet the first Euro-American settlers saw “fire as the enemy of orderly economic development,” and therefore a force that had to be fought. From its origins, the Forest Service saw its primary mission as saving forests from fire; many of its leaders were trained in Europe, where natural fires were uncommon except in the Mediterranean region. Setting fires carried the association of “banditry, and loose morals.” The influential explorer John Wesley Powell thought that fire took out too much timber; since Indians were often users of fire as a way of modifying landscapes, the removal of Indians, Powell thought, would benefit the forests. Celebrating the triumph of the policy of suppression, the first Chief Forester, Gifford Pinchot, made the famous declaration: “Today we understand that forest fires are wholly within the control of man.”
But not everyone bought into this way of thinking. In California in the 1880s, some settlers continued to recognize light burning as a land management tool, and elsewhere in the west, strong anti-government attitudes inspired defiant calls to fire-setting.
Nonetheless, the Forest Service was very successful in getting its ideas across. It employed slogans like “One tree can make a million matches; one match can kill a million trees.” Lectures, films, and paintings (one called “Demon Fire”) reinforced the point. The Forest Service sought the advice of psychologists and anthropologists to get the anti-fire message into the schools. In the 1930s, big ad agencies made the case that forest protection equaled national defense. Walt Disney’s Bambi made fire into the cruel enemy of cuddly wildlife. Smokey the Bear capped this crusade, declaring in the mid-1940s that “Only you can prevent forest fires.”
The campaign to control fire has been remarkably successful, leading to a build-up of fuel. Before fire suppression, Western ponderosa pine, growing in a belt from Eastern Washington to New Mexico, appeared in open stands. Now ponderosa pine forests are characterized by dense in-growth. What can we do with such forests? Treat them with fire? This would be a problem in some places, where the trees are simply too dense, and air quality would be too much affected. Allow logging, particularly the cutting of small trees? This is not economical, since the small trees have little market value. There is no easy solution for the dilemma we have created.
By the 1970s, enough large fires had occurred to focus attention on what the landscapes were telling us. One particular leader in this cause was Dr. Harold Biswell of the University of California, Berkeley, nicknamed “Harry the Torch” or “Dr. Burnwell.” Mocked for a long time, Biswell has emerged as the prophet of a crucial recognition of the need to permit and incorporate fire in forests.
The discussion then focused on questions of remedy. Is there an economical way to thin overgrown forests? Can we develop a market for cutting small trees? Participants also discussed the opposition presented by many environmentalists to any kind of forest-thinning, which they see only as a justification for logging. It was time, one participant observed, for “professional biologists to educate their conservationist brethren.”
This led to a discussion of how on earth anyone could identify the baseline for restoration: if one goal was to recreate forests as they were, then the follow-up question was surely, “As they were when?”
What can we do to reverse the impact of Smokey the Bear? “Not fight all fires at all cost,” Linhart answered. Undertake an education campaign, with the conservation agencies as a particular focus. “Get out of the reactive mode,” John Daily advised; “manage pro-actively.” But this was hard to do, he acknowledged, since exurban residents often protest the thinning of forests: “You’re cutting our trees!” Chemistry professor Bob Sievers encouraged us to think “more holistically” of the health of the planet. The discussion concluded with reflections on how difficult it is to extend the time-scale in our thinking: we are talking about a process that has run for millennia, but we are stuck thinking in terms of the last one hundred years of management. It is very difficult to get the federal agencies (or anyone else, for that matter) to think in the long-term.
Colorado fires since 1700
Professor Thomas Veblen, from Geography, spoke on “Changes in Fire Regimes in the Colorado Front Range Since 1700 A.D.” (Professor Veblen, it turns out, had heard Professor Biswell lecture in the late 1960s.) Veblen remarked on how “amazing” the change in attitudes has been in recent years in terms of recognition of the undesirable consequences of fire suppression. But Veblen also made this attention-grabbing announcement: “We don’t have sufficient knowledge to manage most sites, even if we agreed on the goal.”
During the second half of the nineteenth century, there was evidently an increase in fires, and in the early 1900s, at low elevations, fire suppression went into action. Meadows became forests. The stands behind Chautauqua Park in Boulder can give an immediate sense of how filled in these sites can become. The idea of restoring forests to conditions of 150 years ago, with scattered trees and open land, makes its best fit to these foothill sites.
At higher elevations, however, with a combination of ponderosa, Douglas fir, and lodgepole, there might well have been a different pattern. Veblen’s studies have not shown “evidence of frequent fire in upper montane areas.” The record disclosed that many decades passed between fires at upper elevations — which was “not,” Veblen said “what we expected.” The clear moral to this story was that we need site-specific information, and not the attempted application of the same paradigm from one site to another.
In the years 1786 and 1859, there were fires in lots of Front Range forests; “more than 50% of the area was burning.” And this example of two very heavy fire seasons should leave us “very concerned,” Veblen said. The development of dense stands about the same age meant a synchronicity in outbreaks of budworm infestations, and that, in turn, left dead trees and a greater regional fire hazard. More information on the patterns of spruce budworm outbreaks would thus be very useful to understanding fire regimes.
We need specific information on a particular site to provide a basis for management, Veblen said. While the recent mandate for fire suppression has had a clear effect, we can’t interpret all change in those terms. Climate variability — namely, drought — is also “extremely important” in creating the conditions for fire. What happens in the spring will be crucial for ponderosa forests; if a drought follows a wet year, then conditions will be similar to those in 1786 and 1859.
In current times, houses present a major fire hazard, putting more pressure on human ability to predict and manage fires. Many mountain homeowners seem to think that experts have a “crystal ball,” but experts can’t precisely forecast fire hazards. In the meantime, assumptions about our “ability to reduce fire risk may be creating a false sense of security.”
They admit they’re in denial
During lunch, two participants, one from the National Park Service and the other from the National Forest Service, offered their commentaries. “The timing of this forum,” the Park Service official said, “couldn’t be better.” After “one hundred years of denial,” it was clear that “fire will happen, controlled and regulated or uncontrolled and unregulated.”
Was the year 2000 an “indicator of what’s to come,” or “the beginning of a disastrous couple of decades?” Questions like these are nearly impossible to answer, since we’re still learning about “the complexities of forests.”
Even when science is at its strongest, the political system, all the participants agreed, often “interferes with the logical, scientific way to handle the problem.” In the federal agencies, there is a real “generational aspect” to this topic; senior people were trained in the “Smokey the Bear School,” but now there’s a new breed of managers, some of whom have been taught that “Smokey the Bear should have been shot.” (But he’s well-intentioned, and “he shows up for picnics,” another participant responded in Smokey’s defense.)
The Parks have been trying to “get back to ecosystems with a natural fire regime, “but this means catching up with over eighty years of suppression.” President Clinton’s National Fire Plan called for all agencies to double the acreage of prescribed burns, and yet “most of the easy acres have already been burned,” and there are big Clean Air Act implications for permitting any sort of fire to burn.
The National Forest Service participant observed that the agency’s fire plan office has become “like Santa’s workshop,” a frenzy of activity. In the Rockies, 110,000 acres would be subject this year to “vegetation management,” through mechanical means, chemical treatment, or fire. But the challenge of “building a good scientific basis for doing the right thing,” while also trying to take actions that will be “socially acceptable,” is a big burden.
A likely point of collision exists between the goal of fuel mitigation and the goal of habitat maintenance. Prescribed fire, for instance, produces sedimentation in aquatic systems, which translates into a decline in habitat for a number of species. The Forest Service has to get the “ecological complexity sorted out,” so they can “do the right thing in the right place.”
Air Quality?
Professor Robert Sievers, of the Chemistry Department and the Environmental Program, spoke next. He called attention to the impact on air quality of fire (whether natural or prescribed) in a time in which “the increase of carbonaceous compounds constitutes a global problem.” Industrialization has put massive amounts of carbon into the air and fundamentally changed the atmosphere. A burning forest is surrendering carbon to the atmosphere, and releasing many other chemicals and particulates. Benzene, for instance, is the same carcinogen whether it is released into the atmosphere by a tailpipe or a burning log.
A chemist’s perception of burning could be compared to a biologist’s perception of cancer: both are out-of-control processes that unleash a “proliferation of products.” Of course, a prescribed burn could produce less air pollution than a delayed bigger fire. Still, it makes sense to explore the political and social acceptability of thinning forests by means other than fire, but such solutions may require a great change in the mindset of some environmentalists.
The benefits of natural and prescribed fire come with disagreeable atmospheric impacts. In this discussion, the dangers of smoke inhalation for firefighters brought the big picture to a poignant, human focus, since “acute exposures to smoke inhalation” can be difficult to mitigate, even with respirators.
Unresolved Lessons
The final speaker for Friday’s workshop was Professor Philip Omi, director of the Western Forest Fire Research Center at Colorado State University. Omi reviewed the outcomes and consequences of the summer 2000 fire season. The lessons, he said, were “in many ways unresolved.”
The last century on this continent has been an era of suppression, with the number of fires picking up in the 1980s and 1990s. The revelations from Y2K were many. It was impossible to miss “the futility of fire exclusion.” It was equally impossible not to face up to the “subsidies for people living in fire-prone environments, who expect government to provide them with fire protection.” And prescribed fire also came in for questioning; before the Cerro Grande/Los Alamos fire, it was easy to take prescribed burning as a panacea, a way to restore fire to its natural role.
One of the outcomes of the 2000 fire season was a Presidential Initiative assigning $1.6 billion in federal money to address the problem. The National Fire Plan would 1) upgrade firefighting resources (many skilled veterans are close to retirement); 2) restore and rebuild damaged landscapes and communities; 3) reduce fire risk through fuel hazard reduction, and 4) provide community assistance.
With his longterm work on the issue (he got his start as a firefighter), Omi sees several risks in the terms of the Plan. The hiring of more firefighters by the Clinton initiative risks “reinforcing the fire exclusionary mentality,” and “treating symptoms not causes.” Unaddressed by the initiative, the most fundamental problems lie in the “wildland/urban interface.” “Most of the West is wildland fire territory,” and this interface is dispersed throughout the region. “What can we really do about this?” Omi asked.
Forty million acres in the West are in need of fuel hazard reduction, and prescribed fire is not suitable for all areas. Therefore mechanical thinning is of undeniable value. In treated areas, where forest has been mechanically thinned, fire severity is notably lower, but attitudes about forest management differ. Omi cites a gap in communication between those on the ground who risk losing their lives in blow-ups caused by 50 years of unburned wood fuel, and the advocates (including environmentalists) who remain loyal to the policies of fire suppression.
While we have lots of ecological and technological information available, an understanding of social attitudes is in short supply. The National Fire Plan, though well-intentioned, is likely to produce complicated consequences. Fuel management remains the key to reducing fire impacts, but changing the attitudes of environmentalists and of residents in fire-prone environments will be crucial to any meaningful improvements. Although universities can play a useful role in citizen education and may thereby stimulate collaboration between forest users, universities were not involved in designing the National Fire Plan.
Much of the ensuing discussion focused on the dilemmas posed by the urban/wildlands interface. “We can’t turn back the clock,” Omi responded. It would be great if homeowners and agencies could get together on plans, and agree that it is OK to thin trees and do some prescribed fires, but Omi could not summon sufficient optimism to declare that this was likely to happen.
Fire & Brimstone
The second day of the workshop opened with Tom Lyons, from the English Department speaking on “Representations of Fire in the Bible.” In reviewing scriptural references, Lyons has concluded that only in rare episodes do people in the Bible purposefully use fire to warm themselves. Usually fire is a “vehicle for judgment and punishment”; it punishes human sin and “tests and purifies.”
Fire also symbolizes God. Sometimes God appears in fire, as a comforting and reassuring presence, as in Moses’s encounter with the burning bush. But more often, fire embodies a consuming God, a jealous God. Malachi says that God is “like a refiner’s fire”; John the Baptist declares, “I baptize you with water; He shall baptize with you with fire.” Fire is “elevated by having God represented by it.” Fire in the Bible is also consistently purposeful.
With the patterns of Scripture installed in our minds, Lyons argued, we are “very likely to associate fire with some transgression or evil.” In the Bible, the consuming anger of God and fire as a natural element became fused. Hence, when we see people building exurban residences in fire zones, it is easy and almost comfortable for us to say, “They’ll pay for that!” The scriptural patterns “reverberate in our heads,” even in scientific discussions.
During the subsequent discussion, Philip Omi raised the interesting question: given the over-all negative connotations of fire in the Bible, would Eastern religions lead to different ways of thinking about fire? And a biologist wondered why, if fire is understood to be a key component of Mediterranean ecosystems, the Bible’s representation of it is so negative. There were also reflections on why fire is matched with “brimstone” so often (how much molten sulphur could there be in the Middle East?), and why losing one’s job came to be called “getting fired.”
Aggressive Suppression
Lincoln Bramwell, an experienced hotshot, and a graduate student in History at the University of New Mexico presented: “Far Beyond Driven: The Policy and Culture of Aggressive Fire Suppression.”
Hotshots are the “backbone of fire fighting,” and the system in which they work has been one of “Aggressive Fire Suppression.” Hotshots are appropriately proud of their training and physical condition, and they push themselves to “maintain their reputations.” But this can put them at risk. After the South Canyon fire in 1994, it was increasingly recognized that these crews can develop a dangerous subculture of excessive risk-taking, and this attitude can equal fire in the danger it poses to crew members’ lives.
In the 1930s, agencies recognized the “lack of explicit action guidelines” for firefighting, as well as a “lack of aggressive attitude” in firefighters. Set up in 1935, the 10 a.m. rule defined the standard response: “attack any reported fire, have it out by 10 a.m.” This was expected to be cost-effective, since it would be “easier to fight lots of little fires” than several big ones. Crews were organized, with members esteemed for their woodsmanship, physical prowess, and motivation. Crew members were supposed to be male, between 21 and 40, and preferably unmarried.
Hotshots had high morale, with a spirit summed up in the aphorism: “The difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little bit longer.” Although fatalities sometimes occurred, no one drew the connection between this attitude and a heightened risk of injury or death.
Then, scientific research began to reveal the “beneficial role of fire in ecosystems,” and to question the policy of suppression. But more and more people were enjoying outdoor recreation and building houses in the woods, so there were more calls for fire protection, regardless. On July 6, 1994, at the South Canyon Fire in Colorado, death brought hotshots and their ways to national attention. Altogether in 1994, 23 firefighters lost their lives, earning OSHA citations for agencies. It was difficult to ignore the fact that the bending of safety rules had become common. This merged with the growing recognition that “not all fires can be suppressed.”
It was, at last, time to face up to the “cultural problems” of firefighting. As the demand for hotshots increases, along with the number of people playing and living in non-urban areas, a combination of a heavy forest fuel load and young crews eager to prove their worth could result in further tragedy, if fire management and fighting strategies are not reevaluated.
From the Front Lines
Justin Dombrowski presented “The Reality of Wildland Fire.” Dombrowski is the supervisor of wildlife management for the Boulder Fire Department, and is often sent to fires throughout the state — work that places him “totally at the eye of the storm.” Dombrowski spoke of a fire that hit too close to home for Boulder County residents: the Walker Ranch\Eldorado Fire burned southwest of Boulder in 2000. He detailed how the fire began at the bottom of a bowl (“a tough place to send people,” which led to the dropping of retardant, which seems to land on firefighters as much as it does on trees), how it spread, and what efforts were made by local, state, and national firefighters and supervisors to control it. He talked about the difficulties of communications between jurisdictions, and between professionals and volunteers, as well as of chronic problems of underfunding in emergency services.
Dombrowski also noted the uncanny nature of this fire. Rather than dying down at night, the fire actually gained heat and intensity because of the abundance of fuel, and the dryness in both air and fuel. Dombrowski advocated prescribed burning, noting that once the fire leapt into a meadow where a prescribed burn had occurred, it died down and was finally extinguished by the fire crews.
It is time, Dombrowski concluded, to “shift Smokey’s message.” It turns out that Dombrowski has a particular authority in saying this, since he has sometimes gone out dressed up as Smokey; thus Dombrowski knows the affection that Smokey holds in the public’s heart. In the future, we must anticipate hazards; make evacuation plans; and make our peace with cutting and thinning, but there is plenty of need for Smokey’s leadership in these matters.
Constructing catastrophes
In the next presentation, “The Catastrophic Wildfires of the Future Will Be of Our Own Making: The View from the Ground,” Terry Tompkins, a fire crew leader with the U.S. Forest Service in the Black Hills of South Dakota, addressed the consequences of fire suppression and the increasing interface between public lands and private developments. (His father, Professor Phil Tompkins of the Department of Communications, was his co-author).
In 1910, a blow-up fire in Idaho consumed three million acres of forest in two days; episodes of this sort turned the U.S. Forest Service “into an institution dedicated to suppressing wildfire.” With this zero-tolerance stand on fire, an unprecedented amount of fuel has accumulated. Fires have been “getting bigger, faster, meaner.”
Another danger has emerged with the growing interface between forests and homes. Owned by people with “unrealistic expectations” for their safety, these homes make it difficult to deal with fire as a reincorporated part of forest management. Moreover, federal budgets are “unstable,” with wildly varying amounts allocated each year to fuels reduction.
Under these circumstances, firefighting might well be evolving into a more life-threatening line of work than ever before. Terry Tompkins cited his experience with the Jasper Fire in the Black Hills in 2000, as an example to support prescribed burning, and thereby protect the lives of future firefighters. His personal story gave scholars a vivid sense of what on-the-ground firefighting means: with a roar like a freight train, the fire “came right at us,” Tompkins said. They used a back fire which (thank heavens) worked, and when this fierce fire hit the prescribed burn at Jewel Cave, it “stopped dead in its tracks.”
There is no single solution to our current dilemmas, but a range of alternatives: 1) the continued suppression of all fires (the “orthodoxy that failed”); 2) let fires burn (not very acceptable, too much at stake); 3) prescribed burns (even with careful planning, prescribed burns remain risky); and 4) the mechanical treatments of thinning and chipping.
At the end of Terry’s presentation, Phil Tompkins added his own comments. He acknowledged that the new Fire Plan would spend money to communicate with the public, especially on the matter of where people shouldn’t build. But that doesn’t address the more compelling problem: What should we do about existing houses? “We need a born-again Smokey the Bear,” Phil Tompkins declared, “to tell people what they need to do. This is an urgent matter.” “Terry tells me,” Phil went on to say, “that it is the consensus of the fire establishment” that Colorado’s Front Range “is a disaster waiting to happen.” The amount of the interface between human habitation and forest here is simply “amazing.”
The society of fire-fighters
Speaking on “Chasing Smoke: Toward an Understanding of the Social Dynamics of Wildfire Fighting,” Professor Daniel Cress of the CU Sociology Department focused on the lives and behavior of the men and women who fight fires. Echoing a sentiment expressed by other presenters, Cress declared that the understanding of the social aspects of fire is way behind the scientific understanding of fire.
Most of the existing accounts of firefighting “emphasize the elite or exceptional,” not the “everyday, routine, or typical.” Danger gives meaning to this adrenaline-driven line of work, and a love of the out-of-doors also figures in the appeal. But careers tend to be short-lived: these jobs are temporary, seasonal, migratory, dead-end; and uncertain in pay-off (overtime is lucrative, but fickle). They are also a “young person’s game,” in both physical and relational terms. A job in firefighting, Cress noted, is “notoriously a relationship-killer.”
Those who persist in the enterprise enter a subculture, with values aimed at “overcoming the fear intrinsic to high-risk work.” But resulting attitudes can be problematic, and “lead people to over-extend.” “The need for courage and fearlessness must find a balance” with appropriate “caution and fear.”
Solidarity is also a key element of firefighting, but there are “downsides to solidarity,” too. One must ask the questions: When do shared norms put people in harm’s way? When should firefighters stick together, and when should they bolt? At South Canyon, they wouldn’t drop their tools, and their determination turned fatal.
In a final remark, Cress raised intriguing questions about the future of this career: will a shift in fire policy reshape these jobs? Will a mandate for prescribed burns turn firefighters into fire-starters?
Routine Dangers
Craig Melville, a CU graduate student who works with Professor Tompkins, talked about “Fighting the Mundane Fire, Smartly!” Melville is a former member of the Helena Hotshots, who also feels that research on human factors in fire situations is dramatically under-developed.
Most firefighting involves mundane fires, not dramatic blow-up fires. It is Melville’s goal to “change the way we train firefighters, beyond safety to smart risk.” “Smart risk” would “work with firefighters’ attitudes, rather than against them,” reconciling the conflict between the goals of effectiveness and safety. Melville’s premise is that firefighters are organizational workers, and thinking of them collectively, rather than focusing on individual decisions, might produce better strategies.
The goal would be to get firefighters to internalize certain premises and create attitudes of receptivity to safety. In fact, the first step would be to use the word “smart,” not the word “safe” (since “safe” seems to be too direct a challenge to the firefighter ethos of daring and toughness).
Smoke-jumpers are more individualistic than hotshots, and are less team-oriented. They work off a list, so they get equitable fire time. Hotshots, by contrast, are together the whole season, though not all of the crew has to go to all fires. Here Melville offered one of his key propositions: “if smokejumpers had to work together like hotshots, all would be safer.” This change would “improve the balance of courage and fear.” The idea also has some practicality: there is now much more road access in forests, so it is easier to put in hotshots instead of smoke-jumpers. Improvements in organization, cohesiveness, and interagency communication could be the foundation for “smarter” firefighting.
Flames in the Exurbs
The last presenters were Professor Bill Travis, of the Geography Department, who gave a slide presentation on exurban development in the Rockies, and Mark Haggerty, of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, who recently received his M.A. in Geography from CU. Their joint presentation was entitled “Perspectives on Exurban Development and Fire in the Rockies.” Travis spoke of the recent rapid population growth in the West, much of it “exurban.”
Why call it exurban, and not rural? Rural is generally understood to mean agricultural, and this is a really different ball game. Travis showed a photograph of a suburb, identifying it as “the natural habitat of most Westerners.” Suburbs and exurbs are proliferating at the interface with wildlands; that is simply where people are landing.
“Mountain towns were originally compact” — it was a rare miner who wanted much of a commute to the jobsite — but now “most development is outside of town and up against federal boundaries.” In Summit County, the regulations have pushed owners to locate houses, not in meadows (where they would be too visible), but “hidden” in the trees! The push to settle in hazard zones has its own logic, structured by market subsidies, regulations, and incentives.
And because money talks, political objectives shift to protect people and their structures from fire. Communities in the Rockies have standards for building construction, but they have “almost no restrictions on whether land gets developed.” Land use planning has “lots of potential,” but it is at present “universally ineffective.” And, when fire hits, “we help people rebuild,” which hardly furthers the cause of public education on fire danger.
Mark Haggerty followed up these somewhat disheartening remarks, with his observations on Montana’s situation, where lots of fires happened last summer. “Exurbanization,” Haggerty said, “is one of the great threats to what we all want,” leading to disrupted views and fragmented wildlife habitats, as well as heavy expenditures in firefighting. An organization like the Greater Yellowstone Coalition is therefore committed to trying to “change behavior,” stressing the responsibilities of homeowners, as well as scientists. The fires of 2000 got local people thinking, and this has presented an opportunity “to have an impact on behavior in innovative ways.”
In the ensuing discussion, Justin Dombrowski remarked that last year’s Walker Ranch fire may have delivered the opposite message from the desired one: since no homes were lost, it was possible for people to conclude, “The firefighters will take care of it.” Tom Veblen asked if zoning might be the only solution; was there any hope for that? “No,” Bill Travis responded. A change in land ownership, and in the ambitions and plans of the owners, struck him as the greater hope.
At the workshop’s conclusion, Phil Tompkins suggested that our over-arching goal be a rehabilitation of Smokey the Bear, this time with a message advocating prescribed burns and mitigation activities. Lincoln Bramwell said that “the burden” of our shifting fire policies and our current exurban housing preferences “falls on young people working with simple hand tools.” Terry Tompkins said that “blow-up fires are inevitable,” and “we have not yet prepared people properly for this.” Mark Haggerty raised the crucial question: What are we to do about people “moving into harm’s way?” And Carl Bock repeated his story of the bison he had watched that suddenly charging through the fire to safety, and he drew this conclusion: “You can’t run away from fire; you have to turn and face it.”
Patricia Nelson Limerick is a professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a director of the Center of the American West there. She is the author of several books, among them Legacy of Conquest, and more recently, Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West.
The Center of the American West was founded in 1989 to use “the resources of the University of Colorado to explore, debate, and celebrate the distinctive qualities of the West… by uniting the insightes of the humanities, the physical sciences, and the social sciences.” The Center’s website is centerwest.org; its postal address is Center of the American West, Macky 229, 202 UCB, Boulder CO 80309; telephone 303-492-4879.