Total Running Time: 15:07
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John Heil: Welcome to Forest Focus, a series of programs about the National Forests of California. I’m John Heil and today we’re talking about the all-important issue of fire. On today’s show, we have the Regional Director for Fire and Aviation Ed Hollenshead, and special guests from the field.
Here with me is Regional Forester, Randy Moore. Randy as we get set for another fire season, what could you tell folks about our mission and how we manage fire rather than simply suppressing it.
Randy Moore: Well there’s a difference between fighting fires and managed fires and, and in the Forest Service we don’t simply just fight fire, we also manage fires to keep the forests healthy. For instance, sometimes allowing a fire to burn is healthy for the landscape and it can also prevent future wildfires from occurring in some of those areas. In California frequent fires is just a natural part of California and efforts to exclude fire is not only impossible but it can also harm the health of the forests. And so those are the things that I would suggest people consider as the fire season uh rapidly approaches us here.
John Heil: You recently attended a California Fire Alliance meeting in San Diego and in the nearby community of Talmadge. Tell me what the California Fire Alliance is, and what you saw and heard at the meeting.
Randy Moore: Yeah well the Fire Alliance is really agency heads, the Federal, State, and also the California State Fire Safe council and we get together twice a year. And I really just extremely excited about the campaign the California Fire Alliance was launching. It’s called "Take Responsibility". BLM has the lead in that program within the Fire Alliance and I think that’s another example of how the agencies and the communities are working together to make communities fire resistant.
John Heil: So how would somebody find out more about the "Take Responsibility" campaign?
Randy Moore: There’s a website and it’s called California Fire Alliance, uh and there’s all kinds of information on that website, and I would really encourage folks who’s interested in that to visit that website.
John Heil: For more information, go to cafirealliance.org. That’s all on word, it’s cafirealliance.org, or you can go to cafirealliance.com.
John Heil: I’m speaking with Fire Director for the Pacific Southwest Region of the Forest Service, Ed Hollenshead today about the upcoming fire season. Ed, what does it mean to make the forests more resilient?
Ed Hollenshead: The resilience of our natural ecosystems is based upon the condition of the vegetation on the landscape and right now because of years of aggressive fire suppression, they’re not in a condition where a fire is going to leave them unharmed. A resilient ecosystem can absorb a fire and in fact is it embraces a fire and uses a fire to regenerate itself and to sustain itself over time. So getting to that place requires first of all that we probably need to go in and do something with the vegetation on it right now. Obviously letting fire go unfettered on that landscape is not in our best interest. And then after a while, once we’ve been able to do something with the stand condition, fire can play its natural role in an ecosystem that is sustainable and resilient to it.
John Heil: Are we able to do the necessary hazardous fuels reduction on the forests in order to make the fires a little less intense?
Ed Hollenshead: In many places: yes. Overall as you might suspect with 20 plus million acres in the state, what we’re doing is trying to be strategic about where we put our fuel treatments which allow us in terms of uh, protecting communities to be a little more effective. We are having of course to prioritize what we’re doing.
John Heil: A lot of people talk about a “let it burn” policy. Do we actually have a “let it burn” policy? Are we letting fires burn?
Ed Hollenshead: No, John, we don’t. Our policy recognizes two kinds of fires: planned ignitions and unplanned ignitions. Our planned ignitions are prescribed fire and they are lit under certain conditions, the weather is carefully monitored prior to ignition and we have plenty of folks in place to prevent them from escaping. The unplanned ignitions we suppress those immediately and aggressively. 95-98% of our initial attack on those fires is successful. There are some that are going to get larger, and there are some that are in areas and burning under conditions that are conducive to allowing them to burn, to monitor them, to actually manage them as they do their work on the landscape. Some people would call that a ‘let it burn’ policy. It certainly isn’t because we actually have a prescription and we have people on site to ensure that they don’t become a problem.
John Heil: When the air quality is poor, how can you justify letting it burn or monitoring a fire instead of putting it out?
Ed Hollenshead: There are health hazards with forest smoke, we do know that. The issue is though that either we take a little smoke that we’re managing now and it’s burning under conditions that allow it to burn more cleanly, or we wait for that unplanned ignition where it’s going to burn across large areas and the emissions are much dirtier. They have more volatile oils in them and, and it’s burning under conditions that are much less healthy, if you will. So while we are concerned about that, you know we try to do what we can in our prescriptions to identify winds in terms of speed and direction that will reduce the impact of smoke in local communities, but obviously we can’t afford it at all times. And you know we compete with others for the use of that air shed. The air pollution management boards are uh, our partners, actually they’re working with us and they let us know when we can and we can’t burn, that so you know our intent is to burn as much as we can without affecting the, the health of the communities.
John Heil: Could you tell me what the Forest Service is doing to address the rising costs of fighting fires?
Ed Hollenshead: We’re taking a hard look at how we’re fighting fires. The normal way in the past of fighting fires was bringing overwhelming mass, uh just throwing firefighters, aircraft, everything we had at fires, even when they’re burning under conditions when we have very little impact on stopping them. What we’re trying to do is, were trying to address these fires in a more logical way. You know, we don’t want to waste any effort. Every effort that we give, every risk that we take needs to have an outcome, in terms of reducing that fire spread or eliminating the threats to communities. So I think what we’re trying to do in so many words is be a little more efficient, be a little more mindful about how we’re making the decisions to fight these fires and I think that ultimately what we’re going to see is a reduction in cost.
John Heil: Every year it seems like the fire season gets longer, the fires are more severe and bigger. How prepared are we to deal with another difficult fire season?
Ed Hollenshead: Well obviously we are prepared. I mean we have our engines, our crews, our aviation assets on board right now and that will peak somewhere in the end of June. We carry what we consider to be an average staffing or average capacity to fight fires into the season, based on many years of experience and if the season proves to be a little more aggressive, then we’ll either pull people in from outside the state, which we can do, or we’ll beef up our own resources inside the state.
John Heil: Ed, what would you like to tell the firefighters, hot shot crews and all the folks who work in fire, as summer approaches?
Ed Hollenshead: I want them to know how proud I am of what they do. I want them to know that their work is noble work. More importantly, I want them to be safe. I want them to make good decisions for themselves and for those that they supervise on the landscape. There isn’t one acre, there isn’t one house, there’s nothing worth harm coming to any one of our firefighters. So basically it’s a safety message. It’s a concern for their well-being. I know they’re going to be aggressive in their firefighting. I know that they’re going to be focused. I know that they’re the best in the world and they prove it every day. But ultimately a good, safe firefighter is the highest performing firefighter.
John Heil: So true; thank you. Next we have a report from Assistant Public Affairs Officer John Miller from the San Bernardino National Forest in Southern California.
John Miller: So we’d like to interview Dan Felix, San Bernardino National Forest, Forest Fuels Officer about what does make a fire resistant community.
Dan Felix: Here in southern California, obviously we have to live with fire ‘cause it’s not going to go away so our efforts are aimed at modifying the type of fire behavior that may enter a community. We’re not going to keep these areas from burning. Uh, what we have to do is change the nature of the fire that goes through these areas so that essentially firefighters have a chance at protecting life and property and resources.
John Miller: Do you think that we’re making some progress in reducing the fire threat?
Dan Felix: Absolutely. We have partnered fairly well with both our state and county counterparts in both fire and resource management but also with the people of the community. And we’ve done fairly well at getting a message across that a thick, crowded forest is not necessarily a good thing for living with fire. By cleaning up some of the fuel that would have been cleaned up by more frequent natural fires, I think that people realize that it doesn’t destroy the forest at all. It actually enhances it. And while people have been resistant because many have moved up into the mountains into the forest because of what they perceive as the lush, understory that gives screening and privacy and gives them a feeling of being within the forest, I think many have come to understand that that is not a healthy forest, not only in terms of fire, but in terms of wildlife and accessibility.
John Miller: So let’s discuss emergency preparedness and some of the efforts of the Forest Service along with MAST in getting the local community ready for a potentially devastating fire.
Dan Felix: The County, State, Municipal and Federal agencies, along with other agencies, Southern California Edison for example, decided that they should form this organization, Mountain Area Safety Taskforce to set priorities and guide efforts to prepare people for wild land fire emergencies, and others, and to coordinate all the efforts within certain priorities. And, and that to me was key. And those priorities were evacuation routes, infrastructure, such as communication towers, etceteras, and then also to come up with a coherent evacuation plan. And those efforts paid off in spades when tens of thousands of people were successfully evacuated. And that was, in my mind, a direct result of the prior planning and coordination between all of the entities involved in the MAST organization.
John Miller: Well we appreciate Mr. Felix you spending your time with us, thanks. And the next piece will be with Assistant Fire Chief and Fire Marshall for San Bernardino County, Peter Brierty. And today we’ve brought Peter in to discuss how communities are being made more fire resistant.
Peter Brierty: Well, what it takes is a couple different things; a couple groups working together. So the Mountain Area Safety Task Force, the local Fire Chief and the local community working with the local Fire Safe Council is the starting point for a fire safe community. And what comes from that is several things: the physical removal of fuels, but we also need to concentrate on public education, making sure the public understands what’s going on. And I think we’ve been very, very successful here in San Bernardino County with our partners in the Forest Service and CAL Fire, getting the message out that it is okay to go into the forest lands uh, modify the fuel type, reduce some vegetation, not destroying the habitat, but actually improving the habitat and making a much healthier Forest.
John Miller: In each one of these communities, we have a Fire Safe Council. How would you see their role?
Peter Brierty: Usually during a fire, particularly a large wild land fire, agencies tend to ignore the shoulder patches, work together to put the fire out. But once the fire was out, six, seven, eight years ago, people went back to their offices and rarely ever talked to each other. What the Fire Safe Councils were able to do is to park your shoulder badge at the door as we used to say in some of the early meetings and they actually became the mortar that started to glue together the different agencies and get the different agencies to work together. So they have been a, they have really been a phenomenal, significant player in getting the agencies to cross over administrative boundaries. Quite frankly, without them as the catalyst, we wouldn’t be where we are today.
John Miller: So, chief, where’s the public getting their information about fires now and, and do you see that changing?
Peter Brierty: Well information about specific fires has traditionally been ‘let’s get it on CNN, let’s get it on CBS and get as many people as possible some very general information’. We’re now focusing on the actual customer that we now perceive as the one that’s been evacuated from that neighborhood. And we’re looking much more closely at getting very, very specific information related to what streets have been evacuated, what neighborhoods have been evacuated, what areas have actually burned and getting that information to the public that’s been displaced. So using a multitude of different approaches, not only the radio, television, and now the internet has just been a phenomenal step forward, a huge step forward. During the Slide and Grass Valley Fire, one of our local websites was number thirty seven in the world in hits. And with iPods and blackberries and internet access, the demand is far outstripped government’s ability to respond to it and it’s government’s job to come up to speed and get this information out as fast as possible. Take advantage of the internet. Take advantage of Google. People just aren’t accepting uh, I’ll read it in tomorrow morning’s newspaper. And that’s what we as providers of the information on the fire line need to keep that information as specific as possible and as real-time as possible and as immediate as possible.
John Miller: Chief Brierty, we’ve put a lot of time and effort since 2002 working on our evacuation plans, any thoughts on that?
Peter Brierty: It’s really, really critical that when evacuations are called for, people respond to those evacuations. Our message is to get out and get out early because the sooner the people get out, the sooner the firefighters can get in without restriction. And the sooner they can get in without restriction and do their job, the quicker they can put the fire out. It’s really, really important to get your paperwork, your prescriptions, your pets prepared for evacuation if you live in one of these areas. It’s one of those things that you never know when it’s going to happen so you always need to be prepared.
John Miller: Well I thank you Chief Brierty. Thank you for spending the afternoon with us.
John Heil: Thanks John and thanks to all our guests on this second episode of Forest Focus. Here in the Pacific Southwest Region, we’re working hard to make sure that your forests are safe and healthy. And we appreciate your efforts in keeping your community safe and fire resistant. To receive future episodes of Forest Focus, please subscribe to our RSS feed. I’m John Heil and thank you for listening.