Daniel Weintraub: Sometimes there is no choice but to let it burn
by Daniel Weintraub, Sacramento Bee
July 13, 2008
The flames burning the Big Sur coast have captured the nation's attention, and a big blaze in Butte County is forcing the evacuation of thousands of people. But a stubborn fire steadily chewing its way up the western slope of the Sierra Nevada is largely responsible for making life hell for residents from Tahoe to the Sacramento Valley. And that fire might be burning for weeks to come.
To try to find out why, last week I went to the fire lines east of Foresthill and to an airstrip in Blue Canyon, where the man in charge of fighting the blaze for the U.S. Forest Service was directing the operation in the American River Canyon.
The answer has many parts.
One is simple bad luck. The fire started by lightning strikes one day after another series of strikes hit farther north in California, drawing firefighters and equipment in that direction. When the Tahoe-area Sierra was struck the next day, a lot of crews and equipment were gone, keeping the firefighters here from pouncing on the flames in time to get them contained.
Another reason might be bad management. Casey Judd, the head of the employee association for the federal firefighters, says the Bush administration has diverted money from firefighting, skimping on prevention and preparation, and leaving the Forest Service shorthanded at critical moments, with hundreds of vacancies in California. Indeed, in the early days of the American River Complex fire, there was a shortage of crews, fire engines and aircraft, even logistical help. At one point, managers were so hamstrung that they considered pulling drivers off fire engines to drive catering trucks, because without food, firefighters can't work.
A third reason: priorities. With hundreds of fires burning at once, the national fire management center in Boise, Idaho, decides where to send a finite number of crews, and when. First priority goes to fires that threaten life, homes and businesses.
The American River Complex fire was not deemed critically dangerous. So it was lower on the list and only last week began getting reinforcements as other fires were contained.
Even now that all hands are on deck, however, it will likely take weeks before the fire is fully contained. Last week, Paul Summerfelt, the man commanding the forces here, projected it would be Oct. 1 before containment was achieved. A few days later, after things improved a bit, he said the crews might reach that goal by Aug. 1.
"We could have all the resources in the free world sitting here right now and with the fire burning the way it is in that canyon, we could not put anybody in there," Summerfelt said. "It's just too dangerous."
Fighting a wildfire, as I learned Wednesday driving east on Foresthill Road, is not like putting out a house fire in central Sacramento or a grass fire in the freeway median. The strategies, tactics and skills required make them completely different tasks.
Firefighters do not so much fight a wildfire as try to surround it, mowing down trees and vegetation in its path to slow and eventually stop its advance. Crews use bulldozers, chain saws and hand tools to fell trees, remove brush and clear trails through the forest, creating open space they hope the fire will not be able to cross. Along that perimeter, they trim small branches off the lower trunks of tall trees so that, when the flames do come, they pass through quickly rather than climbing the trunk and reaching the crown. If they have time and the conditions are favorable, they set fires of their own to burn a swath of forest and steal potential fuel from the wildfire.
Although helicopters drop thousands of gallons of water and chemical retardant on the flames and the forest, that does little more than slow the fire's momentum or help forces on the ground extinguish a hot spot that has jumped the line. The main fire must eventually burn itself out by running out of fuel, either on its own or because the crews have been able to clear and burn enough territory to corner it.
"It's a chess game, with pieces moving around," Summerfelt told me Thursday as he sat in the driver's seat of an air-conditioned truck on the edge of the Blue Canyon airstrip. "Right now the fire is doing what it wants to do. We need to get it to a place where we can do what we need to do."
The fires broke out June 21, when dry lightning sparked about a dozen separate blazes in and around the American River Canyon about 50 miles northeast of Sacramento, in the Tahoe National Forest. With the Forest Service's California-based strike teams already assigned elsewhere, Summerfelt's Rocky Mountain team was dispatched to manage the effort.
Once in position, they counted 10 fires. Seven were small and under control, or nearly so. Three others were more serious. With limited resources available, Summerfelt decided to attack the southernmost of the three fires first with everything he had. The other two fires, he decided, would simply be allowed to burn.
The Peavine fire had what firefighters call a good "anchor point" – a safe spot behind the fire from which crews and equipment can fan out in two directions, flank the flames and then work their way around to the front to try to pinch off the fire's exit path. The other two fires, known as Westville and Government Springs, were deeper in the canyon, in more remote, rugged terrain.
It took the forces about a week to contain the Peavine blaze, which eventually burned about 550 acres. The other two, meanwhile, grew larger and more dangerous. Small teams of forward scouts approached those fires to gather intelligence, taking GPS readings of roads, making maps, looking for places where they could insert crews and identifying escape routes in case they were needed.
It was not until about July 1, 10 days after the lightning strikes, that the firefighters began to attack the two fires that are still burning today. By then, the Government Springs fire had grown to 3,000 acres. The Westville fire had consumed about 700 acres.
One objective was to prevent the Government Springs fire from jumping a line along Sawtooth Ridge on its northern edge, about three miles from Interstate 80 and the town of Blue Canyon. Another was to keep the Westville fire from crossing Foresthill Road on its southern flank. Firefighters met both those goals and have maintained them, protecting several small enclaves of homes on the north, as well as the railroad and the interstate highway, and defending sensitive wildlands and popular hiking and horse trails to the south.
But while the fires were hemmed in on the north and south, they were still burning east and west along the steep, almost inaccessible slopes of the river canyon. For a week or more, the two fires worked like slow-moving freight trains moving in opposite directions on parallel tracks. The northern fire, Government Springs, was moving mostly west. The southern fire, Westville, was creeping east. Their strange dance was the product of the kind of fuel and terrain in their paths and the way the winds swirl around in the American River Canyon, like breezes circling inside a baseball stadium.
A crew of "hot shots" – the best-conditioned, best-trained wildlands firefighters – hiked deep into the forest to carve a containment line near Humbug Ridge on the Government Springs fire's western edge, hoping to connect with a line that was holding the Westville fire in place there. And they already had the Government Springs fire cut off at a rocky escarpment on its eastern flank, about five miles up the slope. But the team fighting the Westville fire struggled to establish a line blocking that blaze from moving east. The terrain was too steep, the flames too strong, at some points reaching 120 feet above the ground.
"It's extremely rugged up there," Jeff Wallace, the operations chief responsible for that portion of the fire, told me Wednesday afternoon at his outpost on Ford Point, pointing toward the Beacroft Trail, where Wallace had hoped his crews could stop the fire's eastern march.
Later Wednesday, pushed by strong winds, the fire crossed that line and moved east and north, merging with the Government Springs fire. Now the two fires were one, and the anchor that the fire crews thought they had established on the northeastern edge was worthless, about to be overrun. The crews were forced to pull back and regroup to fight another day.
The fire now was free to start roaming east at will, and it did. By Friday the two fires combined had burned nearly 18,000 acres. About 900 firefighters, managers and support personnel were taking part in the fight. But for the moment, they were still searching for a defensible line to the east where they could make their next stand.
"This fire will burn for a while," Summerfelt said. Even if the crews can get it contained by Aug. 1 – their current target date – the fire will still burn within its boundaries for days or weeks after that.
"There will be smoke coming off this fire," he said, "for a considerable amount of time."