Season of Fire

Even in the middle of the night, the heat on the southern California fire line was unrelenting. For UM wildlife biology student Kelly Matthews, a seasoned wildfire fighter and member of a U.S. Forest Service Hot Shot crew, working a 16-hour shift in this heat would be no problem, but she had been cutting line for 32 hours.  Then, sometime around 3 a.m., a snarling Jack Russell terrier sprung towards her from out of the bushes.  Before she could defend herself, the charging canine had already vanished.

“Hey man, did you see that dog?” Matthews asked a crewmate, to which he replied, “I think you need to sit down or something.” Apparently other Hot Shots had also been hallucinating from exhaustion, and nobody else had seen the dog. 

Why is wildfire fighting so attractive to so many UM students?  The pay is good and the work is outdoors.  But for UM students who fought or, like Matthews, are still fighting fires this summer, long hours and hard work are part of the job.

“Depending on the day, you can work 16 hours, get back to camp, go to sleep, and get up to do it again the next day,” Matthews said. 

Matthews can also look forward to a longer season of long days than most firefighters because she is taking this semester off to work through California’s fire season, which could last into November.

“But fire is pretty unpredictable,” Matthews explained. “We could be home in the next few months.”

Ty Livezey, a UM sophomore in recreation management, has already returned from being the squad boss of an initial attack crew in California, but not after earning over 600 overtime hours this season.  While he spent most of the time fighting fires, he especially enjoyed igniting them in order to enhance their own hand lines and reduce fuels, or “fighting fire with fire,” as Livezey explained.  But he was not so fond of the uniform on the hot summer days.

“Fighting fire means wearing boots, long pants and long sleeves instead of board shorts and flip flops,” Livezey said.

Yet despite the overtime hours, Livezey said that Forest Service firefighters are not paid as much as they deserve.  He mentioned firefighters he met working for the state of California who are paid from the moment they arrive on a fire to the moment they leave, whereas Forest Service crews, which might be on a fire for up to 21 days, are paid during the shift but not when in camp.  While Livezey acknowledged his “free time” in camp (used mostly for sleeping), he said it is not quite the same as time off from other jobs.

“Yeah, we get free time,” Livezey said with a shrug of his shoulders,” but you are already in the middle of nowhere, sleeping on the dirt.”

Travis Pfister was not so far from Missoula during his time off this summer; he worked for the Forest Service in the Plains-Thompson Falls District as an assistant field crew foreman, a title Pfister jokingly describes as “a fancy name for a guy who runs a chainsaw.”

For Pfister, a UM senior in resource conservation, and his 12-man crew, a typical day should have included 10 hours of thinning forests of potential fuels to reduce the damage a fire might cause.  But this summer, a typical day meant frequent interruptions to fight active fires.  Pfister recalled one fire near Plains that everyone in his station responded to.  Upon arrival, they started cutting a fire line, but a sudden change in the weather aided the flames.

“The fire got some good winds and started running on us,” Pfister said, but with the help of a water-dumping helicopter, the ground crew was able to contain it at eight acres.

While most student firefighters have exchanged their chainsaws and pulaskies for textbooks and pencils, the fire season in Montana is far from over.  Stage II fire restrictions are in effect for most of western Montana, including the majority of Missoula County, according to the Northern Rockies Coordinating Group.  The restrictions prohibit open fires, outdoor smoking and off-road vehicle use on public and private forested lands, as well as restrictions mostly dealing with timber harvest.  In Missoula, public open spaces such as Mount Sentinel, Mount Jumbo and the North Hills have been placed under “hoot owl restrictions” closing them from 1 p.m. to 6 a.m., according to Missoula Parks and Recreation director Donna Gaukler.

“Most fires close to town have been related to human error,” Gaukler said, adding that recent fires have been caused by discarded cigarettes, vehicular emissions, fireworks and at least one case of kids playing with matches.  She also said that afternoons and evenings have the greatest fire danger because the grass is drier later in the day.

High on the steep western flank of the Mission Mountains north of Missoula, the Ashley Lake Fire continues to burn into its fourth week.  The fire, within the tribal wilderness on the Flathead Indian Reservation, was first spotted by lookouts earlier this month.  Managers decided to let the fire burn for several reasons, mostly because there was little threat to human life or property due to the fire’s location in the human-restricted Grizzly Bear Conservation Zone, and because of the ecological benefits fire can provide to a forest ecosystem.

Pfister and his crew employed a “confinement strategy” to try to keep the fire from growing, using natural firebreaks like water or rocky areas.  But according to Germaine White, fire information officer for the Confederated Salish-Kootenai Tribes, the fire takes runs depending on the weather.

“Warm, dry weather with winds will whip it up a little bit,” White said, explaining the fire’s growth from one quarter to two acres in the first week, two to 125 acres in the second week, and 125 to 225 acres in the third week.  But despite the growth, managers continued the confinement strategy last week with the help of a helicopter dropping water on the northern and southern flanks of the fire.  The crews, known as helitack crews, laid hoses from the two Ashley Lakes and prepared to resist a northward run, but were pulled out this week without getting their hoses wet. 

While fire managers and scientists continue to monitor the fire and analyze a possible suppression strategy, White said further suppression efforts are unlikely because of safety concerns.  Not only might the steep, rocky terrain and hanging snags present dangers to ground crews, but the canyon surrounding the fire might also create hazards for aircraft.

“Fire will create its own wind, its own weather,” White said, “and in a canyon this creates a spiral-effect that is extremely hazardous to airplanes and helicopters.”

Closer to Missoula, as well as to human life and property, the Wisherd Fire near Marshal Mountain Ski Area was given far fewer opportunities to succeed than the Ashley Lake Fire.  As of the first day of school, fire information officer Pat Cross described the fire as “contained, controlled, and if its not dead out, it’s under patrol.”

The fire was considered a “lightning holdover” fire because it probably started when lightning struck a tree but did not quite flare up until about a week after the storm had passed.  As soon as smoke was sighted, a helitack crew was dispatched and arrived within 30 minutes, according to Kevin Schiappone of the Montana Department of Natural Resource Conservation. A helicopter dropping chemical fire retardent was also employed on the first day of fire suppression, Schiappone added.  By the next day, two more bucket-toting helicopters, a group of smokejumpers and two hand crews from Missoula and Deer Lodge joined the fight.  By the third day, the fire was contained, or completely encircled by a fire line, and by the fourth day it was controlled, which means the fire can withstand major winds through the rest of the season without jumping the fire lines.

Thanks to quick and effective suppression efforts, the fire was contained at 8.5 acres and no longer threatens human life or property.  But while preventative treatments like fuel reduction and thinning might reduce the risk of a similar fire in this area, Schiappone said there is nothing managers can do to prevent lightning strikes.

“About the only way to prevent that fire,” Schiappone said, “is if there were no trees out there.”

The largest fire in western Montana, the Gash Creek Fire in the Bitterroot National Forest southwest of Victor, was 60 percent contained as of Wednesday.  While the cause of the month-old fire is still under investigation, officials suspect it was a result of human error, according to the InciWeb Incident Information System.

Steven Running, an ecology professor at the University of Montana, is one of the most widely known proponents of the global warming theory in the scientific community.  His PowerPoint presentation on evidence supporting the theory now has about 70 slides and, as he says, is almost too long for an hour lecture.  In July, when his article “Is Global Warming Causing More, Larger Wildfires?” appeared online in Science Express, over 170 news reports on the article appeared over the next two days. The article summarizes a study linking increases in large wildfires with increases in summer temperature and earlier snow melting dates. Running says the article is not intended to challenge current land management practices like the National Forest Policy, which blames years of fire suppression and fuels accumulation as the primary cause of the increase in fires.  Rather, he said the article points out that the role climate change has played in the increase has been largely ignored by the Bush Administration and society as a whole.

“We have two factors that are jointly causing this acceleration of wildfires,” Running said.

The study Running summarized, which analyzed over 1,000 large fires since 1970, found that the average length of the fire season in the western United States has increased by 78 days and the average duration of large fires has increased from 7.5 days to 37.1 days.  These increases correspond with increases in average spring and summer temperatures of 0.9C and average snow melting dates that occurred one to four weeks earlier than normal.  The study also found that years with earlier snow melts had five times more large fires (those greater than 1,000 acres) than years with later snow melts. In addition, the study found that high elevation forests showed the greatest increase in fires because trees like fir and spruce are accustomed to dealing with cold and snow rather than heat and fire.  It concluded that these four crucial factors (longer fire season, higher summer temperatures, earlier snowmelt, and vulnerability of high elevation forests) combine to increase fire activity.

What makes this increase in fire different from increases to be expected along with drought, Running said, was its spike and continuous climb since the mid-1980s that corresponds with other data suggesting global warming that show similar changes in the mid-1980s, like the average global temperature.

“So many papers on so many measures came to a similar result that something happened in the 1980s and the climate started to change,” Running said.

But Running said the current administration is unwilling to listen to the science behind global warming.

“They’ve made their mind up on what they believe, and they don’t want to be bothered by the facts,” Running said.  He mentioned instances within government science agencies like NASA and NOAA when appointed directors attempted to muzzle scientists from speaking out on climate change, like when NASA climatologist Jim Hansen was ordered to have all his lectures, papers, and internet postings screened by the NASA public affairs department earlier this year.

“The truth just does not matter to this administration,” Running said.

But the truth should matter to forest ecology, which Running said is already experiencing direct impacts from climate change such as climbing timberlines and the emergence of boreal forest in what used to be arctic tundra.

“We will see differences in species composition and forest structure develop over the next 100 years,” Running said, but added that one key uncertainty still exists: “In Montana, we know it is going to get warmer, but we don’t know if it is going to get wetter or drier.”

While Randy Eardley, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, agrees that the increase in wildfires is due to a combination of factors, his and other federal agencies are more focused on reducing the fuels hazards resultant of many years of successful fire suppression than addressing the possible impacts of climate change.

“We got so good at fire suppression over the past 100 years that we virtually eliminated fire’s role on the landscape,” including natural fuels reductions, Eardley said.

Even though these agencies are no longer mandated to suppress every fire as soon as possible, Eardley said that about 95 percent of fire starts are quickly suppressed.  But after an extreme fire season in 2000, the National Fire Policy implemented major policy changes, including allowing naturally-ignited fires to burn and using more prescribed burning as a fuels reduction treatment.

“In the 1990s we were doing some prescribed burning, but the National Fire Policy really kicked it into a higher gear,” Eardley said.

Whether government policy changes to address global warming or continued fuel reductions effectively reduce fires, chances are the blazes will return to the forests next summer and student firefighters like Kelly Matthews will return to fight them.

“I really like my summer job,” Matthews said, “I’ve got winter to have fun.”