History of Fire Management

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• History of Fire Management
• How have people used fire?
• How do people interact with fire today?

2

• History of Fire Management
• Ecological and cultural setting leading to the
  initiation of fire control
• Development of the American frontier and the
  expansion of civilization were associated with
  elimination of the wilderness. The plow was
  supposed to follow the ax rain was supposed to
  follow the plow.
• Native Americans perceptions of their
  environment were quite different wilderness
  may have been a foreign concept.
• Natives also managed their environments, often
  with fire, but many native populations declined
  precipitously upon exposure to European diseases
  and society.
• The North American frontier encountered by
  European settlers was often very different in the
  1700s and 1800s than it had been a few
  centuries earlier eastern forests and prairie
  edges, especially, had become more dense with
  trees and brush after the cessation of native
  underburning.
• See Fire, Native Peoples, and the Natural
  Landscape, edited by Thomas R. Vale, Island
  Press 2002.
• See World Fire, by Stephen J. Pyne, Henry Holt
  1995.

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Large fires followed landclearing and forest
exploitation. Dark days are recorded in New
England in 1716 and Black Friday, May 19, 1780.
In 1825 nearly 3 million acres burned in Maine
and New Brunswick, mostly slash fires following
logging and landclearing. The spread of
railroads brought fire from locomotives
(smokestacks and brakes). Settlement of the
Lake States brought logging and fire. The first
railroad came into Wisconsin in 1870 1871 was
the Black Year of fire in Wisconsin and
Michigan. Over 2,000 people died in the Peshtigo
and Humboldt fires (WI). Severe fires
continued through the early decades of the
twentieth century.
4
Historical Large Fires
K. Davis, Forest Fire Control and Use, 1959
5
Miramichi Fire (Alan MacEachern, National Library
of Canada) There were various possible causes
of the fire. Lumbermen were blamed immediately
after trees were cut down, they were debarked,
trimmed and squared, in effect leaving behind
approximately one third of the felled trees as
flammable material. Settlers land-clearing
involved rolling cut trees into piles, burning
them, piling the remaining wood, burning it, and
so on. Prior to the invention of the convenient
matchstick, it was difficult to produce
combustion. Consequently, it was common practice
to have open flames present both indoors and
outdoors, resulting in frequent accidental fires.
Lightning is another possible cause. As a
result of the fire, the village of Newcastle was
destroyed many thousands were left homeless or
were drowned while attempting to escape the
flames by rushing into the river. Shortly after
the event, it was claimed that 160 died in the
blaze however, considering the fact there were
an estimated 3000 lumbermen in the wilderness at
the time, the actual number may have been higher.
6
great many were on the blazing bridge when it
fell. The debris from the burning town was hurled
over and on the heads of those who were in the
water, killing many and maiming others so that
they gave up in despair and sank to a watery
grave. In less than an hour the tornado struck
the town, the village of Peshtigo was
annihilated!
Eye witness accounts by volunteer rescue
workers, after the fire, document wagons carrying
human remains lined up as far as three miles,
awaiting a chance to put the victims to rest.
Some waited with the remains of neighbors,
friends and loved ones, while others accompanied
unidentified remains to their final resting
place. Many were burned beyond recognition and
their names will never be known.
Peshtigo Fire Museum and Cemetery,
http//www.rootsweb.com/wioconto/fireMuseum.htm
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Hinckley Fire
Minnesota Historical Society, www.mnhs.org/library

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1933 Fire  Perimeter area of fire               
                              261,222 acres 
Unburned area within perimeter                   
            21,527 acres  Burned
area                                              
            239,695 acres  Timber
killed                                    
11,828,712,000 board feet     (a board foot
measures 12" x 12" x 1")  1939 Fire Perimeter
area of fire                                      
       209,690 acres  Unburned area within
perimeter                               19,030
acres  Burned area                               
                           189,660 acres  Timber
killed                                         
834,220,000 board feet  Previously burned by
other fires                               15,527
acres  1945 Fire Perimeter area of
fire                                            
182,370 acres  Unburned area within
perimeter                                 2,240
acres  Burned area                               
                           180,130 acres  Timber
killed                                         
439,385,000 board feet  Previously burned by
other fires                               10,899
acres  1951 Fire Perimeter and burned
area                                      32,700
acres  Four Fires Combined Perimeter area of
fire                                  
            360,882 acres  Unburned area within
perimeter                                  5,946
acres  Burned area                               
                            354,936 acres 
Timber killed                                    
  13,102,917,000 board feet 
Tillamook Burn and Reburns
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Establishment of the Forest Service was related
to fire disasters. American forestry grew from
European examples, seeking to develop sustainable
yields of forest resources instead of short-term
liquidation of old-growth forests. Part of the
conversion from logging to forest management
could be guided by European forestry
silvicultural plans based on the ecology of tree
species, concern for regeneration, measurement of
growth in order to plan allowable harvests.
These ideas came to transform American ideas
toward forests at the close of the 19th century,
when the end of the frontier period was in
sightand these ideas continue to frame our
modern perspective on conservation and
appropriate management of natural resources.
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Conservation was thus based on thoughtful,
scientific tending of forest resources,
especially trees and grass, protecting them from
human-caused destruction (logging, overgrazing,
fire) and natural destructive forces (insects,
disease, fire). Fire fell into both categories
of forest destruction. Even where beneficial
effects could be ascribed to fire, such as
control of hardwood species in southern pine
forests, the scientific approach to
conservation relied on substituting management
intervention (thinning, herbicides) for the messy
unscientific use of fire. The central
European nations that most influenced American
forestry, especially Germany and France, managed
regulated forests where fire was a minor
nuisance. This example served to some extent in
humid eastern deciduous forests of North
Americaalthough native burning had managed many
of these ecosystems differentlybut it offered no
precedent for the coniferous forests of Maine and
the SE, or the semi-arid western forests.
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The logic for fire exclusion was obvious to early
conservation proponents fires killed and
damaged trees, left forests understocked, and
left watersheds subject to erosion. Strange to
say, that, obvious as the evils of fire are, and
beyond all question to any one acquainted with
even the elements vegetable physiology, persons
have not been found wanting in India, and some
even with a show of scientific argument(!), who
have written in favor of fires. It is needless
to remark that such papers are mostly founded on
the fact that forests do exist in spite of the
fires, and make up the rest by erroneous
statements in regard to facts. B.H.
Baden-Powell (Pyne 1995163) Bernhard Fernow,
a Prussian-trained forester, thought fires were
the bane of American forests and dismissed
their causes as a case of bad habits and loose
morals. (Pyne 1995184)
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Pynes Administrative History of Fire Management
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• Frontier Fire
• 1885/86 Adirondack Forest Preserve (NY),
  Administration of Yellowstone National Park by
  U.S. Cavalry. The Armys work in fighting forest
  fires was considered a great success.
• 1905 Transfer Act removed forest reserves from
  DOI General Land Office to the USDA Bureau of
  Forestry (later USFS). Gifford Pinchot was the
  main motivator and became head of the Forest
  Service. The agency needed to demonstrate that
  it could effectively manage the reserves.
• 1908 Emergency Firefighting Fund Act (1908)
  authorized deficit spending on fire. Funds were
  now available to hire large crews.
• 1910 Huge wildfires, especially in NW. This
  crisis was the formative experience for a
  generation of FS leaders.
• 1911 Weeks Act authorized FS to acquire land in
  eastern US. Now FS needed to deal with light
  burning in the Southeast also.
• 1914 Coert DuBois Systematic Fire Protection
• 1916 Economic theory of least cost plus loss
  proposed to justify spending on fire suppression
  need to suppress fires at the combination of the
  lowest possible cost with least damage to
  resources (usually timber value)
• 1921 Mather Field Conference on fire in CA
  (first servicewide fire conference) approved the
  systematic fire protection and least cost
  concepts basis for national fire planning.
• 1924 Clarke-McNary Act extended cooperative
  fire program. Greatly expanded the influence of
  Federal forestry, put FS as cooperating partner
  and funding source for fire protection over any
  forested watershed, working with states and
  municipalities (municipal watershed lands,
  especially in S. CA).
• Aldo Leopold recognizes the ecological role of
  fire in maintaining the balance between desert
  grassland and woodland in southern AZ, a balance
  changed by grazing and fire suppression.

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Light burning/Paiute forestry (detailed case
study from Pyne, Fire in America, 1982) In parts
of the West, especially California, light
burning or setting surface fires to keep the
forests open and encourage herbaceous growth was
practiced in the latter 19th century. Both
burners and the Forest Service saw an Indian
heritage to light burning practitioners regarded
it as an extension of the Indian way of wise
forest management, while opponents labeled it
Paiute forestry as an expression of scorn.
Aldo Leopold in 1920 wrote an article attacking
light burning with every real and imagined
argument he could contrivethe article forms an
interesting contrast to his later views on
ecological restoration. Light burning was
advocated by some for philosophical
reasonsfollowing the Indian wayand by others
for practical reasons, as a means of reducing
fuels, encouraging pasture, and reducing brush.
In 1899 John Wesley Powell lectured Secretary of
the Interior John Noble on the virtues of Indian
fire practices. As Bernhard Fernow sourly
recalled, Major Powell launched into a long
dissertation to show that the claim of the
favorable influence of forest cover on water flow
or climate was untenable, that the best thing to
do for the Rocky Mountains was to burn them down,
and he related with great gusto how he himself
had started a fire that swept over a thousand
square miles. (Pyne 1982102).
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Opponents argued that light burning killed
regeneration, making the forest unsustainable,
and also reduced herbaceous vigor, depleted
humus, caused economically damaging fire scars,
and facilitated insect and disease attack. A
telling argument for the fire control advocates
was the negative moral impact, antithetical to
the Progressive spirit of conservation.
Essentially, the Forest Services claim to manage
lands rested on the argument that they had a
better, scientific approach this argument failed
if the agency accepted frontier management
practices like light burning. While there were
many differences of opinion between Gifford
Pinchot, founder of the Forest Service, and John
Muir, who helped form the National Park system,
they agreed on the undesirability of light
burning. Muir claimed that the losses due to
fire were ten times greater than those due to
logging. Landowners in California were divided
over light burning. G.L. Hoxie wrote in the
August, 1910, issue of Sunset magazine that light
burning ought to be mandatory, to counter the
hazard of fuel accumulation. What else happened
in August, 1910?
16
August, 1910, saw the worst fires in American
history, throughout the Northwest but all across
the nation. These fires firmed the opposition of
the Forest Service, which argued that
woodsburning fires had caused many of the fire
holocausts that would deforest the US and cause
timber famine. Consider how American ecology
might have changed if the light-burners had
prevailed or if the 1910 fires had not occurred.
Fire might be an accepted practice, much safer
than today (because heavy fuel complexes would
never have built up) and more accepted (because
everyone would have been accustomed to smoke).
Fire-adapted forests would probably be in much
better condition. However, some changes would
have been inevitable. Initial fire exclusion in
much of the West was due to grazing, not fire
suppression. And concern for air pollution, as
well as the conflicts between urban and rural
wildland values, probably would have led to
conflicts over burning.
17
Backcountry fire In 1933, as Franklin Roosevelt
took office, the FS presented the Copeland Report
(A National Plan for American Forestry). The
plan was based on reclamation of American forest
landsrestoring their forest cover and
productivity. Fire control was at the heart of
the plan it called fire protection the greatest
accomplishment of State forestry. More
constructive effort has been put into it and more
money spent on it than on any other form of
forest activity. (Pyne 1982346). The ideas of
systematic fire protection formed the basis for
extending fire control to all forest lands but
money and personnel were lacking. The
conservation programs of Roosevelts New Deal,
especially the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC),
provided the resources to extend fire
protection. At Grand Canyon National Park, for
instance, the CCC in the 1930s initiated regular
fire crews, built roads and tree towers, built
the wooden fence that closed the North Rim to
grazing. Pyne points out that this policy went
against the economic underpinning of fire
control, because the resources in many
backcountry lands were essentially unrecoverable
or worthlessthe backcountry including cutover
lands in the Lake States, for instance. But the
government subsidy establishing the CCC, together
with the perception that fire control was the
right thing to do, caused it to be done anyway.
18

• Backcountry fire
• 1933 Tillamook burn, 270,000 acres in OR Coastal
  Range. Major effort over the next to decades to
  salvage and reforest (see pp. 412-413).
• 1935 The 10 a.m. policy was established
  control all fires by 10 a.m. the next day. (Why?
  Control before start of the next burning
  period). Failing control, the objective was 10
  a.m. the next day, and so on.
• 1937 Aldo Leopold visits the Río Gavilán in
  Chihuahua, contrasted the overgrazed and
  protected SW forests with the frequently burned
  but healthy Mexican ecosystem.
• 1942 Harold Weaver starts burning a plot at
  Coyote Creek on the Colville Indian Reservation,
  WA

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• Mass fire
• Following WWII, the effects of mass fires such as
  incendiary bombing (Dresden) and nuclear weapons
  (Hiroshima, Nagasaki) were observed. Pyne traces
  a connection between FS fire policies and
  military policies relating to the Cold War.
  Compares containing the Red Menace of communism
  with that of fire. The conflagration control
  idea was to concentrate resources so that small
  fires did not become bigger.
• One critical tool was the application of military
  surplus equipment, especially aircraft (deliver
  smokejumperstrue extension of firefighting to
  the backcountryand use for slurry water drops,
  equipment personnel transport), as well as
  trucks and dozers, etc. Big jump in the scale of
  firefighting resources. Projects also increased
  in scale, such as the Ponderosa Way and Truck
  Trail, a 650-mile long fuelbreak in the Sierra
  Nevada.
• However, public attitudes that had sustained the
  ideas of conservation, including regulated forest
  management and sustained yield, were beginning to
  change
• 1963 Leopold report reviewed goals and
  management of National Parks, recommended that
  presettlement conditions be maintained or
  recreated at parksan open invitation to use
  prescribed fire. (Pyne 1982301).
• 1964 Wilderness Act sought to maintain natural
  areas, an approach very different from early FS
  conservation and use goals.

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• Wilderness fire
• Recognition that complete fire control was not a
  solution costs continued to rise, equipment
  firefighting practices often scarred the earth
  more than the fire itself, and research continued
  to show that fire had a natural role that
  humans have been involved in fire use throughout
  our historyessentially that fire control is a
  historical aberration. National Park Service
  emphasized re-introduction of fire. FS role as
  the lead fire agency diminished.
• New NPS guidelines for fire. FS amended 10 a.m.
  policy but set new 10 acre policy costs rose
  revised in 1978 to prescribed fire/wildfire.
• 1970 Fires in WA and CA burned more acres than
  any year since 1910 led to reassessment of fire
  policies at a time of social change.
• 1975 Interval burning studies on
  re-introduction of fire begin in northern Arizona
  (Steve Sackett, Wally Covington).
• 1988 Yellowstone National Park wildfires linked
  to let burn policies end of the enthusiastic
  acceptance of easy fire introduction.

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• Intermix fire
• Reassessment of fire use leads to tighter
  controls on prescribed fire, but not abandonment
  of fire use. Growing urban interface problems
  lead to costly, dangerous wildfires.
• Growing international connection to fire
  atmospheric chemistry change, global warming.
  Pyne asks why is burning a million acres of
  Yellowstone good, and a million acres of Brazil
  bad?
• 1990 Dude fire, AZ, intermix (Zane Greys
  cabin), pine/PJ rim country, fatalities.
• 1994 Storm King fire, CO, extremely fast spread,
  fatalities.
• 1996 SW fires in La Niña year largest most
  severe in recorded history. Crossing threshold
  of 10-50,000 acres.
• 2000 Cerro Grande fire, Los Alamos, NM
• 2002 Rodeo-Chediski, Hayman, Biscuit fires
  threshold of 500,000 acres.

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Current policy, since 1998 wildland fire use for
resource benefit
Powell Wildland Fire Use Page, http//www.fs.fed.u
s/r1/clearwater/fire/Powell20Wildland20Fire20Us
e20Page.htm
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A federal wildland fire management fire policy
and program review occurred in 1995. This review
represents the latest stage in the evolution of
wildland fire management. This policy marks
substantial changes from the previous policy
while still directing federal agencies to manage
fire to accomplish desired objectives. This
policy, far from the one-dimensional fire control
approach, attempts to associate suppression and
management of wildland fires into a single
direction achieving multi-dimensional objectives.
This policy directs federal agencies to achieve
a balance between suppression to protect life,
property, and resources and fire use to regulate
fuels and maintain healthy ecosystems. Most of
the previous barriers and constraints to expanded
fire use are removed through this policy.
http//www.fireuse.org/fumttrial/evolution.htm
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The nine guiding principles from the Federal
Wildland Fire Management Policy are 1.
Firefighter and public safety is the first
priority in every fire management activity.2.
The role of wildland fire as an essential
ecological process and natural agent of change
will be incorporated into the planning
process.3. Fire management plans, programs, and
activities support land and resource management
plans.4. Sound risk management is a foundation
for all fire management activities.5. Fire
management programs and activities are
economically viable.6. Fire management plans are
based on the best available science.7. Fire
management plans incorporate public health and
environmental quality considerations.8. Federal,
state, tribal, and local interagency coordination
and cooperation are essential.9. Standardization
of policies and procedures among federal agencies
is an ongoing objective
http//www.fireuse.org/fumttrial/evolution.htm
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Powell Fire, Grand Canyon June 2003
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(No Transcript)