Forest Service tries different technique in Mill Creek fire suppression efforts

Some complaints surface

 

According to Bitterroot National Forest officials, the recent work done near the Mill Creek Trailhead was an appropriate response to the threat posed by the Mill Lake and Blodgett Lake fires. The fires, which have burned a little over 900 acres, started in late August in the wilderness about seven miles west of the town of Pinesdale and had the potential to make a run to the east, toward homes. The fires are still burning and will likely continue to burn until a significant weather event, like snow, douses them.

Stevensville District Ranger Steve Brown said that crews created a “shaded fuel break” as a contingency line for the Mill Lake and Blodgett Lake fires as an emergency response to those two fires. He said this was an example of an indirect suppression action and was an appropriate response given the potential threat. However, some people are unhappy with the results of this relatively new method.

“Fires in these canyons really don’t lend themselves to fire suppression efforts,” said Brown. “They are very steep walled, with difficult terrain making it hard to directly engage a fire. Since those fires were where they were, our best chance of success was going to be preparing the mouth of the canyon. We have seen it time and again, the fire scars along the Bitterroot Front. They start in the wilderness and then they come out. Then it’s really hard to catch them on the steep slopes. You’ve got to catch them at the bottom of the slope where the ground levels out and you can get in to suppress it.”

He said a case in point is the Lolo Peak fire in 2017 when it came down Bass Creek canyon. He said that fire was coming south and that was where they had to choke it off and what allowed them to hold it was the work that had been done 3 or 4 years before in Bass Creek where they were able to do a burn out in front of that fire and bring it to a halt.

Brown said that the Forest Service put a lot of water on the Mill and Blodgett Lake fires for weeks with helicopter drops, but water from helicopters alone will not put out a fire. 

“You need somebody on the ground stirring that up just like on a campfire,” said Brown. “You might be able to minimize fire growth for a while [with water drops], but you are not going to put it out.”

Brown said that on September 9, after consulting with the local incident commander, prior to calling in the Type 1 Management Team, they decided to act.

“Basically, the fire was growing despite our best efforts,” he said. “We had more hot dry weather and wind events on the horizon. All the models we had said that… we only had a limited amount of time before the fire was going to be out of the mouth of the canyon. So, part of the lessons learned, for example in Lolo Peak, was once the fire comes out of the canyon or is knocking on that door, your options are going to be pretty limited.”

“You could punch in a dozer line, but a single dozer line is probably not going to be sufficient to stop the fire,” said Brown. “You can burn off that dozer line, but if your vegetation is thick like it was at Mill Creek you are going to kill all the trees there with your burn out operation. The reason why Bass Creek was successful was because it had been thinned out so when they did the burn those trees are still alive. Above Bass Creek, out of the area that we treated, those trees are all dead. That was a stand-replacing fire. They did stop the fire but the end result was you killed all the trees.

“So with this fire coming out of the wilderness we had the option to either wait and have no choice but to punch in a dozer line and burn it off and kill all the trees, or if we start now and prepare a fuel break and burn it, the remaining trees will still be alive. By removing ladder fuels and thinning it out a fire can go through there and burn it without killing all the trees.”

“With the forecast we had,” said Brown, “we had every reason to believe that this fire was going to come out and that’s why we called in the Type 1 Management Team because the forecast showed no relief. It was starting to become a complex situation and we were very soon going to be in over our heads.” 

“We tried to create a buffer around the private land that would be a fuel break to drop the fire to the ground and have a better chance to suppress it and on low slopes a better chance of fighting it,” he said. 

Brown said they did talk to different landowners in the area but didn’t do any work on private land. He said there was one landowner on the south side of Tag Alder Creek that allowed for access to the area. 

“They have lived there for decades and were there in 2000 and were very appreciative of the efforts in 2000 and were in this case, too. They gave us access to do this,” said Brown.

Brown said that he didn’t know how much timber had been taken out. He said logging was not the aim of the project and that personnel would be measuring it in preparation for sale and it would be put out to bid. 

Asked if “shaded fuel breaks” were a new technique, Brown said that the concept has been around for a decade perhaps but is being employed a lot more due to the successes.

“To me a dozer line does a lot of damage,” said Brown. “A dozer line is harsh, it’s just plowing everything out of the way. And they are shown to be less effective, but they take less time. So, when you have the time to prepare, like we did here, you have other options. We ran 10-day models and in that time frame the fire was going to be here. So, if we had time to prepare then I wanted to prepare and not be forced to utilize just dozer lines to stop the fire,” said Brown.

“One of the lessons learned in these canyon fires was that effectiveness at suppression of fire is a lot better if we are able to reduce the fuels in front of fire rather than just punching in a dozer line. On the Lolo Peak fire on the Bitterroot side alone there was well over 13 miles of dozer line and that was just to keep it from coming down to private land and had nothing to do with the result on the hillside.”

“So when it came here with such high probability I thought ‘What’s our option going to be? No choice but a dozer line or two and torching everything, or can our result be a lot more enjoyable from a public use standpoint than just bare earth and blackened trees.’ And at the same time knowing that this treatment would have a more likely chance of success than waiting and punching in a dozer line.” He said there were no dozer lines put in, just the tracks left by the log forwarders that were used to remove the logs from the area.

“A forwarder has a large bunk and the logs are stacked on a bed and hauled out, so it doesn’t leave drag marks and a skid trail and things like that,” said Brown.

Asked about what looks like logging roads throughout the project area, Brown said, “This is just from driving on it. We will come through with subsoilers and break up this compaction and plant seeds where necessary.”

He said that one aim for the whole forest on the west side was to take it back to the point that it can be managed with controlled burns the way native peoples used to manage it.

Asked if this park-like expanse really accommodates wildlife like the thickly vegetated forest next door, Brown said, “Well, if you talk to people who live around here, there really wasn’t any wildlife here because there is no food around here.”

Brown said that he had talked to quite a few people in the area and most were very appreciative because it put their homes in a better position. “I know our road guards have talked to others who feel differently,” he said.

When told that some adjacent landowners were not happy about the decision and expressed frustration that they were not even contacted about it, Brown said, “Yeah, well, I feel bad that they were upset, but at the same time a suppression action like this is not the time to be consulting with everybody about what they think needs to be done.”

“The decision was based on the models showing what the weather is doing, what are our options, and my view was if we get busy and establish this fuel break then we are going to be better off… There are going to be different opinions about the decision we made, I know that,” said Brown. “I definitely took that into account in thinking about this action. There will be some people who see it as the right time and others who don’t. But I had to make my decision based on a bad situation. Do we wait and have a worse one? My worst nightmare was that this fire does come blowing out of the canyon and then what do I do. And what do I get blamed for? Since I’ve been here as ranger my worst fear every summer is fire getting out of a canyon and burning up homes.” 

One adjacent landowner, Dr. Eric Keeling, whose family owns 100 acres adjoining the project area, told the Bitterroot Star that he was very upset that the Forest Service acted without any chance for public comment or any notice to adjacent landowners. 

Keeling said that he couldn’t comment on the work that was done and the resultant conditions because he had only seen photographs. He said not being notified or given a chance to comment on it was very upsetting.  

Keeling said his property is part of an original homestead owned by his great-grandfather in the late 1890’s and he told the Forest Service as much in his recent comments on the proposed Bitterroot Front Project.

In his comments he told them about the two long-term research projects associated with the forest on his land and the adjacent Forest Service land. One was the Mill Creek Cooperative Airshed Research Site, initiated in 1988 by his father, Charles D. Keeling, which was acknowledged in two Forest Service Memoranda of Understanding, one in 1994 and one in 2002. Dr. Keeling established an air monitoring site on the land nearly 40 years ago and his sons Eric and Ralph Keeling continue their father’s research. The Forest Service erected a sign at Mill Creek trailhead recognizing the Keeling family legacy in 2011.

Another is a long-term study, including forest data back to 1998, of the effects of irrigation ditches on forest community composition, tree physiology, and bark-beetle mortality. Both studies are set-up as long-term monitoring projects which have benefited from cooperative forest management with the Forest Service.  

“The management history of the adjacent National Forest lands has been compatible with these goals,” wrote Keeling. “Also of note is a portion of the adjacent land was treated with a prescribed burn in 1997, which was explicitly studied in the 2018 research referenced above. The overall area has unique forest composition and structure with diverse size and age classes of trees and a mixture of forest stands and openings. We have observed numerous wildlife species that depend on winter forage as well as visual and thermal cover. It is my hope that the Forest Service consider the management history and future potential of this area for research and conservation when planning forest actions in the coming project.”

Keeling said that his question at this point is, “Was the threat of this fire so high that the kind of treatment they used was justified, without consideration of the public input that they requested back in April?”

Friends of the Bitterroot President Jim Miller doesn’t believe there was a true emergency at the time based on the actual Inciweb reports that were issued continually during the fires. He said the Forest Service started on the project on September 9th when the fire was still six miles inside the wilderness area.

“Although there was some fire growth with the strong winds on September 12th,” he said, “BNF later reported on Inciweb that Sept 12th was the last day there was any movement to the east toward private property still more than 6 miles away. By September 14th, when we first learned of this project, cool, wet weather had moved in and was predicted to continue—which it did—for the next week, into late September. BNF also reported on Inciweb that neither fire was moving, nor projected to move, east towards this fire line 6 miles away.” He said logging continued anyway up through mid-October.

“They are using fire as an excuse to do a commercial logging operation,” said Miller.

Backing up his claim is a report done by members of Friends of the Bitterroot that compares the current “shaded fuel break” work area to a proposed timber sale that was scoped in 2014 and then suspended after considering the long-term studies being done in the area.

Jeff Lonn, who helped prepare the report, said the 2014 timber sale was first proposed as a categorical exclusion, meaning that an analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act would not be required. The proposal was contested and then dropped due to “extraordinary circumstances.” In this case the extraordinary circumstances included two long-term studies being conducted in the area.

A couple of maps compare the Mill Creek Vegetation Project proposed in 2014 with the current logging project. The Mill Creek project was scoped in 2014 and dropped and never analyzed because extraordinary circumstances were shown to exist. The project proposed 75 acres of commercial logging that was accomplished (and then some) with the current fire activity. 

“The Bitterroot National Forest has clearly been after these logs for a long time,” said Lonn.

According to another author of the report, Michael Hoyt, this kind of disguised logging project is being conducted on other forests around the state in the vicinity of active fires.

Miller said that the actions taken on the current project do not meet the definition of a shaded fuel break. He said shaded fuel breaks are generally understood to extend a couple hundred feet in width, not thousands of feet. They also generally involve the removal or reduction in understory but not the harvest of mature trees. According to Miller, the park-like structure of the forest they left behind provides no thermal cover for animals nor any security cover for elk.

“I believe they just dusted off an old timber sale,” said Miller. “I don’t know this, but the kind of logging that was done makes me worried because it appears it was just turned over to the people cutting the timber to observe a certain distance spacing and that the largest trees were all removed. This is going to be a weed patch. I’ve seen a moose family forage in here and now there is nothing, no shrubs or grasses to graze on, there is nothing here. There is no cover. You can see a thousand feet in any direction. No place to hide. No thermal cover, all opened up. It had shady, delightful, big trees, all gone.”

According to Miller, if the Forest Service continues this type of action across the whole Bitterroot Front, we are going to see the forest turned into suburban parkland with lots of open space, very few animals and some very young trees looking more like a tree farm than a forest.