HAMILTON - As the summer's heat settles in and hillsides in the Bitterroot Valley turn brown, Jim Freeman starts his day like many of his fellow Bitterrooters.
"We come out of the house in the morning and sniff the breeze to see if there's a little smoke in the air," he said. "And then we look up in the hills scanning for a new column of smoke."
"I'm sure there are a lot of people living here who are holding their breath and hoping for the best," Freeman said.
The lessons of that fiery summer haven't been lost on residents of the Bitterroot Valley.
In fact, their efforts over the past five years have attracted national attention and in many ways have become a model for other communities that have since suffered the same fate.
Right from the beginning, Bitterroot Valley residents rolled up their sleeves and went to work helping those most affected by the fires, lending a hand in the restoration effort and working to reduce the risk of such a fire season ever happening again.
Before the inferno of 2000, people in the Bitterroot Valley were pretty much immune to the dangers of wildfire.
There was a bit of a scare in 1988 when some worried that a fire in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness might blow over the hill and into the valley. Before 2000, the landmark fire in the valley burned 38,000 acres in the Sleeping Child drainage.
On Black Sunday - Aug. 6, 2000 - that many acres burned in a single day.
By the time the 2000 fire season finally died out, an estimated 356,000 acres in the Bitterroot Valley were scorched. More than 1,500 people in Ravalli County were evacuated from their homes. Private property losses were in the millions of dollars. And there were 70 homes, 170 other structures and 94 vehicles in ashes.
Millions were spent fighting the blazes. And millions more were later spent on rehabilitation and recovery work.
The complex of fires was the biggest of its time. Fires a few years later in Colorado and Oregon would eventually take over that dubious title.
The risk of catastrophic fire didn't disappear with the smoke from the 2000 fires. An estimated 1.3 million acres of private, state and federal lands in the Bitterroot are still overgrown and ready to burn.
At the same time, Ravalli County is one of the fastest-growing counties in the state. Many of the new folks are building in the trees.
The Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, and U.S. Forest Service estimate that more than 162,000 acres of high-risk forest lands remain within the valley's urban interface. Those areas need some kind of treatment to lower the fire danger and protect nearby residents.
But residents haven't buried their heads in the sand these past five years. In fact, they've done everything but that.
"This was the kind of crisis that could put wedges between people or rally them to work together," said Nan Christianson of the Bitterroot National Forest. "All of these folks knew right from the beginning that they'd be better off working together, and the end result was that they very much fought this fire as a community."
Even before the fires were out, people in the valley banded together to start helping in any way they could, remembers Kit Sutherland, coordinator of the Bitterroot Resource Conservation and Development Agency, or RC&D. That help came in a variety of ways, from donating time to help direct volunteers to gathering up some folks to move a herd of 450 cattle endangered by a fast-moving flame front.
By the time the last fires were doused, valley residents had banded together to form the Bitterroot Interagency Recovery Team, or BIRT, which would then lead the cleanup effort.
"The Forest Service just got clobbered with this enormous fire Š they were overwhelmed," said Freeman, the RC&D's president. "We knew they needed some help. Kit agreed to be the incident commander of the cleanup effort."
Volunteers weren't hard to find. In fact, they poured in. The oldest was 86 and the youngest was 4, said Sutherland.
"People were anxious to help," he said. "There are lots of good stories that came out of that effort."
One of Sutherland's favorites happened one day when a busload of fourth-graders showed up at Bill and Wilma Andrew's place on Mill Creek. The Andrews were in their 70s and had been hard workers all their lives. In their younger days, they ran one of the first two-person chain-saws.
They were having a hard time cleaning up around their place following the fire, said Sutherland.
Then the youngsters showed up, and they started to sow some grass seed, dig some erosion barriers and plant about 100 trees in a fire scar that stretched right down the Andrews' back door.
"It took three of them to run a shovel," Sutherland said. "But they all worked hard and when it was done, Bill came up to me with tears in his eyes and told me how much he really appreciated it. That made a lasting impression on me."
"That was something that happened many times," he said. "It was important that people knew that others cared about their loss. It helped them a lot."
The grant money started to trickle in. First there was a little bit to help buy some hard hats and some other tools. Then came some to help ranchers rebuild fences and still more to help landowners address potential post-fire impacts, like flooding or mudslides.
People were calling for all sorts of assistance.
Sutherland remembers one woman who initially called because of worries that burned trees behind her house might fall and injure someone. He sent out a team of volunteer sawyers. Then she called with worries about mudslides because the fire had burned so hot behind her home. He sent out a team to assess the situation. And then she called worried about potential flooding.
"I said, 'Gee, you ever think about moving?' " Sutherland said. "She replied, 'No, now that everything is burned around us, the house is only worth a quarter of what it was worth before.' We went out and sandbagged her place."
The cleanup effort went on for months. Even then, some were starting to look ahead and consider the kinds of things that needed to be done to reduce the risk of catastrophic fire around homes.
"The fire really opened people's eyes about the dangerous fuel buildup on the forest," said Freeman.
That included Congress. In Washington, D.C., lawmakers supported development of the National Fire Plan that would help set the course for communities wanting to reduce the risk of wildland fire.
"The National Fire Plan was written in the late fall of 2000," said Christianson. "It was in direct response to what happened in the Bitterroot Valley."
The federal government also set aside some money to help offset costs to private landowners wanting to reduce fuels on their properties. To be able to receive those funds, communities needed to have a fire plan in place.
"We wanted to be right out there at the head of the line," said Freeman.
So a diverse group of residents met repeatedly over the winter of 2002-03 to begin prioritizing the kinds of action needed to address the most pressing issues of reducing wildfire risks.
The resulting plan emphasized fire prevention and suppression, hazardous-fuel treatment, restoration of fire-adapted ecosystems and community assistance.
Then the Bitterroot Valley went to work making all of that happen.
Every year since, the core group of state, federal and county officials get together and review what they've accomplished and come up with suggestions for what's next.
Over the years, their efforts have been noticed. The result has been an influx of several million in grant monies that go to help treat hazardous fuels on private lands in Ravalli County and elsewhere around the state.
So far, there have been 1,226 acres of private land treated using nearly $900,000 of the $1.386 million in grant funds secured by the RC&D. At this point, 174 landowners and 66 leaseholders have signed up to have work done on their land.
"There's kind of a snowball effect on those kinds of fuel reduction projects," Christianson said. "Once one neighbor sees how well the project turned out on his neighbor's land, they decide to go ahead and do the work on their property."
Among the most remarkable accomplishments happened in the small town of Darby.
Over the course of two years, Darby was selected as the first location for a new Fuels for Schools program that promoted burning chipped material from hazardous-fuels reduction projects in a biomass boiler and for the town's new library, which featured the kind of small-diameter roundwood typically cut while reducing fuels on forested lands.
Both projects were touted nationally.
The school project, which is saving the district about $60,000 annually, has become a model for similar projects in five other states.
The $900,000 library roundwood project was paid for almost exclusively by the community, Christianson said.
"Forest Service grants only paid for about 10 percent of the project - which some have called the Sistine Chapel of small-diameter roundwood," she said. "The rest came from pie sales and local fundraisers. It's an incredible success story."
"Those were both projects that came out of the Bitterroot Valley," said Christianson. "It shows that lemonade can come from a big batch of lemons."
The RC&D, Forest Service and Department of Natural Resources and Conservation also worked together to create an interagency coordination guide that draws on their experience during and after the Bitterroot fires to help other folks faced with similar dilemmas.
They've also worked to put together a van filled with information on what people living in the woods can do to protect their homes and property from wildfire.
Living through the trials and tribulations of the fires of 2000 changed attitudes and opened a variety of doors.
Before the fires, Christianson said the Forest Service and many in the community seemed to be at odds over a variety of issues. That changed after the fires.
"There seemed to be the opinion among many that if we didn't take this time as an opportunity to change and do something different, then shame on us," she said.
Over the course of a few months following the fire season, community members met up and down the valley 14 times. They talked about what they went through and what they wanted to see happen.
And the Forest Service listened.
"We didn't want to propose anything that the community wasn't going to support," Christianson said. "It was important for us to know that we really understood what the community wanted."
Overwhelmingly, the community said it wanted to address the potential threat for further wildfire.
"We knew that wasn't a carte blanche to go out and cut everything," she said.
As a result, the agency has worked with several communities on fuel-reduction projects on both private and public lands.
"The communities have really helped shape what we do," Christianson said. "They've lived through this experience and they get it."
Many are stepping up to do work on their own property.
Retired fire ecologist Steve Arno has a 30-year head start on most people hoping to make their properties safe from fire while restoring the vigor of the trees.
When Arno purchased his property near Florence in 1971, there were portions of it that were so thick with underbrush that he'd literally have to crawl to make his way through it.
"There was no place that you could see 100 yards and there were many that you'd be lucky to see 50," Arno remembers. "It was unbelievably dense."
So he and his family went to work to clear out the brush and re-create the kind of ponderosa pine forest that Arno is convinced once existed on the site. He figures his land was probably first logged sometime around 1886. A few of the large ponderosa pine stumps still remain from that historic venture.
Nowadays, Arno's land is filled with century-old ponderosa pines scattered around an almost park-like setting. Aspen and willows have sprouted in the wetter sites on the property. And this year's crop of grass stands knee-high.
His land borders property that hasn't been touched. The lot is choked with small dog-hair fir and other brush.
"That's what it used to look like. A fire would carry pretty well there," he said, first looking onto a neighbor's ground and then glancing back at his property. "I doubt you'd be able to carry a crown fire through here."
"So much of our forest has been taken over by fir," said Arno. "I think the vast majority of this area was once dominated by these more open stands of ponderosa pine, which can live up to 500 years. ... From as near as we can tell, for several thousand years the forests in this area were much more open than what they are now."
Arno's efforts on his own property have been an attempt to mimic nature. When he can, he adds a controlled burn to the forest floor. He allows a few smaller pines to get a start. His long-term goal is to create a forest that's sustainable.
It's an idea that he is happy to share with anyone interested.
Forestry has come a long way since Arno's school days back in the early 1960s.
"The mistakes that we made on the ground back then repelled a lot of people," he said. "Back then, foresters worked to build even-aged stands in an effort for efficiency.
"Later on, people began to recognize the other values of the forest. We went on to recognize that people didn't want their forests converted into something like an agro-forest."
"It took us awhile to get up to speed. There are different rules now," he said. "Now we have enough knowledge that we can use to help us make our forests healthier."
Many newcomers have a perception of what a forest should look like based on where they came from. Many hail from more humid areas where the forests are thicker, and they want to see that here.
"We live in a semi-arid place and a completely different ecological type," Arno said. "And in many places, our forests are still intact."
The fires of 2000 were an eye-opener for many people living in the forest in the Bitterroot Valley, said Arno.
"It was the year that the Bitterroot didn't dodge the bullet," he said. "There were some scares like in 1988, but once the smoke cleared, people just shrugged it off."
That all changed after the fires of 2000.
"People decided right then that they had to do something about the forest growing around them," he said. "The fires made a lasting impression."
People are taking that responsibility seriously.
"The idea of personal responsibility is an ingrained value in Montanans," said Arno. "That's not so likely to happen in the suburbs of Denver or the mountain subdivisions of California, where urban people are moving out into the countryside."
"In Montana, we have a tradition of taking care of ourselves if possible," he said. "We also have a tradition of common sense. We're able to recognize what needs to be done and we do it.
"There's nothing so elemental as protecting ourselves and our cherished backyard, whether that's land in our own ownership or the public lands that we all care about."
Arno said people should encourage the Forest Service to take care of their lands as well.
"I'd like to see people pounding on the ranger's door and asking them, 'What's going on out there? Why isn't that land being cared for? Can I help in the planning process?' " he said.
Reach reporter Perry Backus at 523-5259 or e-mail pbackus@missoulian.com
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)