Watch a video of an air tanker at work fighting firesToday, environmentalists are ahead of that pace in what they anticipate will be another decade-long forest campaign, having scored victories in the courtroom and public spotlight five years into an effort to force the U.S. Forest Service to overhaul its firefighting mission and practices.
Rather than using an endangered owl as their icon, environmentalists this time are spotlighting aerial fire retardants, saying the chemical red slurry is an environmental hazard - not a critical firefighting tool, as the Forest Service maintains.
FSEEE, an Oregon-based watchdog group, contends a century of aggressive wildfire suppression has drastically changed the health, structure, characteristics and fire behavior of Western forests, resulted in thousands of injuries and hundreds of deaths and wasted billions of dollars.
The group wants the Forest Service to stop putting out wildfires unless they threaten people and property, and to focus on fire prevention around communities.
That will create healthier forests, safer conditions and allow the agency - which devotes nearly 50 percent of its budget to fire suppression - to spend more on recreation, wildlife habitat and other needs on national forests, FSEEE says.
The group also wants local and state governments and insurance companies to enact tougher standards for new construction in the West's fire-prone forests, just as they have restricted building in the East's floodplains.
But the Forest Service says its stop-all-fires policy ended long ago, giving way to a more sophisticated strategy that reflects the latest in fire science, land management and public expectations.
George Weldon, deputy director of fire, aviation and air for the Forest Service's Northern Region, said managing fires as a natural force has to be balanced with protection of people, property, infrastructure and natural resources.
“It's more complicated than people think,” Weldon said. Depending on fuels, weather and topography - the three primary drivers of fire behavior - “a fire that's 30 miles from a community can be more dangerous than one that's a quarter of a mile away.”
In recent decades, Forest Service officials have come to agree that fire is essential for America's ecosystems, where frequent low-intensity and occasionally severe blazes once maintained a mosaic of open and dense woodlands.
When the Forest Service went into the firefighting business in 1911, a year after the “Big Blowup” charred 3 million acres of western Montana and north Idaho in 48 hours, the agency adopted a “10 a.m.” fire policy that aimed to extinguish all blazes by the morning after they started.
But agency officials say that aggressive policy began changing 40 years ago when land managers and scientists started to realize that excluding fire from fire-dependent ecosystems creates unhealthy, fuel-laden forests.
Since then, officials say, they have adopted fire suppression as one tool in a larger policy that balances fire's natural function, hotter and drier conditions wrought by climate change, and the growing number of people building houses in Western woodlands.
Today, the National Fire Plan and the Bush administration's Healthy Forests Initiative are intended to get the federal government out of the fire suppression business, the Forest Service insists.
It's a process that employs thousands, from scientists in the laboratory to firefighters on the ground to air tanker crews overhead; that uses tools from computers to bulldozers; that analyzes fuels, weather, topography, safety and other factors.
The reason fire suppression costs have skyrocketed, Forest Service officials say, isn't because the agency is fighting every little fire but because it's trying to limit catastrophic fires.
“There's this notion that Smokey Bear has driven our fire policy,” said Ed Nesselroad, director of public and governmental affairs for the Forest Service's Northern Region. “But the fact is our approach has evolved greatly over the years.”
Perry Brown, dean of the College of Forestry and Conservation at the University of Montana, said fire management has become far more complex.
“The world is changing socially and ecologically, so we have to have a serious discussion on how we can adapt,” he said.
Since the 1970s, dozens of studies have shown that chemical fire retardants are toxic to fish and more recently that they promote the spread of invasive weeds.
The retardants, which are about
85 percent water, slow wildfires by cooling and coating the fuels, robbing the fire of oxygen, and slowing the rate of fuel combustion with inorganic salts that change how the fire burns.
Starting in 1992, the Forest Service contracted with the U.S. Geological Survey to conduct field and laboratory studies on the ecological effects of ammonia salts, cyanide compounds, and other chemicals in fire retardants and fire suppressant foams.
Results showed the formulas were extremely toxic to aquatic organisms, including fish, algae, insects and crustaceans, although the kill rate depended on the amount of retardant that enters the water, the streamflow and other factors.
The Forest Service has stopped using slurry containing a cyanide compound because studies showed it was highly toxic to fish when exposed to water and sunlight.
Results also showed that retardants acted like a short-term fertilizer on vegetation, increasing its growth, decreasing native plant diversity and invigorating weeds.
In the mid-1990s, a few years after the old-growth logging tumult in the Pacific Northwest, FSEEE decided to target the federal government's fire policy because of a growing number of large, so-called “catastrophic” fires in the West.
In 2003, FSEEE sued the Forest Service in federal court in Missoula, a year after a retardant airdrop killed 20,000 fish in a central Oregon stream.
In the first legal challenge to the Forest Service's firefighting policy, the suit said the agency had never conducted an ecological review of aerial fire retardants, and that their use violated the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act.
In 2005, U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy agreed, ruling that the Forest Service had failed to properly analyze the environmental harm from ammonium phosphate, the primary ingredient in retardants.
Last month, the Forest Service finally presented its environmental review - a general evaluation rather than a more detailed environmental impact statement - after Molloy threatened to hold the agency in contempt of court.
That threat, which drew national attention, included the possibility of jailing Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, the Bush administration's top forest official, and grounding the nation's firefighting air tankers until the judge's order was obeyed.
During several days of testimony, Forest Service officials defended their use of retardant airdrops and said an environmental impact statement wasn't needed. They painted a dire picture of a Western landscape ablaze and virtually undefended if retardant airdrops were banned.
The agency's review, signed by Forest Service Chief Gail Kimbell, said aerial retardants have no significant impact on public health, safety, firefighters or the environment.
“Because a limited number of effective firefighting tools exist, it is essential that firefighters are able to utilize every available means - including retardant - to fight wildland fires,” Kimbell wrote. “All firefighting tools help contain and control fires, as well as prevent damage to human life, property and valuable natural resources.”
Kimbell rejected the options of using only water airdrops or stopping all retardant airdrops until a less toxic formula is found.
Instead, she chose to stick with current federal retardant use guidelines, which prohibit drops within 300 feet of waterways unless people or property are threatened, although she said studies show that a 3-meter buffer zone is adequate.
But the Forest Service also made a concession when it agreed to expand its testing and monitoring of aerial retardants - before and after they are dropped near waterways - because of concerns of two sister agencies.
In their biological opinions, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service said the Forest Service's review had seriously underestimated the ecological impact from the accidental delivery, drift and surface runoff of fire retardants into waterways.
Those agencies said retardants jeopardize 45 endangered or threatened fish, plant, insect, mussel and amphibian species and their critical habitats. And they said retardants have caused massive fish kills in the past, and will cause even more in the future as the use of slurry increases.
But the two agencies also said the Forest Service could follow “reasonable and prudent alternatives” to lessen the ecological impact of firefighting retardants, ranging from field inspections to lab tests to making a concerted effort to keep the slurry away from waterways.
The Forest Service agreed to those measures but refused to change its operational guidelines for using retardants, saying it must be free to make airdrops near waterways if people, property or natural resources are threatened.
FSEEE, which considers the “reasonable and prudent alternatives” inadequate, plans to file another lawsuit soon in Missoula - the second half of its original legal strategy - to challenge the validity of the Forest Service's environmental review.
Stopping the war on fire, Stahl said, will only succeed if federal courts enforce environmental laws, local governments restrict development in the so-called wildland-urban interface, and public schools teach fire ecology.
“This issue doesn't have an easy answer,” he said. “It's not a case of all fires should burn or we should fight all fires. It's do we approach fire with a war-like mentality in which cost is no object, or do we address fire as part of a larger land-use issue?”
From the 1930s to the 1980s, the Forest Service built a massive firefighting complex that was aided by a generally wet climate cycle in the West, both of which resulted in fewer large wildifires.
The resulting fuel buildup, drier climate and population shift will take a partnership between government agencies and local communities so that people can live safely in the new West, said Weldon, of the Forest Service.
“After all those years of putting out fires, we still struggle sometimes with the concept of ‘Holy cow, we can't put all of them out anymore,' ” he said. “We have to learn how to live with fires because fire will be with us, like it or not. As a society, we're still coming to grips with that.”
Brown, the UM forestry dean, said the Forest Service's fire policy has become more nuanced in recent years as the agency tries to balance ecological, social, financial and safety concerns.
Changing an entrenched bureaucracy takes time, “but some of that momentum has changed,” he said. “It's been slow in coming, but they're taking a broader perspective.”
Reporter John Cramer can be reached at 523-5259 or at johncramer@missoulian.com
Missoula has long played role in conflict over fighting fires
The dispute over America's wildland firefighting policies and practices is playing out in Missoula, which has long had a central role in the nation's firefighting efforts.
In 2003, an environmental watchdog group chose the Garden City - one of a number of Western jurisdictions with conservation-minded federal judges - as the venue to sue the U.S. Forest Service over its use of aerial fire retardants.
For Missoula, the lawsuit is the latest chapter in a story that started in the early 1900s.
Like other Western towns, Missoula was once a place where drunks were pulled off bar stools, handed pulaskis and taken by truck or train to remote firelines in exchange for a few dollars' pay.
But as professional firefighting standards evolved, Missoula became a birthplace of the nation's elite firefighters, the smokejumpers, and a management, operations and research hub for the federal government's firefighting industrial complex.
One of those hubs is the Forest Service's Technology and Development Center in Missoula, one of two such facilities in the nation.
The centers function as think tanks, technical innovators and trouble-shooters, working on up to 300 projects a year for federal land agencies.
“We're the problem-solvers,” said Dave Aicher, the Missoula center's manager.
Created in the 1940s, the two centers develop a range of products, services and techniques used by government agencies and private companies worldwide.
The center's innovations range from timber harvesting equipment, all-terrain vehicles and computer programs to product specifications, which save the federal government $15 million a year, according to the General Services Administration.
Fire-related projects include firefighting chemicals, spark arrestors, smokejumper parachutes and fire shelters, which are credited with saving more than 300 firefighters since they were developed in the 1950s.
While the public image of wildland firefighters is that of foot soldiers in flame-resistant yellow shirts blackened by ash, dirt and sweat, the federal government has a corps of scientists in the field and laboratory who analyze fire behavior and look for ways to contain it.
It's a constant juggling act, trying to find the right combination of tools that stop fires, work consistently and don't harm people or the environment.
“You can never say any product used to suppress fire is going to be nontoxic, but we try to reduce the toxicity value,” said Les Holsapple, MTDC's program leader for wildland fire chemical systems.
The center's physical science researchers evaluate long-term aerial retardants, foam suppressants and water enhancers, or gel-like substances.
Researchers test whether the fire products are effective and can be delivered safely and efficiently without corroding air tankers, nozzles, rubber gaskets and other mechanical equipment, said Ceci Johnson, MTDC's project leader for fire suppression chemicals.
The chemicals are tested at different temperatures, spread on different metals and doused on pine needles and shredded wood in wind tunnels and combustion chambers. They also are field-tested by air tankers and helicopters. The goal is to reduce a fire's intensity and speed by at least 50 percent.
For a half-century, the MTDC has tested a variety of fire chemicals, including borate salts, ammonium and cyanide compounds, nitrogen fertilizers and seaweed gels.
Today's aerial retardants, which are 85 percent water, contain retardant salts made up of ammonium phosphate and ammonium sulfate together or ammonium phosphate alone.
In 2001, the Forest Service decided it would gradually shift to ammonium phosphate-only retardants because it is more effective, less corrosive and requires one-third less ammonium. The decision takes effect for the 2010 fire season.
In 2002, an ammonium-based retardant killed 20,000 fish in an Oregon stream, which prompted an environmental watchdog group to sue the Forest Service in an effort to ban aerial fire retardants.
Ammonium is toxic to fish but less so than cyanide-based slurry, which the Forest Service realized in the late 1990s was deadly to fish when exposed to sunlight and water.
Retardants containing a cyanide compound, which have caused large fish kills in the West, were phased out over the last three years.
Aerial fire retardant alternatives
The U.S. Forest Service recently agreed to “reasonable and prudent alternatives” when it uses aerial fire retardants.
The alternatives were suggested by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service. Under the plan:
The Forest Service will complete toxicity tests within two years on all retardants it intends to continue using beyond 2010.
Retardants that harm protected species will no longer be used.
The agency will conduct toxicological studies on retardants' long-term effects on aquatic species, including anadromous fish.
The Forest Service will assess water quality, fish, insects, soil and other factors whenever retardants enter waterways. And it will tell the National Marine Fisheries Service whether the airdrop was accidental or intentional.
The agency will prepare a summary every two years on retardants' cumulative ecological impact, including whether protected species and their habitats were harmed.
The agency will take into account protected species and their habitat when making decisions about fire suppression and fuel reduction.
Fire incident commanders will try to keep retardant airdrops away from protected species and habitats whenever practical.
The agency will prioritize fuel-reduction projects near protected species and critical habitat to reduce the need for aerial retardants in those areas. Water or less toxic slurry will be used in those areas whenever practical.
The agency will consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service, as required by the Endangered Species Act, if retardants are dropped on protected species and critical habitat. The consultations could include monitoring the direct, indirect and cumulative impacts on protected species, taking steps to restore species populations and removing all non-native weeds in the area.
The agency also agreed to permanently adopt interim guidelines approved in 2000 on fire retardants and foams.
The guidelines, which were created by the Forest Service and other federal agencies, are designed to prevent retardant from getting into waterways.
The guidelines define a waterway as any body of water, including lakes, rivers, streams, ponds, swamps, marshes and other wetlands whether or not they contain aquatic life.
Under the guidelines, aerial retardants should not be dropped within 300 feet of waterways that are visible to the pilot.
Exceptions allow airdrops within the buffer zone if ground crews aren't available or they can't dig fire lines, if people or property are threatened, or if the potential damage to natural resources outweighs the loss of aquatic life.
The agency will consult with the FWS and NMFS if protected aquatic species or their habitats are affected by retardant airdrops within the 300-foot buffer.
The Forest Service says only a few retardant airdrops get into waterways each year, but the NMFS said that number is likely higher.
Timeline of Forest Service firefighting
1876: The U.S. government creates the first of a series of agencies to oversee the nation's forests.
1899: Federal fire research starts when Gifford Pinchot, who becomes the U.S. Forest Service's first chief, authorizes a study on the history of forest fires to better understand their impact.
1905: The U.S. Forest Service is established.
1910: To date, most wildfires are fought by Forest Service workers and nearby residents using wet burlap bags, axes and water buckets, but increasingly severe blazes prompt calls for an organized wildland firefighting system.
1910: The “Big Blowup” burns more than 3 million acres in western Montana and north Idaho in two days.
1911: Congress puts the Forest Service into the wildland firefighting business. All fires are to be extinguished by 10 a.m. the next day.
1920s: After World War I, the Forest Service starts using airplanes to patrol for wildfires.
1930: The Forest Service makes its first waterdrops on wildfires, but most of the water drifts off course or evaporates before reaching the ground.
1940: Smokejumpers make their first leap.
1944: Smokey Bear, one of the most successful public service campaigns in U.S. history, is created to urge Americans to prevent - but also to stamp out - forest fires.
1940s-1950s: Federal land agencies continue to experiment with aerial firefighting, developing chemical retardants and using military surplus planes and helicopters.
Post-1945: After World War II, the nation's population boom expands into more rural areas where fire is a natural part of the landscape.
1955: Water airdrops containing borate salts are effective against fires, but they corrode the air tankers and sterilize the ground.
1963: The Forest Service starts using fertilizer-based fire retardants containing ammonium compounds, which become widely used.
1970s: Federal land managers and scientists realize that excluding wildfire creates unhealthy forests, especially in the West where most fire retardants are applied.
1970s: The Forest Service starts adopting new measures to restore fire-adapted ecosystems. The measures include prescribed fire, thinning fuels and allowing fires to burn if they don't threaten people, homes, infrastructure, natural resources and protected species' habitat.
2000 to date: More people build homes in the West's forests and demand fire protection.
2002: A Forest Service retardant airdrop kills 20,000 fish in an Oregon stream.
2003: Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics sues the Forest Service over its use of aerial fire retardants.
2005: U.S. District Court Judge Donald Molloy rules the Forest Service is violating federal law by not reviewing the environmental impact of retardants.
2008: Molloy dismisses FSEEE's lawsuit when the Forest Service completes a broad environmental review of aerial retardants. The group vows to file another lawsuit challenging the substance of the Forest Service's review.
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