Last weekend, as the Station wildfire on the northern edge of urban Los Angeles doubled, and doubled, and then
doubled again – it has now grown to 250 square miles in the Angeles National Forest – I sat down to re-read “Fire Management of California Shrubland
Landscapes” by Jon E. Keeley of the U.S. Geological Survey. The academic paper
was given to me by Richard Halsey, the founder of the California Chaparral
Institute, whom I profiled for this magazine two winters ago. And it lays out,
in plain, clear language, why just about everything you hear about wildfire in Southern
California – from politicians, newscasters and most of all homeowners on the
edge of that urban-wildland interface – is wrong.
The paper is of particular importance in light of a letter California Senator
Barbara Boxer wrote responding to this early-onset fire season to the
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who ultimately oversees the Forest Service.
Urging the federal government to clear forests before big burns happen, she
wrote, “too often, dead or dying trees and
chaparral, in many cases where fire has not occurred for decades, becomes the
fuel for fires that cannot be controlled without a serious threat to people and
the communities they live in.”
Boxer’s complaint is based on the idea that fires would
be smaller and more manageable if only the plants didn’t get so big and old.
She is one of the many who “assume,” as Keeley writes, “that this fire hazard is
unnatural and has developed because of fuel accumulation arising from a century
of fire suppression policy.” And while that principle applies to many Western
coniferous forests (see the comparisons in Keeley’s latest collaboration, “Ecological Foundations for Fire Management in North American Forest and Shrubland Ecosystems“), little of what burns in Southern California is coniferous
forest. Most of it is chaparral shrubland – 95 percent of the Station Fire
happened in chaparral — and fire hazard in chaparral has very little to do
with the age of the fuel.
Writes Keeley: “large catastrophic fires will readily burn
through young stands less than 20 years of age and do not require old
vegetation.”
Just to make sure I was getting all this right, I called up
Keeley on his cell phone. I mentioned to
him Boxer’s letter, and a recent Associated Press story reporting that the
forest service never finished conducting the controlled burns they’d planned on 1,800 acres
of land, some of which falls within the boundaries of the Station Fire. But
would any of that have held back a fire that spread across more than 100,000
acres within a week?
Keeley said no. A complicated a no, but no nonetheless.
Keeley is involved right now with the U.S. Geological
Survey’s Multi-Hazards Demonstration Project, a collaborative effort among
scientists, public officials and emergency personnel to reduce the
vulnerability of communities to natural phenomena – earthquakes, winter storms
and wildfires — in Southern California. As part of that effort, “we’ve been
looking at this subject of fuel treatment on the landscape,” Keeley told me.
“So far the evidence shows that fuel treatments are not going to stop these
fires.”
Prescribed burns can help firefighters defend homes from wildfires, Keeley explains, “but they don’t really have any
effect on the size of the fire. Within the perimeter of the Station Fire there
are more than 150 miles of fuel breaks and several thousand acres of prescribed
burns. The fire just burned right through them.”
And another thing: Even though investigators have declared that arson caused the Station Fire, it happened within the timeframe of the natural fire cycle. Contrary to
the media’s current master narrative, it did not feed on extraordinarily old fuels. More than half of the just-scorched land last burned from 30
to 40 years ago, which is just about “the lower limit of the interval you want
to burn at,” says Keeley. More frequent fires destroy the seedbank in the soil and allow grasses to replace chaparral, “and that would be an ecological disaster.” Not
only would fires burn faster and happen more frequently, but land would slip
more violently: Chaparral shrubbery stabilizes steep slopes. (Say that
100 times really fast.) If anything, fire suppression in the chaparral has kept the “type conversion” of chaparral to grasses at bay.
The tragic deaths of two firefighters and the destruction of
nearly 300 homes make it hard to say anything good about the Station Fire. But
even though it’s now been deemed the largest fire in the history of Los Angeles
County, from a purely ecological standpoint, it’s not the worst. And it’s probably
not the one for senators to use to make points about keeping people safe from
fire.
“We have to get away from this view that we can stop these
fires,” Keeley says. “We can’t. To me, listening to someone say you need to do
something to stop these fires sounds as ridiculous as saying ‘we’ve got stop these
earthquakes.’ What do we do about earthquakes? We ask how can we adapt to
earthquake country. We need to treat fires like earthquakes, recognize they’re
inevitable, and modify how we live with them.”
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