Dear HCN,
Blaming federal
fire-suppression policy on the conditions leading up to the South
Canyon (not Canyon Creek) fire that killed 14 near Glenwood
Springs, Colo., is very trendy but bullshit (HCN, 7/25/94). Fuels
don’t accumulate in the piûon-juniper vegetative types;
typical stands are open-spaced canopies with little understory to
carry a fire.
In addition, the Gambel oak growing
on the site was on the average 6 to 8 feet high, hardly a hazardous
fuel condition caused by a federal fire-exclusion policy of the
last 80 years. Typically fires burn the leaf litter in oakbrush and
not much else. It was a combination of weather, topography and
drought-stressed fuels that led to the blowup, and not some dated
policy as the author contends.
Writer Jim Carrier
discounts the wildland-urban interface as a legitimate reason for
suppressing a fire such as South Canyon. Describing it as a
“leisurely creeping” wildfire with only “11 homesites on the north
in trees’ brings to mind the image of the textbook-friendly fire
creeping around in the pine needles benignly recycling nutrients
and carefully avoiding homes and other improvements. Be assured it
would be a hard concept to swallow if you lived in Mitchell Creek
or Canyon Creek or anywhere else that had to evacuate during a
wildfire.
The key to avoiding scenarios like
South Canyon is to be able to respond with adequate resources
quickly. Ignoring the problems created by population growth in the
West will only postpone the inevitable. Public lands in Colorado
are intermixed with private lands and houses: That’s a fact.
Resource management agencies would be remiss not to suppress
wildfires in close proximity to private lands. I think the attempt
to link federal policy with the fatalities is additional proof that
the media are the ones with the problem.
W.
Robertson
Palisade,
Colorado
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Trendy and wrong.
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