5/18/00 5:05 a.m.
Blaze Days At Los Alamos
A massive federal foul-up.

By Bill Croke

s a college student in northern California in 1977, I had a summer job cleaning campgrounds and doing trail maintenance on the Plumas National Forest. One day my crew was assigned the task of burning some slash piles left behind at a logging site high on a mountain called Mill Peak. We burned the dozen or so bulldozed-and-gathered piles and--when the wind rose unexpectedly — about forty acres of nearby prime red fir and lodgepole pine for good measure. Luckily, we were in a remote area, and no homes were nearby.

When we returned, worn out and soot-faced, to the ranger station that evening after putting the fire out (thanks to the assistance of another hastily dispatched crew with a water truck), our supervisors nonchalantly shrugged their shoulders. No one was to blame. It was an Act of God. Upon leaving the station that morning we had been assured that local weather conditions were optimum for burning: Relatively high humidity following some rain the previous night, cloud cover, and no wind. (This was in the 1970s, before sophisticated computer-enhanced weather forecasting.)

I remembered all this while watching television coverage of the ongoing fiery fiasco in Los Alamos, New Mexico. On May 4th , a "controlled burn" was set at Bandelier National Monument near that town. The idea was to burn away 900 acres of brush growing on the slopes of Cerro Grande Peak on the edge of Bandelier. Twenty-one off-duty firefighters were assigned this job, and on orders of Bandelier Superintendent Roy Weaver, set the fire.

That Superintendent Weaver would authorize this, after receiving a last-minute Haines 6 fire weather forecast (the Haines Scale runs from 0-6, and a number mid-range or higher means that a controlled burn should not be done) is frankly bizarre, considering that the man is a 33-year veteran of the Park Service. One can only speculate that Mr. Weaver may have been under some sort of administrative pressure to execute this burn (which, given the modus operandi for the management of the public lands, surely had been carefully planned for months if not years) before truly hot summer weather arrived — thereby lowering his chances to do it, and leaving the Bandelier an extreme fire danger for its tourist season.

That this burn was even contemplated so late in the spring — and under these conditions — is unfathomable. The entire Southwest is enduring its worst drought in 30 years. Mountain snowpack over the last two winters was well below normal, and lowland rainfall scant. Pre-Los Alamos, the state of New Mexico has suffered fires totaling 200,000 acres so far this spring — already four times last year's total — with the summer still ahead. As of May 15th , the eleven-day-old Los Alamos fire had consumed 46,000 acres, burned 260 homes, permanently or temporarily displaced 25,000 people, and threatened the Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Laboratory. And, as far as American forest fires go, Los Alamos is a big one. It sports a burning perimeter 90 miles long. One wildland fire fighter contemplating that fact can be likened to a World War II German infantryman contemplating the Russian Front.

The National Park Service (NPS), the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and the United States Forest Service (USFS) have conducted these controlled burns for years with occasional mishaps involving damaged private property, though never on the scale of Los Alamos. In many instances, fire is beneficial to wildlife habitat and overall forest health. Every year, two to three million acres (an total area roughly the size of Rhode Island) of public land — mostly in the West — are targeted. That this method of forest maintenance is increasingly employed is not surprising, because Smokey the Bear has done his job all too well.

After a century of conscientious-to-the-extreme fire suppression, the forested public lands are a brush-choked wreck. Today's forest fires burn hotter, faster, larger, and longer than ever before (witness the 1988 conflagration that scorched one-third of Yellowstone National Park). This, coupled with the fact that environmentally driven litigation, legislation, and regulation, has lowered the annual timber harvest in the West from 12.7 billion board feet in 1987, to 3.3 billion today — a 75% drop. This has resulted in literally millions of acres of dead — and easily burned — trees, due to infestations of blister rust, spruce budworm, and bark beetles. To quote an old saw of foresters: "Log it, or it burns.".

Needless to say, most of the recent gross mismanagement of the public lands has occurred on the Bill Clinton-Bruce Babbitt-Mike Espy-Dan Glickman watch. And, we will see it continue if Al Gore is elected president in November. We not only have out-of-work loggers and lumber mills closing, but also the irony of economically dying timber towns amidst ecologically dying forests that are nothing but fires waiting to happen.

When Theodore Roosevelt (the President that the "conservationist" Bill Clinton is frequently compared to by his green supporters) appointed Gifford Pinchot to be the first Director of the U.S. Forest Service, the attachment of the new agency to the U.S. Department of Agriculture was no accident. Wisdom dictated that the softwood forests of the mostly arid West be sensibly managed as a commodity (today this "heretical" idea elicits howls from environmentalists). Granted, through the decades, mistakes — as they say in Washington — were made. But for good or ill, the Age of the Clearcut is over, and the fact that these lands are not logged in a scientific and sustainable manner is reprehensible, and will have adverse effects (read: Los Alamos) on the West's ecological future.

The decade of the '90s has shown that "New West" to be the nation's fastest- growing region. Cities such as Denver, Boise, and Phoenix are booming in an Information Age demographic shift. Even small towns like Los Alamos are feeling growing pains as ranchland gives way to subdivisions that ring the old downtowns. Since many — if not most — municipalities in the Rockies border public land, this has created what the Forest Service guys call "The Urban-Wildland Interface." For example, near my home in Cody, Wyo., moose, elk, mountain lions, and even grizzly bears wander close to or into subdivisions, causing headaches for local Wyoming Game and Fish Department personnel. Likewise, these suburban zones are vulnerable to fires burning on nearby public lands. Before the Los Alamos fire it would have been interesting to poll those unfortunate people who lost their homes as to their opinions on the feasibility of selectively logging adjacent tracts of public land. It's likely that the majority would have been against the idea. It would have been a case of the old N.I.M.B.Y. ("Not in my backyard) argument. Yet, if those tracts had been thinned of their younger growth, and by that method also denuded of the ground brush that feeds big fires, those 260 homes might be standing today.

On May 12th (Day 8), Interior Secretary Babbitt, New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, and Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck held a joint press conference in Los Alamos. With smoky mountains as a backdrop, the press was updated on the latest fire suppression efforts. Then Secretary Babbitt announced a May 18th hearing scheduled in Washington to investigate the fire's circumstances, and maybe question the wisdom of conducting the controlled burn. "Uh…Uh…we'll know more on Thursday," said the taciturn Interior Secretary. Then Mike Dombeck announced a 30-day moratorium on such burns west of the 100th Meridian (a line that runs from North Dakota south to Texas, and includes the entire Rocky Mountain West).

As the Los Alamos fire continues to burn in the next few days and weeks, fingers of blame will be pointed in all directions. The Congress will likely appropriate the proper funding to compensate those 260 home owners. And Roy Weaver — already on administrative leave — might lose his job. But Bill Clinton, Bruce Babbitt, Dan Glickman, Mike Dombeck, et al. won't lose theirs, though they are complicit in the tragedy of Los Alamos.

They're up to their necks in it — like a wildland firefighter battling his way through the manzanita on a hot day.