Bandelier Fire Program Thriving

April 28, 2010 at 3:17 pm
Bandelier National Monument, following direction in the 2000 National Fire Plan, resumed its prescribed fire program in 2007 in earnest. It conducted an 1800 acre burn very close to the Cerro Grande mountain where the prescribed fire in 2000 escaped. Since then they have conducted another fire in Frijoles Canyon and have plans for two more this year. Additionally they have an extensive pile burning program near Los Alamos.

All of these fires have been managed with interagency support and adequate personnel. Also the people at the Santa Fe National Forest who obstructed dispatch of resources at the Cerro Grande fire have retired and been replaced with those instructed to treat “fire as fire.”

I have written a book on the management of the Cerro Grande Fire from a professional perspective called Inferno by Committee. You can learn more at http://www.tomribe.com

Upper Frijoles Canyon at Bandelier after aerial ignition.

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the Big Burn

New York Times writer Timothy Egan has written a book critical to anyone interested in wildland fire and the history of public land management. The Big Burn is an ambitious book that examines the 1910 fires that burned 3 million acres of Idaho and  Montana and killed 100 people, mostly firefighters.

His book goes well beyond an examination of the complex of fires and their behavior and affects on towns like Wallace Idaho. He brings it all into a much larger historical perspective looking at the birth of the national forests under Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot and then follows the development of the Forest Service in its first 30 years primarily by looking at the career of Gifford Pinchot.

Egan notes that the 1910 fires were critical to the survival of Teddy Roosevelt’s national forests which were under attack from industrialists who wanted to cut them down and mine them without restrain and without accountability before Roosevelt set them aside as public lands.

Egan’s book is an excellent account of the early years of the Forest Service and how it very nearly didn’t survive its first decade until the 1910 fires were used by Gifford Pinchot to convince the nation of the importance of public management and conservation.

The book is well worth reading. My book on the Cerro Grande Fire will be out soon. See details at www.tomribe.com.

Tenth Anniversary of Cerro Grande

This May we’ll mark the 10th anniversary of the Cerro Grande Fire. A group called the Cerro Grande Survivors plans events in Los Alamos.

I plan to have my book Inferno by Committee out by May and I know everyone will rush out and buy it right away when it is available.

In the meantime, don’t forget to visit my website to keep up with the book and its happenings.

http://www.tomribe.com

Fire and Climate Change

As we move into 2010 with the optimism that the Obama administration has brought to many Americans, fire management on public lands is in flux. While the land agencies made considerable progress in redefining fire management despite the regressive administration of Bush, we now will see if climate change will squeeze progress or if we will be able to continue to apply more fire to the land to correct ecological deficiencies created by fire exclusion over more than a century.

Obama has ordered federal agencies to review their activities with reducing their carbon footprint in mind. While this is a very good thing, it could have a negative impact on prescribed fire and fire use.

Fire has always existed on many landscapes, like most of the western public lands. We humans have excluded it when possible for the last century but the buildup of fuels and the distortion of ecology that results is a pent up fire waiting to happen. Releasing this bottled energy is the goal of prescribed fire and fire use programs.

Fires make smoke and carbon dioxide. This is normal background pollution, natural as the sky and sea. It is folly to think we can prevent its release into the atmosphere by suppressing fire again. We must accept this background level of CO2 and let progressive fire programs continue.

There are ways fire organizations can limit their CO2 emissions. More efficient vehicles, use of natural gas powered vehicles, care to drive minimally and retrofitting of buildings for energy efficiency are key moves. Also food in firecamps should exclude beef and pork, two foods that have a very high carbon footprint.

Little of this is considered in Inferno by Committee, my new book. But it may be in my next one. Keep posted on my ranting at www.tomribe.com.

Tim Ingalsbee writes the Forward!

Dr. Tim Ingalsbee has written the Forward for Inferno by Committee!  Tim is the Executive Director of FUSEE, Firefighters United for Safety Ethics and Ecology. He is a top expert on federal fire policy, a former National Park Service fire fighter (fire shepherd) and a board member for Association for Fire Ecology (AFE).

His contribution to the book raises it up a notch of two. If you want to follow fire policy developments and western wildfire more broadly, be sure to visit FUSEE’s website.

Visit the Inferno by Committee website here.

Book title changed

As of today, I have changed the name of my upcoming book on the Cerro Grande Fire. The new title is Inferno by Committee. View my website at www.tomribe.com.

Thanks.

2010 will be the 10th anniversary of the Cerro Grande Fire and my book will be released around the anniversary if not before. As of January, the Cerro Grande burn area is covered with a great deal of snow but in the spring the many young aspens will leaf out and the birds will chirp.

We’ll see how the fire season of 2010 is but we can feel some peace knowing most of the lessons of Cerro Grande were learned by the federal land management agencies. If communities like Los Alamos learned the lessons, only time will tell.

From book preface

This is the Preface from Tragedy by Committee, the new book about the Cerro Grande Fire.

The Cerro Grande Fire was one of the most misunderstood yet important
events in New Mexico and Western United States history. It was important in
New Mexico because it was the culmination of many human impacts on the
environment spread out over centuries. Many of those impacts are largely
hidden from all but trained eyes. The fire was a study of cumulative
unintended consequences.

The Cerro Grande Fire had large impact on the Western US as the lessons
learned from it changed federal fire policy permanently. The story told here
boils down to lessons learned and new practices enacted on every prescribed
fire and even most wild fires in America.

I wrote this book after reading and listening to media and investigative
accounts of the fire which were clearly poorly informed. I felt the public
and the land managers deserved to have a more complete story of the fire
told so the they would be able to better understand this region¹s beautiful
environment and its environmental history and so that we all could get
beyond the blame and recriminations that dominated popular accounts of the
fire in 2000.

If any theme dominated my study of the Cerro Grande Fire, it was the
complexity of environmental history and the complexity of wildfire and fire
management. Fire truly is a fascinating event that is driven by multiple
environmental factors that play into each other in ways that even career
professionals never fully understand. The natural world is sensitive and
delicate and our exploitations have long lasting consequences.

Prescribing fire on the landscape involves risk. Sometimes, as in Cerro
Grande, the risk taken results in disaster. For land managers, there really
is no option but to prescribe fire, to restore fire to a landscape where
fire is native and necessary for the survival of the biological systems.
Cerro Grande showed us both the consequences of taking a risk with fire and
more dramatically, the consequences of avoiding that risk.

I hope readers will appreciate this paradox and the difficulty it poses
to those who manage our public heritage in the federal land management
agencies.

New Fire book

The new book Tragedy by Committee will be coming out in February. It is about the Cerro Grande Fire, the big forest fire that burned Los Alamos New Mexico in May 2000.

See the book’s website: http://www.tomribe.com

The book is written for the general public and fire professionals interested in forest fires, public lands, public land management, wildfire, the National Park Service, the US Forest Service, Los Alamos, New Mexico, Los Alamos National Laboratory, fire management, the Cerro Grande Fire, Los Alamos Fire, sheep grazing, livestock grazing, forest thinning, prescribed fire, fire investigation, Bandelier National Monument, the Valles Caldera National Preserve, the Santa Fe National Forest, the Manhattan Project, New Mexico Hispanic history, Pueblo history and extreme fire behavior.

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