8/25/2003

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

 

Wildfire and Smoke: A Historical Perspective

 

            Although some timber interests have made tentative efforts to make political hay out of the wildfires and pall of smoke that have engulfed parts of Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Wyoming, such abuses of other people’s suffering to push particular special interests have been blessedly limited so far during this wildfire season. Montana’s Lieutenant Governor Ohs, even when encouraged to blame the current fires engulfing Western Montana on inadequate timber harvests or environmental roadblocks to extensive forest thinning, responded that at times natural forces are simply beyond human control. He pointed to the obvious: the extended, multi-year drought and record high temperatures that have left our forest floors drier than ever before observed and to repeated dry lightning storms.

            Various special interest groups have claimed that it is human policy failures, logging or the lack of logging, past fire suppression, over-grazing, or people building homes in wildlands, that have caused the current wildfire threat and choking smoke. Before buying into any of these claims, it is worth going back to the early period of European-American settlement of the West, before we did any of these things, to get some historical perspective on wildfire.

            Although the firestorm that tore through Western Montana and North Idaho in a few days during August of 1910 is usually used to date the federal commitment to fire suppression in Western forests, 1889 provides an example from 105 years ago of what drought and heat by themselves can do to the flammability of our forests without any modern human activities that cumulatively degraded “forest heath.”[1]

            Major John Wesley Powell, director of the US Geological Survey reported to Congress on the fires of 1889 saying:

This past [wildfire] season….I passed through South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho by train. Among the valleys, with mountains on every side, during all that trip, a mountain was never seen. This was because the fires in the mountains created such a smoke that the whole country was enveloped by it and hidden from view.

These smoke conditions were not new to Powell. From the late 1860s through 1889, he reported that the geographic work of his surveyors throughout the West was often hampered by heavy smoke during the dry summer months. 

On August 20, 1889, the New York Times, reported:

[F]orest fires which have been raging all over Montana for three weeks and have destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of timber have reached most alarming proportions…In two days the fire travels over a section 60 miles wide and 100 miles in length…

Those fires burned through millions of acres of mountain forests around Deer Lodge, Helena, and Boise.  Like this year, in 1889 the fires were not limited to Western Montana.  Miles City was surrounded by fire. As the New York Times reported: “The bodies of timber north and south of town…seem to have caught fire simultaneously. Lightning during the storm of Sunday night is the cause of the flames…A heavy smoke is hanging over the town.”

            The Times report from Portland on August 15, 1889, should also sound familiar to folks living in Missoula, Kalispell, and Helena this summer:

The atmosphere for miles around is thick with smoke and cinders and burning brands are falling in showers. All the northwestern country seems to be burning up in forest fires. The smoke has been so dense in Portland for the last two or threes weeks that for a time it was impossible to see far up the street….”

            During the 19th century, prior to extensive fire suppression activities, fire analysts tell us that an average of 20 million acres of Western forest, grass, and sagebrush lands burned each year. That is about 4 times as much land as burned during the fires of 2000 and about 10 times as much as what annually has burned during the last 20 years.

What is clear is that wildfire in our Western forest, grass, and scrub lands is a natural phenomenon. Like people elsewhere in the country who regularly have to cope with floods, blizzards, cold snaps, tornados, hurricanes, and earthquakes, we in the West will periodically have to cope as best we can with wildfire. Although in the past a combination of cooler and wetter weather and successful fire suppression have allowed us to live smugly with the belief that our particular corner of paradise was not plagued by life-threatening and misery-producing natural forces, that simply is not the case.  Wildfire has always been a powerful and creative natural force that has been crucial in creating the beautiful and productive natural landscapes that have drawn us to and hold us in this part of the world.

Our challenge is to learn how to live safely and creatively in these spectacular natural landscapes without systematically destroying them in the name of safety and convenience.  There is much that can be done consistent with that objective, but it all begins with the recognition that wildfire will always be a part of our lives here.           


[1] These quotes are taken from Stephen F. Arno and Steven Allison-Bunnell, Flames in Our Forest: Disaster or Renewal?, Island Press: Washington, 2002, pp. 28-34.