1/9/2006

KUFM/KGPR

T. M. Power

Wildfire in the South: Lessons for the West

The ongoing wildfires in Texas and Oklahoma are a bit disorienting to those of us living in the north who have been worrying about snow pack in the mountains, bitter cold, and freezing rain. Besides, we are used to thinking of the West as the center of wildfire danger and, in particular, National Forest lands as the source of that wildfire threat.

But typically most wildfires ignite in our southern states where ninety percent of the forested land is privately-owned and government-managed forests play a relatively minor role. Also when we think of wildfires, we tend to focus on forest fires. But the current fires ravaging Texas and Oklahoma have been primarily grass fires that have also ignited some scrub and brush lands. The source of the frequent wildfires in the south is also different. Almost all of the fires are human caused. Lightening in the south is usually accompanied by rain so that lightening plays a much smaller role in the initiation of wildfires.

All of this should help put our own wildfire experience into a broader context. We are not alone in facing this natural risk and our wildfire risks may not be greater than those of other areas. The recent wildfires in Texas and Oklahoma have burned over a half-million acres, destroyed 470 homes, and killed five people in a relatively brief period of time. Entire fire seasons in Montana do not usually exact that toll.

Federal land management policy cannot be blamed for these recent fires and losses either. In Texas, there is very little federal land because Texas was an independent country before it entered the Union. The wildfires are primarily starting on and burning individually-owned private lands. In Texas, for instance, 92 percent of forest land is privately owned and 76 percent of forest land is in the hands of individual landowners, not forest products companies. The burning grasslands are also overwhelmingly individually-owned private lands.

Of course wildfire has always been a part of natural grassland and forest systems. Wildfire is not something caused by European-American settlement. But economic and demographic changes have been contributing to increasingly costly wildfire events in the south.

As technological change has continuously boosted the productivity of our farms and ranches and globalization has exposed them to worldwide competition, the economic viability of agriculture in many parts of the United States has deteriorated. More and more southern farm and ranch land has been abandoned and converted to either rural residential settlement or pine tree plantations or both. This has led to the accumulation of fuels on both the grasslands and in the tree plantations.

As families have been attracted back to rural open spaces for home sites, the number of people and structures nestled in amongst these accumulating wildfire fuels has grown, increasing the likelihood of loss of life and property when wildfires ultimately sweep through.

Nature, possibly seriously modified by human activity, has, of course, played a role too. Plentiful rainfall last spring produced a lush crop of grass. By this winter, however, severe drought, unseasonably warm winter weather with temperatures in the 80s, low humidity, and high winds created the basis for the perfect firestorm. Human stupidity and negligence triggered the conflagrations: celebrating New Year’s Eve with fireworks, the open burning of refuse and trash on windy days, flipping a burning cigarette away, was all it took.

Much of this should sound familiar to us here in the Northern Rockies and Great Plains. Some of our most threatening wildfires have been grassland fires that then moved up into the forests. The same combinations of lush springs following by dry summers laid the tinder for severe wildfire seasons. Wind, humidity, and temperature largely determine the likelihood of our ability to contain the wildfires that were ignited. Human settlement amidst the accumulating wildfire fuels have significantly increased the probability and scale of human loss here too.

Like last year’s scrubland wildfires in California, the recent grassland fires in Texas and Oklahoma should put the wildfire dangers we face in a larger context. It is not the failure of federal land managers to open all of the public domain to commercial logging or other development that has created our wildfire risks. Almost all natural landscapes carry that risk, forested, logged, or not. That, of course, does not mean we cannot act to reduce the wildfire risk to human life and property. It just means that an anti-government, anti-environmental ideology is not a very practical basis from which to develop a wildfire risk reduction strategy. Doing away with public lands and sharing an insensitivity to environmental damage do not reduce wildfire risks. Just ask the folks in northeast Texas.