by Kyle Dickman
The Big Burn made the agency’s case. Three million acres of forest burned in one mammoth firestorm, and the timber industry calculated the losses to be in the millions. Pinchot’s Forest Service rangers, though, were the ones leading the effort to extinguish the flames. They organized civilian militias raised from bars and churches and helped direct the Buffalo Soldiers and other cavalry when the Army got involved. In the Big Burn’s aftermath, Congress finally found purpose in the agency. Their job, as one early Forest Service director put it, was to keep the land ripe for the ax by suppressing wildfires.
Over the decades that followed, the Forest Service and the timber industry grew to depend on each other. Loggers clear-cut national forests in every western state, and the agency grew wealthy from the leases the companies paid to harvest publicly owned trees. To better curb the only scourge slowing the timber harvests, the agency invested heavily in fighting fires. During World War II, conscientious objectors served their country by fighting wildfires. The Forest Service shortened response times to wilderness blazes by building roads into remote mountain ranges, erecting watchtowers among swaths of virgin forest, and founding the smoke-jumping program—an idea borrowed from Army paratroopers—to extinguish any fire too remote to hike or drive to. Army surpluses left behind after World War II—Jeeps, air tankers, helicopters—further militarized suppression troops, and the public was enlisted in the war on fire.
During World War II, the government issued posters that showed Hitler and an Imperial Japanese soldier grinning beside a wildfire. The Japanese had taken to sending high-altitude hot-air balloons across the Pacific to set ablaze America’s forests and its cities. They launched an estimated nine thousand balloons, and though 342 reached the United States, only one caused significant damage. The hydrogen-filled rubberized silk balloon landed in southern Oregon, killing a pregnant Sunday school teacher and five of her teenage students. They were the only U.S. combat casualties in the forty-eight states. The text beneath the government-issued campaign posters read, OUR CARELESSNESS, THEIR SECRET WEAPON.
Ultimately, though, it was a shirtless, shovel-wielding, ranger-hat-and-blue-jeans-wearing brown bear that colored America’s perception of fires. Created by the Advertising Council in 1944, Smokey Bear tapped into the nationalist fervor that had swept the country during the war years, and through radio and TV ads, folk songs by popular country musicians, and movies, like Bambi, that villainized wildfire, the phrase “Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires” became ingrained in the American psyche. The advertising campaign became one of the most successful messaging efforts in history. By the twenty-first century, Smokey’s fame rivaled that of Santa Claus. At a glance, 95 percent of adults and 77 percent of children knew Smokey Bear and his anti-wildfire message.
Many firefighters were dying trying to corral the burns. In the first thirty years of the Forest Service’s grand experiment to control the flames, 186 firefighters were killed on the line. These fatalities only strengthened the agency’s resolve to suppress fires. Smoke jumpers, fire engines, air tankers, helicopters, and hotshot crews were developed to aid the effort to extinguish any and all sparks in the forests.
Before suppression became the reigning management policy in the 1930s and ’40s, forest scientists estimate that more than thirty million acres burned in the West every year; after suppression was instituted, most fire seasons were held to less than five million acres. By the mid-1950s, firefighters were stopping almost all wildfires before they reached the size of a city block. In just forty years, the Forest Service had assembled the world’s most effective firefighting force.
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What forest managers hadn’t foreseen was suppression’s serious environmental consequences. Unwittingly, land managers had made more volatile. Naturally and regularly occurring fires played a crucial role in the evolution of most western forests. Removing the flames changed the self-regulating system. As a strategy for dealing with natural wildfires, dousing every spark worked just long enough for countless pine, fir, and cedar saplings to grow into mature trees. By the end of the twentieth century, the policy failures were nowhere more obvious than in the Southwest.
Suppression had changed the forests. The Southwest used to simmer with frequent low-intensity burns every summer. Lightning ignited some blazes, but native peoples intentionally set the majority to cultivate grass for the elk and deer herds they relied on for food. Smoky summer skies were the norm. Towering columns associated with extremely hot blazes were not. Fires burned at low intensity, with flames not much taller than knee height. These blazes meandered across the landscape, clearing the forest of underbrush every ten to fifteen years. Left behind were open meadows and ponderosa forests with widely spaced canopies and black charcoal scarring the trees’ trunks.
Without frequent blazes, brush and saplings choked out the open grasslands and created a ladder of fuels that grew from the forest floor to the tops of the pines. Since suppression began, millions—maybe billions—more trees have crowded into western forests. Though firefighters have limited the frequency with which fires escape, the ones that do now have exponentially more fuel to burn. In one New Mexico mountain range, there are now 1,300 trees per acre where a century earlier there were just 150. Flames can climb quickly up the ladder and into the crown, where fires ignite the tallest tree and create infernos that are nearly impossible to control.
Nationwide, firefighters began noticing an uptick in fire intensity in the early 1980s. But it wasn’t until the summer of 1988, when more than a third of Yellowstone National Park burned, that the greater public took note of just how unhealthy the forests had become. For three months the fires raged, and national newspapers splashed across their front pages images of two-hundred-foot flames dwarfing park buildings. Dubbed the Summer of Fire, the conflagration closed the park to tourists, and Americans were concerned that they were witnessing the destruction of a national treasure.
“People were horrified by Yellowstone,” said Harry Croft, the deputy national director of fire and aviation management for the Forest Service during the mid- to late seventies. “We didn’t like what was going on, either. So we put together a plan that would reintroduce fire, logging, thinning—something to get our forests back on track and limit how often we get the Yellowstone anomalies.”
Croft and his colleagues released an updated National Fire Plan in 2000. It allowed fires that didn’t threaten houses, endangered species, or watersheds to burn unmolested by firefighters. The policy shift is part of the reason six-million-acre fire seasons are the new norm, and ten-million-acre seasons loom on the horizon.
“More acreage burned is a very good thing,” says Alexander Evans, a forest scientist who studies wildfires for the Forest Guild, a Santa Fe–based nonprofit that advocates for sustainable forestry. Before World War II, fire seasons that burned between thirty and forty million acres, much of it at a lower intensity, weren’t uncommon. “In a few places, we’re even seeing a return to natural fire cycles and the fuels getting thinner. That’s what we want more of,” says Evans.
But now that we’ve made it possible for forests to grow unchecked for years, it’s not as simple as it sounds. As acclaimed fire scientist Stephen Pyne puts it, removing fire from the landscape is much easier than putting it back.
The combination of dense forests and drying climate has made highly destructive fires—like the Yellowstone anomalies—increasingly common. Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, and Colorado have all seen their most destructive blazes since the turn of the twenty-first century.
Forest scientists and the media alike have branded these blazes mega-fires. The term is imprecise and means only that a burn is destructive, extremely difficult to control, and, because of this, expensive. The term’s usage also turns a blind eye to the fact that large wildfires, though somewhat anomalous, have historically shaped American forests. Between 1825 and 1910, six documented fires—in present-day Wisconsin, Michigan, Maine, Idaho, and South Carolina—exceeded one milli
on acres. Each of them burned more acreage than the largest blazes the United States has seen in a hundred years, and three of them were larger by a factor of five.
What the term “mega-fire” accurately reflects is that fires are burning more intensely now than at any point since the Forest Service became proficient at the business of suppression, and land management agencies are having a hard time coping. Though the Forest Service, the BLM, and state agencies are still aggressively trying to control mega-fires, there’s a mounting body of evidence suggesting that it’s a costly and failing endeavor. Jerry Williams, the former national director of fire and aviation management for the Forest Service, who is credited with popularizing the term “mega-fire” in the mid-2000s, estimates that only one-tenth of 1 percent of the fires that burn each year qualify as mega-fires. Yet the severest 1 percent of blazes account for 85 percent of the suppression costs—hence the upper echelon’s significance.
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“The worst wildfires on record are coinciding with a time when suppression force has never been greater, technological advantage has never been better, and suppression spending has never been higher,” Williams wrote. “Mega-fires challenge the commonly held notion that increasing wildfire threats can be effectively matched with greater suppression forces.”
Williams’s report isn’t the only one to put forward these views. In the past few years, one Forest Service–funded report suggested that fully three-quarters of air-tanker drops are ineffective during the initial attack phase of the firefight. Rapidly spreading fires burn straight through the slurry, which is exactly what Todd Lerke saw on Thompson Ridge. Yet because the tactic is widely and perhaps erroneously recognized as effective, incident commanders drop retardant on the vast majority of quickly spreading blazes. Another report found that the costs of fighting fires fall by half when the new blazes burn into the blackened fuel left behind from previous fire scars. In other words, when more fires are allowed to burn, fire size regulates naturally, and controlling blazes becomes cheaper. It’s likely to take many years for this information, and other studies like these, to drastically reshape the way we deal with wildfires in America, but the fact that critical research is forthcoming is a sign that the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and state forestry agencies are open to adapting their management policies to the new realities of wildfires. The change hasn’t happened yet, and in the meantime, firefighters are still stopping 98 percent of burns in the initial-attack stage.
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The eighteen Granite Mountain Hotshots remaining on the Thompson Ridge Fire had little time to process Renan’s departure. No one knew whether he would live, or the extent of his injuries if he did, but the men were clearly disturbed by what they’d witnessed. After the ambulance rushed toward an emergency room two hours to the south, they clumped together in knots of twos and threes before pulling apart and lying back down for another few hours of rest. Grant was inconsolable. He called Leah, sobbing. Bob pulled him aside and told him to settle down.
“I know this is hard, but you’ve got to get over this,” he said.
“We go back to work? That’s how we deal with this?” Grant asked.
The simple answer was yes. Granite Mountain still had seven more shifts before Day’s team would release them from Thompson Ridge, and the crew’s trials were far from over. A few days after Renan’s incident, Steed called the men together beside the barn in the meadow. It was after another night shift, and the hotshots, still trying and mostly failing to sleep in the campground, looked exhausted. Ash and charcoal colored their scruffy faces gray, and dried sweat left behind rings of salt on their black T-shirts. They all wanted an update on Renan. Steed knew only that Renan was going to live, but he didn’t know the details about his condition. He did have other news, though, and it wasn’t good.
That day, a twenty-eight-year-old smoke jumper in California, Luke Sheehy, had died on the line. He and two other jumpers had parachuted into a single-tree lightning fire in Northern California’s South Warner Wilderness. A burning branch had fallen sixty feet and struck Sheehy in the head. Despite his fellow jumpers’ attempts to resuscitate him, he died before arriving at the hospital.
Steed and the crew took a moment of silence. The more religious hotshots hung their heads in prayer, and the others just shook their heads. None of them knew Sheehy personally, but the news still hit close to the heart. Sheehy had died doing what Granite Mountain was doing every day on Thompson Ridge: work that wasn’t exceptionally hard or patently dangerous. But his death made it difficult to ignore the reality that, in one dark moment, the same fate could befall any of the hotshots.
Granite Mountain loaded into the buggies, and as the men headed back to the campground, they steeled themselves for another shift on the line. By the afternoon of June 8, Thompson Ridge had roughly doubled in size since the hotshots’ arrival. The blaze now spread across 18,500 acres and threatened another subdivision on its southern edge. To protect the homes, Day’s team called for a second burnout. This time, the objective was a four-thousand-to-five-thousand-acre pocket of pines and aspens adjacent to the homes. If Day’s team successfully orchestrated the burnout behind the houses, Thompson Ridge would be nearly contained.
The operation was controversial with the public from the outset. One of the homeowners’ major concerns was mudslides. Normally, when rain falls on unburned forest, 98 percent of the water soaks into the ground. But the blast-oven heat of an intense wildfire changes the soil’s composition and leaves behind a hydrophobic layer. When the monsoon rains come, the water streaks off this waxy film, carrying with it whatever ash the fire leaves behind. After one particularly intense fire in the Jemez Mountains, the rain from a single thunderstorm moved thousands of tons of ash—five inches deep in some places—off the mountains. As black torrents cascaded down toward the Rio Grande, they picked up boulders and logs, and in the deluge, orchards and farms that had been spared from the flames were destroyed by the floods. The aftermath made it look as if the Jemez Mountains had erupted.
Mudslides were one concern. But for homeowners, the greater issue with Day’s burnout plan on Thompson Ridge was its echoes of 2000’s historically destructive Cerro Grande Fire. Started as a prescribed burn intended to thin out the increasingly thick forest near Los Alamos, the blaze escaped and led to a nuclear scare when flames jumped onto the National Laboratory’s property, where all manner of explosive and radioactive materials are used, tested, and stored.
The fire burned for three months, and firefighters were able to contain Cerro Grande only after the weather changed. By then the blaze had razed 235 Los Alamos homes and caused $1 billion in damages. In its aftermath, the name Cerro Grande became shorthand among both firefighters and the press for an increasingly accepted reality: man’s reign of controlling wildfire was quickly coming to an end.
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An AStar helicopter took off from Thompson Ridge’s fire camp shortly before dark. The helicopter banked over the tops of the pines and flew straight toward a patch of unburned forest that sat between a small group of houses and the wildfire. When the pilot looked down and saw the line of flames advancing through the sea of trees, he signaled to a crew member who sat in the wind near an open side door in the back. Balanced on the edge of the fuselage, extending just over the helicopter’s skids, was a waist-high box filled with plastic spheres about the size of Ping-Pong balls. The firefighter flipped a switch on the top of the box, an electric motor whirred to life, and every few seconds a ball injected with a highly flammable combination of chemicals rolled down a tube, dropped from the helicopter, and burst into flames just above the forest floor.
From where Granite Mountain was spread out along a road, holding the burnout operation’s southern edge, it looked as if the helicopter were firing tracer bullets into the hillside. It didn’t look quite right. The smoke was too black, and the fire much too hot, as though the ignition boss in the helicopter hadn’t fully acc
ounted for just how dry the forest was. After seeing the flames, firefighters on scene estimated that rather than dropping six hundred balls, as it was supposed to, the helicopter had dropped six thousand.
Within the hour, thousands of tiny blazes climbed up brush and saplings and into the forest’s crown, where the flames caught gusts of wind and grew into one massive front. Like massive ocean waves, flames crashed through the forest. One of the fire’s heads raced toward the line where Granite Mountain was holding line. It hit so hard that the flames jumped a thirty-foot-wide road and divided another hotshot crew that was spread along the road uphill of Granite Mountain. The fire cut off a few hotshots from the rest of their crew. They abandoned their heavier gear and rushed west to safety while the rest of their crew fled east into the valley. When Bunch and his swamper, Parker, saw the hotshots racing toward the line, they shared a quick and concerned glance: Thompson Ridge was off and running.
When the temperature inside the smoke column exceeded four hundred degrees, whatever bits of aspen leaves, pinecones, or needles were caught in the rising air combusted and became natural-born incendiaries that rode gusts of wind up and away from the main fire. From the valley floor, the rising embers looked like endless strings of Christmas lights wrapped around a rotating smoke column. The effect was supernatural.
The most remarkable story of a fire’s behavior comes from the horrific Peshtigo Fire, a blaze that killed an estimated fifteen hundred people in Wisconsin’s North Woods in 1871. On the Peshtigo Fire, the temperature difference between the smoke and the cooler air on the blaze’s perimeter was so extreme that a tornado formed in the turbulent interface. The fire spun into a cyclone that rose hundreds of feet above the forest. As it twisted through the logging town of Peshtigo, the tornado incinerated grain elevators and lifted locomotives completely off the railroad tracks. The heat became so intense that silicates that had melted out of the soil were sucked into the air. When the firestorm produced a thunderhead, the silicates became molten glass that rained down from the skies. In the aftermath, a thin sheet of glass encased everything—from the thousands of birds suffocated midflight by the fire’s insatiable appetite for oxygen to the fleeing family killed atop their horse-drawn wagon.