Megafire

by Michael Kodas

  She ran out her front door and headed across the street to higher ground. “As I was doing that, I got washed away. I was underwater and flailing.”

  The water was flowing at 30 miles per hour. She grabbed a tree, then pulled herself onto an embankment and crawled above the flood. “Then I noticed I was walking on a broken leg and a broken foot,” she said.

  Neighbors carried her away from the creek and washed the mud and cinders out of her eyes. Her street was full of boulders, mud, and rubble.

  “It wasn’t until the next day that I found out that my cottage totally is gone,” Laura said. “There’s just a slab there. My cats, when they get scared, they hide in a drawer underneath my bed. So that’s probably what they did. I lost everything.”

  It was the third flood to hit Manitou Springs that year, and the fourth to inundate Colorado Springs since the Waldo Canyon Fire.

  Wildfires often not only leave mountain slopes denuded of vegetation that would hold them in place, but also turn the soils hydrophobic. Oils from the burning vegetation spread across the dirt below, making it impervious to moisture. Water runs fast down the water-repellent soils on barren, burnt slopes. The velocity of the flow carries away materials that normally would be as solid as rock—tons of mud, charred branches, and trees, as well as boulders, cars, and even houses. Floods on burnt mountainsides can carry 10 times more debris than those on slopes that aren’t burnt.1

  “I saw a guy running in a trickle of water,” said Chris Johnson, who lives in a castle-like house near the Cave of the Winds, where Williams Canyon enters Manitou Springs. “He was just screaming . . . Behind him was a wall of water.”

  Half a dozen people on foot barely outran the flood. The debris flow swept a pickup truck down Canyon Avenue, and then a small car. Laura Hunt’s yellow cottage bobbed down the street on the floodwaters, then fell apart, leaving one wall lying across a sidewalk. Other homes broke in half, filled with mud, or had appliance-sized boulders deposited in the living room. Days later a Bobcat earthmoving machine that had been washed away still hadn’t been found. Rock and mud filled the shops throughout Manitou’s tourist district.

  While watching coverage on TV, Johnson saw his ’73 Chevy truck, which his grandfather had bought off the line, on top of his next-door neighbor’s ’69 BMW in floodwaters a half mile from their homes. On U.S. 24, which runs into the mountains above Colorado Springs, a man was found buried in rubble after being washed away from his car or trying to outrun the flood, while a woman was rescued from a tree above the floodwaters.2

  The Hayman Fire forced Johnson from a cabin he lived in. Ten years later he evacuated his current home in the Waldo Canyon Fire. “But nothing compares to watching that flood come down and the people running away,” he said.

  Post-wildfire debris flows buried roads, clogged water systems, and blackened rivers across Colorado during the summer of 2013, leading up to a “biblical” flood that washed out highways and homes and killed five people that September.

  Mudslides and debris flows are often the insults that follow the injury of wildfires. On Labor Day 1994 heavy rains drove a debris flow from Storm King Mountain, where 14 firefighters had perished in the South Canyon Fire two months earlier.3 The slide buried Interstate 70 and washed 30 cars into the Colorado River.

  In California, debris flows after wildfires have buried neighborhoods up to their roofs. On Christmas Eve 2003, four inches of rain fell in 24 hours on the steep, burnt slopes left by the state’s biggest wildfire, which had burned during the previous summer and fall. A dozen debris flows broke loose on Christmas Day, killing three people, burying a church camp, and bulldozing through the town of Devore.4 A 1934 post-fire landslide killed 49 people when a 20-foot-high wall of rock inundated La Crescenta–Montrose.

  But in 2013, a few weeks after the Black Forest Fire, California learned that the impacts of a wildfire trickle down to communities far from the mountains’ flames and floods.

  ON AUGUST 16 A HUNTER’S ILLEGAL CAMPFIRE escaped near the Rim of the World overlook in the Stanislaus National Forest outside Yosemite National Park. Record drought had cut 10 inches from the region’s average precipitation for the year. The Sierra Nevada held near record-low snowpacks.

  “The situation is extremely crispy and dry,” Bill Patzert, a climatologist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the Los Angeles Times earlier in the summer. “That equals incendiary.”5

  The drought and a heat wave primed the forest to burn, and a century of putting out fires had left much of it overgrown, with plenty of fuel.6

  The Rim Fire blew up to 100,000 acres in 36 hours, and engulfed nearly 90,000 acres more in the following two days. When it was finally contained more than two months later, it had burned 257,314 acres, making it the third-largest wildfire in California history and the largest on record in the Sierra Nevada. Nearly 80,000 of the acres burned were in Yosemite National Park. The fire burned so intensely that firefighters cleared brush around giant sequoia trees, which are normally insulated from wildfire by their thick bark, and surrounded them with sprinklers to keep them from igniting. Some wood smoldered right through the winter, and the fire wasn’t declared out for more than a year after it was contained.

  Its impacts ran down to cities hundreds of miles away.

  The fire burned to within a mile of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, which supplies water to more than 85 percent of San Francisco’s population. While the water was never so contaminated with ash that the city’s supply had to be cut off, as many residents had feared, it forced the closure of two hydroelectric power stations that depend on the reservoir. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission purchased $600,000 worth of electricity from other sources to prevent blackouts.7 In the end, the fire cost the city $36.3 million in repairs to infrastructure, power purchases, and remediation of the landscape to prevent post-fire floods and debris flows.8

  The U.S. Forest Service had exhausted its budget for firefighting before the Rim Fire even started. Cuts in most federal government programs triggered by “sequestration,” automatic deficit-reduction measures that resulted from the 2011 debt-ceiling standoff between the Republican Congress and President Barack Obama, had whittled 5 percent from the Forest Service’s $2 billion budget for dealing with wildfires.9 Even without the sequester, federal firefighters were certain to run out of funding, but agency officials reported that the cuts meant they had 500 fewer firefighters and 50 fewer fire trucks than the year before.10

  JUST BECAUSE THE FIREFIGHTERS were out of money didn’t mean they wouldn’t show up. They just had to get the funds from somewhere else.

  “Fire borrowing”—the transfer of funds from other Forest Service and Department of the Interior programs to pay for firefighting—happened in all but four years between 2000 and 2013. In seven of those years, both the Department of the Interior and the Forest Service, part of the Department of Agriculture, ran out of money to fight wildfires. Part of that was due to skyrocketing costs. The USDA reported that fighting fires accounted for 13 percent of the Forest Service’s budget in the 1990s, but consumed more than half of it in 2015.11

  Caps on discretionary spending passed by Congress further hobbled firefighting budgets. In 2014 the U.S. Forest Service and Department of the Interior were projected to spend more than $470 million more fighting wildfires than the $1.4 billion Congress budgeted for the task.

  “The forecast released today demonstrates the difficult budget position the Forest Service and Interior face in our efforts to fight catastrophic wildfire,” Robert Bonnie, the undersecretary of agriculture for natural resources and environment, said on May 1, 2014. “While our agencies will spend the necessary resources to protect people, homes, and our forests, the high levels of wildfire this report predicts would force us to borrow funds from forest restoration, recreation, and other areas.”12

  For years critics have noted that the annual reallocation of funds is turning the Forest Service into the “Fire Service.” A report in August 2014 fro
m Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture, cited a 110 percent increase in the number of people working on wildfires in the Forest Service since 1998, while the number of people managing forests had declined by 35 percent. “Fire borrowing” had led to a 95 percent reduction in the budget for maintaining infrastructure, including making critical bridge repairs, fixing health and safety problems in buildings and campsites, and maintaining water supplies—a $5.5 billion backlog of projects. Vegetation and watershed management suffered a 22 percent reduction; wildlife and fisheries habitat management a 17 percent cut; and support for recreation, heritage, and wilderness activities a 13 percent cut.13

  Although Congress pays back most of the borrowed funds, Forest Service chief Tom Tidwell argued that this approach hamstrings programs to prevent and prepare for future wildfires, such as prescribed burning and thinning of forests,14 while a letter from the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources to Obama administration officials stated that “this approach to paying for firefighting is nonsensical and increases wildland fire costs.”15

  Political battles regularly leave firefighters under-resourced. In 2009 Congress passed the FLAME Act, which created a reserve fund to pay for additional firefighting in years with more blazes than average. Congress put $413 million in the reserve, but cuts brought it down to $290 million during the debt-ceiling standoff with the president in 2011. While the FLAME Act fund was intended as a reserve to help cover the costs of expensive fire years, it was included in the overall wildfire budget based on the average costs of the previous 10 years. With the costs of wildfires rapidly escalating, the fund was quickly being depleted.16

  FUNDING CHALLENGES WILL GET FAR WORSE as the costs of wildfires continue to explode.

  A month after the sequester took effect in 2013, Forest Service scientists gave a grim prediction of what the “new normal” for wildfire in America will look like. At a forum in Denver considering how the nation should adapt to climate change, they released a paper projecting that by 2050 the area burned each year by wildfires will at least double, to about 20 million acres. The assessment, based on 25 years of climate science, predicts that some regions, including western Colorado, will see a fivefold increase in wildfires.17

  Tree-killing insect attacks, expected to see similar growth, are already increasing, according to the report, killing high-elevation trees that were once protected by the cold. Runoff from fire scars will increasingly contaminate watersheds serving the booming population of the West. Forests’ capacity to cleanse water will diminish, as will their ability to sequester carbon. Forests currently suck in about 13 percent of U.S. carbon emissions.

  Scientists urging lawmakers to restore forests and reduce dangerous fuel loads instead found their budgets to prevent and prepare for wildfires slashed, in order to fund firefighting in forests that were already burning.

  “This is not merely a concern for future generations; it will hurt us right now, this year,” Vilsack wrote when releasing the 2014 report. “The Forest Service will soon run out of money and will be forced to transfer hundreds of millions of dollars from other programs in order to put out the fires . . . The current system is untenable, dangerous, and simply irresponsible.”

  AS COLORADO SPRINGS CONTINUED CLEANING UP from the two most destructive fires in state history, the political squabbling and fight for funding were just two more drivers of the new world of megafire. “I think we’re looking at the tip of the iceberg,” Steve Riker, the city’s incident commander at the Waldo Canyon Fire, told me. “We don’t see 99 percent of it. It is going to get worse.

  “We keep pushing farther and farther into areas that we’ve never been into before. We’re not allowing our forests to burn off like they should every hundred or 200 years. And the farther we get away from these events, our memories do get clouded. Are we going to get bigger, and worse [wildfires] and more deaths? Absolutely. I don’t see any way around that.”

  That the city faced two once-in-a-century fires not even a year apart is a reflection of one aspect of the new normal: megafires aren’t just blazes that are bigger or hotter or more deadly and destructive; they’re also more frequent fires, out-of-season fires, and the endless fire season.

  “It’s the new norm,” Jim Schanel said after he finished fighting the latest Colorado Springs conflagration in Black Forest. “Whether you subscribe to global warming, the population of the northern hemisphere increasing infringement on wildland areas, [or] unhealthy forests, there’s a very complex algorithm to this. This fire behavior is not going to go away.”

  Within 10 days of the Black Forest Fire’s containment, every aspect of that algorithm—the warming and drying climate, the overgrown and unhealthy forests, the homes filling flammable landscapes, the politics, and the economics—would come to bear on a small Arizona city.

  PART VI

  Backfire

  26

  Frontier Days

  Prescott, Arizona—July 1, 2013

  PHOENIX MAY BE NAMED for the bird resurrected from its burnt nest, but Prescott is the Arizona city that was reborn in fire. That story is carved in stone.

  The Yavapai County Timeline, etched into a concrete walkway in Prescott’s Courthouse Plaza, starts with an explosion painted red, orange, and black, below the words “In the Beginning.” A scarlet line jets from the blast like a highway stripe, at first in dashes that mark the sporadic history of white explorers in the area, and then unbroken, as if moving into a no-passing zone.

  The stripe runs toward the courthouse until confronted by a statue of Buckey O’Neill atop his rearing horse. In Prescott, O’Neill was a newspaperman and sheriff. In Tombstone, he was a friend of the Earp brothers. And in Cuba, he was a captain with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, with whom he died on San Juan Hill on July 1, 1898—115 years to the day before I stood in front of his statue. He was shot through the mouth by a sniper after preaching that officers shouldn’t cower from the Spanish bullets, and then rolling a cigarette amid the gunfire.1

  The concrete timeline hairpins away from O’Neill’s charge as if it is retreating from the cowboy in its path. Fires in the area sometimes seem to do the same thing—but not all of them.

  In 1863 Joseph R. Walker established the first mining district in what would become Yavapai County. The gold rush was the “city’s birth certificate,” and the next year, at the encouragement of Congress and Abraham Lincoln, who wanted to secure its mineral riches for the Union during the Civil War, Prescott became a town.

  The timeline doesn’t turn into a yellow brick road, but instead remains a fiery red. Even more than gold, flames defined the city.

  The timeline notes the Battle Fire in 1972 and the Castle Fire seven years later as the largest wildfires in the county’s history, but Prescott’s tragic, flaming legacy began a century before. That’s written not only in the timeline but in every building I could see from it.

  Brick and stone facades in the Romanesque, Second Renaissance Revival, Beaux Arts, Art Deco, and Chicago styles face the plaza. The square includes as distinctive a panorama of architecture as can be found anywhere in the West. When the town first rose amid the arid ponderosa pine forests, however, it was comprised almost entirely of wood-frame buildings. Settlers from the Midwest and East created a city in the style of those moister regions of the United States. Even the square, with its Neoclassical Revival–style courthouse surrounded by a park, reflects an eastern sensibility.

  From the timeline, I looked up at Whiskey Row’s famed lineup of taverns facing the courthouse. A longhorn skull nearly five feet wide spanned the doorway leading into Matt’s Saloon. Its eyes glowed red, like embers. Beside it, the electric handlebar mustache of Hooligan’s Pub matched the size and shape of the steer’s horns. A Victorian lady outlined in neon led to the Jersey Lilly Saloon, its grand stone balcony overhanging the Palace, Arizona’s oldest frontier saloon, a sprawling restaurant where tourists gawk at the bullet holes in the tin ceiling.

  In 1879 the Weekly Arizona Mine
r newspaper saw a plague of fire coming to the city as clearly as I could see those barroom signs. “At least four deep wells should be made on our public plaza which might be the means of saving our town should a fire break out in the wooden buildings on Montezuma Street,” the newspaper pleaded. “We can’t afford a fire just yet.”2

  It was natural that the newspaper would take on “that all destroying fiend of fire.” A blaze in the 1870s had damaged much of the publication’s equipment. Another had burned its printing office, several stores, and the Palace. The newspaper’s editor, Samuel N. Holmes, burned to death in his room at the Sherman House hotel in 1884. The paper’s headlines called that blaze “The Severest Visitation of the Fire Fiend the City of Prescott Has Ever Experienced.”3 A few months later another headline reported a “Bath House, Laundries, Opium Dens and Chinese Joss House Swept Out of Existence” in “another disastrous fire.”

  On July 4, 1883, a fire destroyed many of the buildings around Courthouse Plaza, including much of Whiskey Row, despite the “fire wells” on all four corners of the square. Five years later, as a white building and a jagged bloom of flame carved into the timeline note, another fire destroyed much of downtown east of the plaza.4 That same year, according to the next engraving, Prescott founded what is now the world’s oldest rodeo. A list of the presidents of the rodeo are carved into the sidewalk, concluding with J. C. Trujillo, who made enough money riding broncos to purchase a ranch in the county and has been running Prescott’s Frontier Days for decades. The rodeo had its struggles, and if it weren’t for some of its supporters taking second mortgages on their homes to keep it running, it would have closed in the 1980s.

  Prescott also has Arizona’s oldest fire department, but its founding and fire chiefs aren’t noted in the walkway.