Restore the Mendo

Rancher's editorial about controlled burns right on target

by Rich Fairbanks

Bill Burrows makes some excellent points about controlled burning in the editorial he wrote in this weekend's Redding Record Searchlight.  The coalition he is working with includes a number of former fire management workers.  I personally worked on Forest Service fire crews and overhead teams for 20 years.  I came away from that experience firmly convinced that for certain forest types, low severity fire prevents high severity fire. 

One of the forest types that benefits most from low severity fire is the mixed conifer forest that is so common in the mountains of Northern California.  The Mendocino National Forest contains 337,000 acres of mixed conifer.  That is one of the reasons our coalition is trying to persuade Congress to ramp up the budget for controlled burning in the Mendocino National Forest.  For all the folks in Northern California and Southern Oregon who sat in the haze for a couple of months last summer, controlled burning is part of the solution. 

We don't have to tolerate months-long smoke inversions, massive stand replacing fires and escalating suppression costs.  Part of the answer to these problems is the ancient practice of under burning.  We can reduce wildfire rate of spread, resistance to control and fire severity by controlled burning in winter and spring.

They're doing it in Oregon

by Rich Fairbanks

Nearly 4,000 acres of controlled burns are scheduled for this spring on the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's Medford District and the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest in southern Oregon. Some 2,450 acres will be burned on the Medford District while about 1,376 acres will be burned on the national forest.

The agencies largely will employ understory burning intended to mimic a low-intensity wildfire by burning the ground fuels without harming most mature trees. The burning improves forest health by reducing crowding of trees and therefore the risk of insect and disease outbreaks. It also reduces the severity and sometimes the spread rate of wildfires near the urban-wildland interface.

"We are actively committed to reducing fuels across the landscape to protect lives, property and resources," Tom Murphy, fire management officer for the BLM's Medford District, told the Mail Tribune. "It is essential that we manage our forests to reduce the potential for a large uncontrolled wildfire."

The controlled burns are allowed only on days when conditions will let the fire burn safely while blowing smoke away from populated areas. The land resource agencies work with the Oregon Smoke Management Office, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, the Oregon Department of Forestry and the National Weather Service.

It is especially gratifying to see underburning in the Siskiyous. In parts of these  mountains the dry mixed conifer forests have responded to logging and fire control by producing the infamous "doghair" stand conditions where thousands of small trees slowly choke the mature conifers.  "Too many straws in the coconut", as one silviculturist put it.