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Not All is Black Inside the Nation's Biggest Wildfire
G RANTS PASS, Ore.—When Biscuit - the nation's biggest wildfire this
year - was on its hind legs and roaring last July, anyone looking at
the towering plumes of smoke in southwestern Oregon could only wonder
how anything could survive the inferno.
Now that most of the flames have cooled, however, a closer look at the
nearly 500,000 acres within the containment lines reveals a landscape
typical of wildfi More than half either did not burn, or burned at
low intensity, leaving mature trees green, standing, and better off.
"When a fire burns, unlike what is seen in cartoons, not every tree is
killed, not every plant is killed, not every acre is burned to
nothing," said Eric Christiansen, fire behavior analyst on the elite
federal management team that stopped Biscuit from roaring into
Oregon's Illinois Valley.
While the fire put the 17,000 people in the valley on evacuation alert
as it burned five cabins and threatened others, in the long run it
maintained the well-being of individual species and the Siskiyou
National Forest as a whole.
"The worst thing that we could have is to be so enamored of our
forests that we eliminate the processes that change them," said Tom
Atzet, the U.S. Forest Service ecologist for southwestern Oregon.
Charred rings on old trees show fire returns to the area burned by
Biscuit every 70 years on average on the wetter west side and every 50
years on the drier east side, he said.
Just how that fire burns depends on the mix of weather, fuel and
terrain, Christiansen said. A windy, hot and dry day, combined with
steep ravines filled with heavy brush, fallen logs and tightly packed
trees, means flames twice the height of the timber and temperatures up
to 2,000 degrees.
But you would hardly notice the fire that comes through sparse timber
in flat rocky ground on a cool humid day with little wind. Even
patches of grass survive.
Both those scenarios can be found on Biscuit. As conditions changed
through each day and across the landscape, the fire intensity changed,
creating a mosaic of different results.
A satellite map for assessing rehabilitation efforts showed 19 percent
of the Biscuit fire area, about 95,000 acres, was unburned; 41
percent, about 205,000 acres, burned at low intensity, leaving green
trees standing and healthy while clearing out brush and small trees.
Only 15.7 percent, about 78,500 acres, burned at high intensity,
leaving little but ash and charcoal behind, and 22.6 percent, about
113,000 acres, burned at moderate intensity.
A good place to see the phenomenon is Babyfoot Lake. The fire burned
hot on steep slopes around the lake, but at the shore, where the water
cooled and humidified the air and a towering cliff cut the wind, half
the shoreline did not burn. Centuries-old pine and Douglas fir stand
as proof that fire can't fully flex its muscles here.
The same phenomenon served to spare much of the vegetation along the
Illinois River, home to salmon and steelhead, said hydrologist Jon
Brazier.
The Forest Service has yet to analyze just how past logging may have
affected fire behavior, an issue in the debate over how forests should
be managed to reduce vulnerability to wildfire.
But logging may not prove to be much of a factor. There has been
little cutting here since the 1980s, and the burn analysis of the 1987
Silver fire, which burned nearly 100,000 acres in the same area,
showed little difference between wilderness and areas that had been
logged.
At a cost of nearly $150 million, fighting Biscuit looks expensive.
But another way to look at it, Atzet said, would be to imagine
Congress appropriating $150 million to do prescribed burns restoring
fire to its proper place in the ecosystem.
"In an ecological sense, we just invested $150 million," Atzet said.
For example, the kalmiopsis bush, for which the Kalmiopsis Wilderness
where the fire started is named, depends on fire to kill the white fir
that competes with it for water, sunlight and nutrients, Atzet said.
The thin bark on white fir gives it less protection from fire than
ponderosa pine and Douglas fir, with thick bark. Surviving trees do
better than ever.
Dwarf mistletoe, a parasite that stunts Douglas fir, gets knocked back
by fire, said Ellen Goheen, a Forest Service plant pathologist.
"Mistletoe creates huge brooms in trees," she said. "Those brooms act
as wicks, taking ground fire to a crown fire."
Spaced out more widely by fire, trees are less susceptible to root
diseases, such as deadly Port Orford cedar root rot, which can be
passed root-to-root, she added. Heat kills the spores.
Darlingtonia - an insect-eating plant also known as cobra plant - will
likely expand their command of hillside bogs now that competing plants
on the edges have been killed, said Siskiyou ecologist Diane White.
Chemicals leaching out of the ashes can stimulate acorns to sprout
into oak trees, giving them a head start on pines and firs waiting for
the spring. Madrones will sprout from the bole - the underground
connection between the trunk and the roots - after the top of the tree
is killed.
Knobcone pines not only need the heat of fire to open their cones, but
their seeds love the mineral soil exposed when fire burns off the duff
- needles and bark built up over the years.
"It's important that part of the system be burned at high severity,"
said Atzet.
Siskiyou wildlife biologist Lee Webb said some animals surely got
trapped by the fire and died, but he never saw one in eight days of
walking the fire. None of the 250 species found on the Siskiyou have
been driven off by the fire, though some fared better than others.
Blue birds and olivesided flycatchers will flock to the burn, either
for insects to eat or nesting cavities. Deer and elk herds will likely
increase because the fire expanded meadows and sprouting trees and
brush will provide more food.
But the Northern spotted owl, a threatened species responsible for
practically shutting down logging on Northwest national forests, will
likely do worse.
The fate of the 47 pairs of spotted owls whose range falls within the
fire boundaries is not known yet, but satellite mapping indicates the
fire killed about 53,000 acres of old growth forest considered
suitable for owl habitat - one-seventh of the total owl habitat on the
forest, Webb said.
"Nothing is good or bad for wildlife," as a whole, Webb said. "We've
got 250 species out there, and there is a range."