 Living with wildfire, it's a fact of life here in the Blue Mountains and in much of the Intermountain West. Do we control it or does it control us? Well, thanks for joining us. Today we'll be examining the issue of wildfire in the Blue Mountains. We've invited several distinguished experts in the field to help us understand the issue in greater detail and to provide several different points of view. But first, some background. How do I shape the forest here in the Blue Mountains more than any other single factor? How does it benefit us? Can we control it or even manage it? Today we're going to examine how to live in a landscape dominated by wildfire. We'll describe the natural fire regime of the Blue Mountains, how we as humans have changed things, and offer some solutions to a growing problem. In times past, fire was a frequent visitor to the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon in Washington. The area is dry and has frequent lightning storms that often ignite wildfires. Consequently, current plant communities are dominated by species that are resistant to fire or even dependent on fire for seed germination, for example. Much of the pre-settlement landscape was dominated by ponderosa pine, a species that thrives on relatively dry sites and has thick bark that's resistant to fires. Stories of old fire scars and stumps and in living trees indicates that much of the Blue Mountains was formally characterized by low intensity fires that thinned stands of ponderosa pine and other fire resistant species, discouraged fur species, and kept fuels from accumulating. With the coming of settlers, the pressure to harvest trees for lumber at the greatest dollar return and to prevent loss of trees to wildfire changed the ecosystem dynamic. With the exclusion of fire, furs have come to dominate many sites once occupied by ponderosa pine. Thickets of these furs, killed by water stress, insects, or disease, has led to the accumulation of dangerous levels of fuels for wildfires. The result is conditions that are ripe for fires of much greater size and intensity than were routine just 100 years ago. To help us explore how fire affects us here in the Blue Mountains and how we can best live with it, we've invited four experts in the field. John Zimoniak is assistant fire staff and Aaron Fuels with the Willow Whitman National Forest. Bertie Udy is Northeast Oregon regional ecologist with the Nature Conservancy here in the Grand. He is assistant Timberlands manager for Boise Cascade Corporation, also here in the Grand. And John Buckman is Pendleton unit forester for the Oregon Department of Forestry. Welcome everybody. John Zimoniak, describe for us some of the recent fires that have received headlines in the Blue Mountains. Well, the most recent experience that we've had with large fires were of course in 1996 with the more localized summit and tower fires that burned large tracts of ground. They were very destructive wildfires and covered a great number of acres. And they, because of the landscape continuity, the fuels that were in the area and the lack of disturbance over the past, there were very heavy fuel loadings, the crown canopies were conducive to supporting a large crown fire which then moved across that landscape. And that actually became very dangerous. It was the most important thing we could do once it became a large fire was to get people out of the way and tell the weather change to where we could have some effect trying to stop the fire. And what's the result on the landscape when a fire like the tower fire goes through? When a tower type of fire, a summit fire, some of these larger destructive type fires move through, there's a whole range, a suite of changes that take place on the landscape. Some of them of course could be perceived as beneficial and some not. If you're in an area that's more back country such as that or wilderness, the negative effects from our standpoint are the potential loss of soil nutrients because so much of it's volatilized when it burns so intensely and you can also develop a water repellent soil that repels water over time. And really in a fire that covers 50,000 acres, you now reset the clock to zero over a large patch of ground instead of maybe areas that were 5,000 or 2,000 or 500 acres, it's a large area that now is all going to be the same. And it's like it's not as to continue the boom and bust cycle up there. So, but having fires like this always occurred? Certainly, certainly fires have burned for as long as there's been vegetation to consume by fire. Probably the primary difference now would be where we have conditions that fires of such intensity can cover so much ground so fast. That may be the difference, but even historically say 2 or 3,000 years ago any of these things could have been possible during many ice ages, those types of things. But our fear is when they get that large is the risk to private property, the risk to the firefighters and the damaging effects that people live in the area perceive this as not a good thing and the amount of money that it takes to suppress these kinds of fires. Can we manage our way out of this? In certain situations it's certainly possible to try to manage our way out of it or at least to begin to understand what needs to take place on the landscape. The federal land is just a mosaic of different administrative types of restrictions and or opportunities. In wilderness areas they're managed for a primitive experience we're certainly not able to nor do we want to go in and log those sorts of things or to manage the canopy. There are different opportunities there. First is somewhere here and say in the foothills of LeGrand or Baker District where we're down in a more managed situation where we have opportunities to extract some of these sorts of things. To get as much of a benefit out of it as society can stand at any given spot as well as to reduce the impacts from prescribed fire, lower intensities when we lower the fuel loadings by taking it out. Our chances of success are higher and I think the emissions we produce are lower because we've utilized some of this material and we've been able to then deal with fire more on our human terms versus a roll of the dice when a lightning storm comes. So things like mechanical thinning and removal and prescribed fires, those are tools that reduce the fuel loadings and so therefore at least theoretically reduce the intensity of wildfires when they come through. That's right. We're never going to completely stop fires. We have lightning and there's three components that certainly start fires. You have to have fuel, topography and weather. Well, we know we can't do much about the weather. We're not going to change the topography but we do have some opportunity to deal with fuels and fuel loading. So if we can utilize some of that material, move it, change it or at least change some of the structural characteristics of how much of a landscape is in the same condition. The thing we have to focus on is not just the fuels on the ground but these large fires that become a crown fire that are so dangerous is the canopy level, the continuity of that vertical fuel, how much of it? Is it take a two foot flame to get to the crown or a 10 foot flame to get to the crown? And once it gets there, is there enough fuels in those crowns then to continue that energy flow across the landscape? So these techniques are meant to reduce that whole process of the fire proceeding up into the canopy and becoming a crown fire moving across the landscape is the tools of thinning and prescribed fire. Can you very briefly explain prescribed fire and what that is? Well, prescribed fire for us, as it's generally applied, when we ignite the fire we do it under our terms with a burn plan we've developed. We've written an EA that explained to the public. We've asked for their input about where we're going to burn, when we might burn in possible outficks, outcomes of that burning. But we'll get both the smoke management forecast that talks about directions of the smoke, the potential for dispersal. And then we'll also get a weather forecast that'll talk to us about the types of weather we may expect, both the day before the burn, the day of the burn, and ensuing days after because once you light these larger burns off, you have to live with it for some days. And what you don't want is a big surprise out of the weather front. So it's humidity that's very important to us. We have to have the right humidity that controls the fine fuels. We need to know what the wind factors may or may not be. And then that's the ability of the atmosphere. How much of the smoke is going to mix out for us? Are these prescribed fires always ground fires? Are they always prescribed to be ground fires creeping along the ground? Those are the times, those are the ones we're really focusing on right now, is that we've got a long road with this program. And so to be successful, we need to treat the areas we'll be most successful with, which is a ground fire. We want our flame lengths to be somewhere in that two to four foot elevation, somewhere that we can control with small strips that we ignite, that move through, and then we'll light some more strips. I think that as a general rule in this part of the world, we're some years away from us talking about standard placing type fires. I think that at some point someone may have to do that to talk about these higher elevation stands that really they only burn one way. And that boom and bust is that they burn very intensely when they do burn, or they don't burn at all. And they're going to be a challenge for folks. And frankly, I don't think we're funded enough for that type of work. And it just needs to be out there ways in the future for something to take care of. And in these higher elevations, they may take care of themselves over time. And if we can treat enough of the areas that are adjacent to those things, we may lower the risk for those properties that are adjacent. So your prescribed fire program right now really only mimics a lower elevation, ponderous, a pine type that tended to experience these high frequency, low intensity. That's right. That's where we think we're most out of balance in the sequence. If we're talking about fire and fire effects, the low and mid elevations say 5,000 feet and below, those are the stands that have gone the longest without a repeated small, low intensity disturbance like fire to move and release the nutrients to generate and stimulate those organisms that are there that seem to respond with fire and have evolved with fire. Okay, let's talk just a little about smoke. Where there's fire, there's smoke. What kind of smoke problems are presented when you're using prescribed fire? And compare those to the kind we have with wildfire. The prescribed fire smoke, as I mentioned earlier, we get a smoke management forecast where we try to determine which direction the column is going to go. Where's that smoke going to end up? And how readily will it disperse? The difference is, of course, between wildfire and prescribed fire is a wildfire smoke like in Tower Summit, where you may loft a column 45 to 60,000 feet into the atmosphere. It'll go great distances. We may put it into another state, in fact. The prescribed fire, unfortunately, or fortunately, but prescribed fire is more of a local phenomenon. It will impact the local communities, the valleys here, because it's of a lower intensity. We don't get the column to loft up and out into, say, Idaho or Montana into someone else's neighborhood. Our solution is going to be local-based. And those folks that are going to have to tolerate and understand what we're doing is also local-based. And that smoke is going to stay with us. As you said, there just is no silver bullet. When you have combustion, you make smoke. Are there regulatory agencies you've got to deal with with the smoke? Yes. We work very closely with Oregon Department of Forestry and the smoke management forecast that we obtain daily from Salem. And we also register all of our burns ahead of time. We plan and know how much we're going to burn, when we're going to burn, so that they can factor that in across the landscape so that if someone's burning in John Day, how will that affect someone in LeGrand? If someone's burning over in Yuccaia, will that may possibly affect someone in Baker? And it's a fairly complex puzzle to try to match this up and then match it with the weather and the forecast to see what's not only today, but what may it be three days from now. Now, when we compare the two different fuel reduction techniques, the prescribed fire that you've just described and the mechanical thinning and removal, how do you decide which method to use under which circumstances? Is this a simple decision? It's part art and part science. It does involve an interdisciplinary team of team of biologists, wildlife biologists, fisheries biologists, and foresters on the ground and fire specialists that look at different opportunities on a particular acre. What types of treatment may be most successful? And we also then have to balance in terms of is it managed for wilderness values? Is it managed for back country? Or is it around Phillips Lake? That's high recreation density. So you have to bend all that sort of thing in there and then a line officer or manager has to make a decision that this is the best way to treat this today and deal with it from that perspective. Does the value of the stems that you want to remove have anything to do with it? Absolutely. I mean, you have to look at what the value and what the market is to try to take as much out and utilize it as possible. The other point with that is is that because of the Clean Air Act and our agreement with Department of Environmental Quality here in the state of Oregon is we've said that we'll use the best available control technology just as any industry does in terms of trying to manage their emissions. And so that if we have the opportunity to try to utilize the biomass, the Department of Environmental Quality would ask us to try to do that. Use what you can to reduce the emissions that may come and expose the public in these communities to that kind of unhealthy effects of smoke. Thanks, John. Let me turn that to you now, Mr. Buckman. It's pretty clear that the federal agency's role is to manage fuel and fires on federal lands. What's the role of Oregon Department of Forestry regarding wildfires? Jim, the Oregon Department of Forestry is responsible for providing fire protection to about 16 million acres in Oregon. In northeast Oregon, that's about 1.6 million acres. Our customers, in general terms, are non-federal forest and rangeland owners within our protection districts. These landowners pay an annual assessment to the Department of Forestry to provide for fire protection. In simple terms, you could view our roles with wildfires, such as a local fire department inside a city. We are the fire protection for these forest landowners. So with that in mind, our customers, these landowners, generally are adverse to the risk associated with fires. They also, in general terms, have a desire to make profits from their forest lands, forest and rangelands. So it's a role or the mission of the Department of Forestry to effectively and efficiently suppress fires that are destructive on private lands. So your major role with this issue is fire suppression. That's correct. OK, we heard that field reduction strategies are recognized as very important for management of the fire issue on federal lands. The privately held lands have the same kind of fuels problem? With a point that I just made, generally speaking, these non-federal landowners have a desire to make profits from their lands. That can either be grazing, or in the case of forest lands, it can be with the reclaiming assets from their lands. So with that in mind, most private lands have been intensively managed for the last 20 or 30 years. In the early 90s, we had some very good log prices and chip prices. That coincided with quite a bit of mortality from some of the insect and diseases that visit our forests in Northeast Oregon. Many of these forest lands have been salvaged. So a lot of the fuels that, if we could contrast it with the national forest system that are available there, had been removed from the private lands. So in general terms, we don't have the extensive fuel loading problems that our neighbors do. Would these lands, in some way, break up the fuel continuity on federal lands? Or what's the spatial distribution of those lands? And again, in general terms, the non-federal lands tend to be lower elevation. And from my perspective, they are not that well intermixed. They are more on the fringes of the forest. So we aren't breaking up vast acreages of national forest lands. OK, but let me ask you, maybe it's a rhetorical question at this point, because there isn't as big a fuel problem. But what would be your average landowner's response to being offered these two different tools? Do you have some of your customers that would be supportive of the prescribed fire? Our department, with our various employees, has quite a bit of contact with non-federal landowners. When we're asked this question in the field, we first go ask the landowner, what are their objectives? And they say they can be a whole variety of objectives. We have state, fish and wildlife management areas. Their objectives are certainly going to be different than some industrial landowners or some of the larger non-industrial landowners. Generally, they say they want a healthy forest. They want viable, vigorous, healthy trees. They want a nice grass crop out there. We would go through some of the items that John talked about about how do we reach that objective. I think we're going to talk about thinning and having a well-spaced forest. And we're going to look at mechanical means or suggest mechanical means that, under the right log prices, are revenue-producing options, as opposed to using some prescribed fire. Certainly, there are some landowners that do want to do some burning. From my perspective, burning is not a panacea. Prescribed fire is not necessarily a panacea. It is certainly a tool in the bag of that private landowner should consider. But we'd also like to see him consider some other options. If a private landowner wanted to consider prescribed fire, how would they accomplish that? You're getting into a little bit of the intricacies of state law. When a private landowner wants to burn, certainly our agency will work cooperatively with these landowners. But one of the things we have to explain to them is the potential liability associated with using fire on private lands. Historically, most prescribed fire or slash disposal fire was done late in the fall. We had all winter for the fires to go out. Generally speaking, landowners could do that with little risk or little exposure to the risk. When we start to get into some of the prescribed fire, longer duration fires, exposure to changing weather conditions, a landowner may incur some fire suppression, fire management problems. In the state of Oregon, we do have some liabilities that are assigned to the landowner if they use fire and the fire escapes their planned area. It's something we would talk to them about ahead of time. So there is a legal problem here and a liability problem that could really be an impediment? I wouldn't call it an impediment. I'd call it something that would have to be considered in the process. Our agency has recognized what our liability laws say regarding private land burning. There is some efforts to address these issues on private lands. There's some discussion at our staff level of how to work with these landowners to minimize their exposure, possibly some low-cost insurance, term insurance, essentially, while they do these burns. So we're trying to address that. I just wanted to say that ODF, Oregon Department of Forestry, has been a really good cooperator and partner on our Willamette Valley Westside burns on nature concerns the lands. We've worked with you guys a lot. Great. So there's some experience here that we can go on. We're learning as we go. And Jim, we have burned across a couple of private pieces, small places where it's been beneficial to do so. The thing you have to understand about fire is it doesn't respect private land boundaries. Everybody becomes equal once it starts to burn. And so we're able to develop partnerships with a cooperative landowner and develop some MOUs. And I think we may see more of that in the future so that we treat across these landownership patterns to where we have more effect to reducing the chances of a large fire, wiping out their losses, which is what they're most concerned about. OK. Thanks, John. I think we'll turn now to Tom Goodall. As a representative of a private company with large land holdings here in the blues, what is your policy toward welfare? Jim, as land managers for a large publicly held corporation, our foresters have a trust responsibility, first and foremost, to our shareholders. And secondarily, a social responsibility to the public to professionally manage our forests to protect them from catastrophic loss due to wildfire, insects, and disease. When wildfires threaten our lands, we take aggressive, immediate action to suppress fires. We're very proud of the fact that over the last decade, less than 1,000 acres of our ownership, or less than 1%, has burned, with the largest fire, being about 100 acres. When fires do burn on our lands, generally they are low to moderate intensity fires due to the way that we've managed our lands. Do you have the horsepower to fight your own fires? No, we sure don't. Really, the success of our fire program is due in large part to the Oregon Department of Forestry, our logging contractors, and I think most importantly, to our long-term strategy to promote and maintain forest health resiliency and productivity. So by that, you mean stocking density control, fuel reduction measures? That's exactly right. Pre-commercial thinning, commercial thinning, selective cutting, all of these kinds of programs to promote the right kind of stand structures that help to avert catastrophic fire, or the impacts of catastrophic fire. Removing fuel ladders, removing excess fuels, all of these are programs that we employ. Okay, now your lands are setting up there north of Elgin in that area there. There's a fairly large track. Are your lands interspersed with federal lands or with any other kind of lands that would allow a breakup of continuity? To some extent, but I think to John's point, our lands are primarily on the fringe of the federal ownership. We are our neighbors to federal lands and to other private landowners. Part of our program is to, certainly is to maintain our lands in a condition so that when fires, adjacent fires on neighboring lands, approach that basically, that we can sustain minimum damage when these fires come over on our lands. Okay, now you mentioned that good force health conditions in your previous comment. In the past, low intensity fires maintained fuel at low levels, thus creating a situation in which fires sort of crept along the ground. Do you think that thinning and removal as a method mimics fire in terms of its ecosystem effects? Yeah, we've been very satisfied with our program and we've got a number of growth plots across our land that we monitor, continually monitor growth, productivity and really the dynamics that are happening on our forest lands. And we're very pleased with our programs. We think that our good stewardship practices and our practices of applying civil culture to avert catastrophic damage of paid off well force. Okay, so in terms, you mentioned the staying growth in terms of the tree vigor and the speed at which they're growing, their productivity, you feel as though your program is working well. The program is really focused on increasing vigor and resiliency. When stands are healthy, vigorous, they are more resilient to insects and disease and catastrophic fire. Our program looks at thinning trees so that when fires do come onto our land, there is space between the crowns for the heat to escape. The fuel ladders are basically non-existent, these sorts of things. So the fire basically stays on the ground and behaves and really is more beneficial. Would you generally, would you say then that good tree health means good ecosystem health? Would you go so far as to say that? I think that really is at the heart of our success that really pushing to promote individual tree vigor and subsequently stand health is an approach, a more ecosystem type of approach, I think, or a more diverse approach to promoting overall forest health. Okay, thanks Tom. Now I'll turn to you finally, Verda Yudi. What is the philosophy of the Nature Conservancy with respects to the fuel issue and the wildfire issue? Well in general, the Nature Conservancy has a let burn policy on our lands I say in general because we don't wanna have catastrophic fires and we're gonna manage our lands to reduce catastrophic fires and usually that means entering into a prescribed burn program to reduce some of those fuels. We monitor our fuels and if we feel like we've got a problem, we're going to go in and do some prescribed fire. And in one case, our fuel loads are so high that we can't go into a prescribed fire program right away. And so we are doing some thinning and removal as a first step to eventually be able to reintroduce fire again in its natural fire frequencies. And what I mean is not a stand replacement fire but I think I read like 80% of the fires in the Blue Mountains used to be surface or under story burns. And that's what we'd like to have our land ready to actually if we had a wildfire that it would just be we could reduce the fuels to a point where it would just be a surface fire. But your emphasis and your focus on prescribed fire and that implies the philosophy of maintaining sort of natural ecological variables in your system. And natural fire frequencies. I think that that thinning and removal is fine for the over story species but we're not just managing for the trees. We're managing for everything out there and a lot of those under story species need fire like seanothus and lupin, a lot of those seeds need fire to in order to germinate. And so we want the fire to go through so it allows all the species in the Blue Mountains as elsewhere have adapted different responses to fire. Now isn't seanothus a nitrogen fixed in legumes? Aren't they nitrogen fixing species? So if we encourage them, we build up the nitrogen levels in the soil. Yeah and I think fire is important for nutrient cycling too. And so we would like to have fires burn on our property but we do realize that we don't want a catastrophic fire. And so we have to manage. So your objectives really in terms of not wanting catastrophic fire are pretty much identical to everybody else's. But the means to get there is a bit different. It's more focused on ecological values. Would you say that was a fair comment? I think that's true. And now with the thinning and removal, you mentioned this one project on your preserve there in the mill fork. I'm assuming that's where that is. And you would use thinning and removal to prepare for prescribed fire. What are you gonna do with that product? Well, we're hoping that that product could be sold and that hopefully it would pay for the thinning and removal and we kind of see it as a forest restoration project. And so we would hope that we could sell some of that and have it pay for the thinning operation. So you're not adverse to the economics of it. You're just, you feel as though that's not an emphasis. That's a means to an end. To a healthy forest is the objective. If we can't produce, we have to raise the money somehow and it would be really nice if we could get a return for what we take out. Otherwise we wouldn't have to work through other channels to try to raise the money in order to do the project. Okay. I ask you the same question I asked Tom. Are you able to accomplish prescribed fire here in the blues on your own? No, we don't have the infrastructure. And as I mentioned, we've worked with ODF and the BLM actually in a lot of places on one preserve on the Middle Fork. We worked with the Forest Service. It was kind of, they were gonna do a prescribed fire and it was easier for them to put their fire line kind of on our property. So they actually came to us and said, could we burn some of your lands? And we said, oh yes. And then we were able to give them some manpower as well as monitoring the results of the fire. And that worked out really well. And actually that area in the prescribed fire was in the summit fire. And although most of the forest on the federal land is toast, on our lands we came out pretty well and we only have about 10% of what burned was stand replacement on our lands. And it was pretty much an under burn. In fact, it didn't take a nut out. So you'd attribute the success that the lower intensity fire, you'd attribute that primarily to the fuel reduction. Well, I don't know if we can say it's totally because of the prescribed fire. The fire came down on us a couple days later after the really intense weather conditions we had. So that it may be due to cooler temperatures as well. But I really think that it did help. And some effect. Yeah. Let's back away from your land holdings and think about the blues as a whole. What is your view about letting nature take your course on the big scale, allowing wildfires to burn as they will? What's your view in general about that? Well, I don't think that all the land needs to be managed as a nature conservancy would do it. I think that man has needs and we need timber and in some places we're gonna have to harvest it. So although I'd like to see fire prescribed fire play a larger role in the blues, I'm not prescribing that everybody managed their land like the nature conservancy does. But you think that nature should have a role in this as well as managers, forest managers. I think that if we had more prescribed fire and more kind of less intense fires, we wouldn't be spending all this money to put out large fires and that we could actually do some better forest restoration work in the blues. Okay, point I'd like to make though, Jim, in terms of if you think about how long human activity has been here in the Blue Mountains, say for the last 80 to 100 years with early sheep grazing, cattle grazing, and timber harvest and eroding in homes, is that we've been a player in this ecosystem for long enough now that the option of just standing back and saying, no, we're not gonna intercede or be part of it anymore. I'm not sure that's an option. Because of our early involvement, I think we need to stay connected. We may need to adjust what we're doing, but we do need to stay involved with the process. Now, you mentioned the 80 to 100 years, that's the European settler and European settlers came. Prior to that, the Native Americans were here and they were conducting activities that were more in accordance perhaps with the fire regime? Well, they certainly didn't need to worry about how to the same level as you would if you lived in a woodhouse, what the fire pattern may be. They didn't have sawmills to worry about producing. They didn't have shareholders to worry about what may happen to the quarterly profits. So their effects with fire, I believe they at least learned how to live with fire and we over the last 80 years spent an awful lot of time trying to learn how to live and exclude all fire. And so we have this fuel, fuels build up in these landscape conditions now that don't make no action a very good alternative in most areas. Certainly in wilderness, our options are different, but in the general landscape of the blues, I think we do need to stay connected. Okay, John, let me just follow that up just a bit here. The risk factor, in fact, the people are living here in the midst of this fire regime. We have significant parts of the landscape burned periodically and in most cases, unpredictably, we have cities out here, structures of various kinds. We have developed impressive technology for dealing with wildfires, for suppressing them once they get going and for reducing fuels. Yet people, yet there's still a risk and yet people still want to build homes right along the urban forest interface. Okay, how does this jive with your, what happens to your firefighting capabilities and priorities when people do that? Well, when a fire comes and the fire comes to the Blue Mountains in terms of episodes, they come in these thunderstorms that may ignite hundreds of fires at one time in one series of storms. And so you can quickly deplete your suppression response capabilities. So we set priorities, we have to go through a priority setting phase and always, the first priority is protection of life and property. We can always rebuild on them for us, but recovering life and to deal with property loss someone's home is a pretty devastating experience. And so we'll set the priorities and go to those things. Now, if our suppression resources have been depleted because we're being pulled off to deal with private land issues, we got distance to private land or a home, or we may have some people at risk, then we're gonna have to leave other areas, the higher elevation, the places that are not as, as pose as much risk to society and to the communities as these other places. So we'll work very closely with John and the ODF, you know, ODF on these types of issues. From my standpoint, I think that the private landowner needs to take more responsibility for their own property when they move into these environments, understand you moved into a fire environment, and that you need to take actions to protect and reduce your risk profile yourself. The American people all pay for a federal firefighting force and it's one of the best firefighting forces in the world and the amount of money and the organizational aspects that if you look at what type of organization can be in the Blue Mountains within 48 hours of a fire episode, it's nothing short of impressive, but it costs us a lot of money to do that. If they take their own responsibility to reduce their risk, then I think they can help us that way. If you look at an elk hunter who comes every 15 years from Chicago and he likes to go to a Catherine Creek meadow as possibly a hunter, go somewhere else. And we have to pull off from that to go to a local fire that's threatening someone else. Now the person from Chicago paid the same amount of money as someone from this local emblazor alginary that paid. So it's a federal tax dollar, but we understand living in this community, we have a responsibility to these people. They're here, they're the ones who know what the most and will help to help us work on these solutions. Mr. Buckman, what do you recommend to private landowners then? Do you have programs that you try to put out to people who live in that interface? Yes, we do. I would also echo John's comments there is personal responsibility needs to be taken by people that live in forest environments. In the business we talk about defensible spaces around homes or dwellings out in the forest. That phrase implies someone may be there to help defend that home. In reality, when some of these episodes that John was referring to break out, maybe a concept of a survivable home is a better concept. So with that, I would discuss fuel-free areas around the home, ladder fuels on trees should be limbed up, clearing around the barn and the dwellings should be cleared up. Access to these homes should be such that if we do have engines or fire apparatus that is available that could easily get in and get out, firefighter safety is of utmost importance in these situations. So that has to be considered. So we do have programs, there's some state laws on citing new dwellings in forests. We welcome the opportunity to talk to landowners about how they can make their homes fire safe, minimize their exposure to fire, and we have some crews in all of our offices in Northeast Oregon that would find time to meet with these landowners. And then on the other question of your priorities in terms of when fires break out, what is your, how does your priority compare with? Our priorities are a little different. They are life first and forest resource second and private property would be third. In reality, that is an on the ground call. There are some lines of thought that suggests that a house, if a house caught fire, it would be just like a big slash pile catching fire. So keeping a fire out of those that abundance of fuel is also good for the fighting fire effort. Okay, thanks, John. And back to you, Mr. Zimoniak, the financial consequences of increasing people increasingly living in that urban forest interface. Are they significant? Yeah, they're certainly significant that you, if you don't deal with the landscape that surrounds your property like John just described, you place yourself and your possessions at risk and maybe your investment from your timber, if you don't follow the prescriptions, the objectives in terms of how to deal with your fuel loading. Okay, but how about the fire suppression costs? Well, they go out, the fire suppression costs over the past 20 years have been just skyrocketing upwards. Has Congress always responded favorably? Congress has continued to fund this. I think the American people take care of themselves. They respond to a crisis. And just as the Midwest has built a series of dykes and tried to control flooding, the Congress has supported the firefighting organization in the West. It's a very well-funded organization. And I think what the Congress is asking now is where do you see this thing starting to stop? It continues to go up. And that's where our current direction is coming from Congress and from the administration and leaders on both houses of Congress is to begin some proactive treatments. What else can we do besides more air tankers, more engines, more people? And I think that that's that proactive response of why this dialogue's taking place about trying to deal with landscape fuels and to get an increase of funding to be able to deal with that. So in the future, you'll start to see some real changes that will allow Whitman just a few years ago was only trying to prescribe burn just a few thousand acres. In the future, for instance, in 1998, we're looking at around 13,000 acres with the same kind of influences and increases on the Umatilla National Forest and the Mount Huron National Forest. So that collectively the Forest Service in the Blue Mountains is looking at somewhere around 60,000 acres just this year. And to see what we can sustain, what can we do over time? Every year won't be the same. It depends on certain weather patterns. Some years we may not burn anything like 94. If it's dry enough, we don't have a good prescription, we're not going to burn. But the idea here is that we certainly have to start to do some things to lower the amount of money we're spending and the risk to both the public and to our firefighters in terms of these wildfires. And we've learned that in 1994 when we had some fatalities. And just give me the figure of comparison of costs per acre between fire suppression and prescribed fire, for example. Our large fire cost per acre has been running somewhere between $600 and $1,000 an acre to suppress a wildfire. And that just factors in the suppression costs, air tankers, the crews. That doesn't have anything to do with the rehabilitation costs, the long-term effects about loss of wildlife values or habitat values or timber values. So in our prescribed burning is somewhere between $50 and $80 an acre. And those treatments, you have to figure how long will that be effective? And I think most of our prescribed burning will be effective somewhere between 10 and 30 years in these stands. And so you have to amortize that factor in there. But it seems to be a wise investment. So it's about a 10th the cost. And those are just direct costs, not to... You have to factor in some of the things that Bertha talked about, about nutrient cycling and those types of positive effects of using fire where it's appropriate. Okay, thanks. Back to you, Mr. Buckman. I'm going to wind this up. Kind of a rhetorical question here. From your perspective at the ODF as a professional, what is your sense of the future in terms of people continuing to live as they have in the last 100 years here in the blues in the midst of this dynamic fire regime? As we've discussed here today, from the private forest land perspective, I mean, our department's gonna encourage managing forest stands to meet your objectives. And again, dealing with our private land owners, they're gonna, well-spaced forest, the healthy forest are gonna minimize their exposure to some of these wildfire situations. For people living in the forest, you know, what we talked about on maintaining a fire safe home site would be the direction that those people should follow. And you think with these measures, we can deal with it pretty well. We don't see a dark cloud looming on the horizon. I think certainly the rural interface issues pose a dark cloud, so to speak, as far as the forest land issues, you know, the dark cloud may have already passed. With the insect and diseases episodes we had in the late 80s and early 90s, much of the forest lands have been dealt with or managed either by default or through active management. So with the exception of that interface issues and people living on forest fringes, much like the edge of town here, I think we're, we can continue to live as we have been. Brenda. Same question. I hope with the administration's looking at prevention now and actually putting dollars into prescribed burning or thinning or how we're going to reduce these fields in the forest that we'll be able to reduce the catastrophic fire in the blues. And people will, as I say, live here. Maybe we'll be doing a little different jobs in the forest but we'll be here. Okay. John. I think that when you're dealing with forestry issues what I would ask people is to try to have a longer view that there are no quick fixes to any of this on the scale of the federal land system out there. There, it took us a long time to get here and certainly as everyone's heard it's going to take a long time to get out of this thing in that if people will work with us, cooperate with us and try to understand the objectives of the work that when we're burning in the spring and we're burning in the fall that the work is just not going to be over in one year or two years or five years and that this is a long-term project but while we're continuing to work people will come and evaluate what we're doing, tell us what they like and they don't like and we're going to make some adjustments along the way with this whole program but it is going to be a long-term program and what we need to do is have enough places out there so that when we have places, fires like summit I can have someone like Bird is saying, yeah, I think that prescribed burning you did a few years ago may have had some effect. That's what we need to be able to see. Okay, and Tom? I think I'm encouraged by what I'm hearing. I think that the key or the foundation of what I've heard here today is that we need to take a proactive approach, proactive approach as opposed to where we've been in the past, which is reactive approach. To John's point, these forest conditions didn't happen overnight, but they keep getting more and more severe in terms of risk, in terms of stand density and in terms of fuel loading. I think that what is needed and what we're clear to seeing the science indicating is that we need an aggressive active management approach to avert the risk and to bring these stands into more of the historical regime that they were in so that fire plays a more natural role. I think that in terms of resource losses and the cost of suppressing these fires, that money should be shifted over to the proactive approach to avert and vert catastrophes, and basically to manage these stands so that when fire does intercept forest conditions, that basically they play a more natural role. Okay, and you mean that methods such as prescribed fire and mechanical thinning, whatever we have in our toolbox? Personally, I feel that we need to lean pretty heavy on fuel reduction measures before we introduce fire, looking at the conditions of the forest or the blue mountains. I think it's far too risky to introduce prescribed fire without taking measures to make sure that they're going to burn within prescription and get the desired results. Okay. Well, thanks, Tom, and thanks to all the rest of you for coming out today. As we've seen, there are many faces of fire. As a dominant shaper of our landscape, fire is with us for the long run. It is to our benefit to continue to learn how best to live with wildfire. As manager of the Institute, I want to thank you for watching Living with Wildfire, one of the many educational programs put on by the Blue Mountain Natural Resources Institute. One of our goals is to serve as a neutral forum for natural resources discussion. 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