By George Watson
San Bernardino County Sun
Copyright 2007 MediaNews Group, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Professor Richard Minnich’s passion for the ecology of fire burns as hot as the blazes that have torched the region in recent years.
Working from his office at UC Riverside, Minnich, a fire ecologist, has been a leading advocate against fire suppression tactics.
His reasoning? The forests need to burn, as they have since the beginning of time. Fire suppression has led to unhealthy forests that get hit extra hard during droughts. That enabled bark beetles to kill millions of trees in the San Bernardinos earlier this decade, turning the forests into what Minnich described as “a ticking time bomb.”
With memories of the devastating Old Fire of 2003 and last year’s deadly
Esperanza Fire that killed five firefighters, The Sun sat down with Minnich last week at his office. As the region continues heading toward the driest on record, he was asked to assess the status of the wildfire danger as the heart of fire season approaches.
Question: So, how does the wildfire danger look this year?
Answer: The answer depends on the vegetation. Let’s start out with the easiest one. It’s called grassland at the bottom of the mountain.
The dried grass on the hills is doing something that I have never seen before. It’s actually breaking down ... It’s exposing bare soil now. Usually in most years, before the grass dries out, there is another crop of new grass the following year. But now we are going two years in without anything coming up.
The fire hazard in the hills is abnormally low.
In the chaparral and the forests, you’re looking at a cumulative growth. The areas that have burned the most recently have the least hazard.
So, right now ... if you go from Santa Ana River and west of Cajon Pass, the fire hazard is nil because it burned in ’03. It’s three-year-old brush, and nothing is going to carry there for another 20 years - you don’t have a problem.
From Santa Ana River east, you’ve got a big problem because nearly all of those stands of chaparral, between there, through Oak Glen is 60 to 120 years old, and is explosive and it can blow out any time.
Q: So, the communities of Lake Arrowhead and the Big Bear Valley should feel safer now than in past years?
A: They should feel better if the fire ... originates in chaparral, yes. If the fire originates in forest, no, because these brush fires of ’03 did not enter much of the forest. It was mainly chaparral all the way through, and the exceptions are the Cedar Glen area east of Arrowhead ... and west of Crestline and down to Silverwood. In those two strips there is nothing left, really, and not much of a fire hazard, but Arrowhead dodged the bullet.
Arrowhead is still a trash forest, bottom line.
Q: And that means?
A: It’s too dense. There is too much in growth of young trees... . If you count all the trees, they are probably 10 times too dense, and the fuel hazard is nothing less than extraordinary, especially in Arrowhead and toward Running Springs, less so in Big Bear because the trees grow slowly. It doesn’t rain as much there.
Idyllwild is like Arrowhead. It’s a mess, too.
Q: How often should chaparral burn?
A: Two to three times per century, in any given spot. So it ranges from 30 to 50, 60 years.
Q: How would you compare the drought conditions now, versus this time in 2002?
A: OK, everybody is going to draw comparisons between this year and ’02. They are the two driest years on record. And, there is a big difference here though. ’02 was the fourth year of drought, and ... everything was severely desiccated and trees died off at phenomenal rates beginning that year, and it had nothing to do with insects. They just died of lack of water.
‘07 is the driest year we’ve ever had, but, it’s the first dry year. ’05, we were drowned. It rained 100 inches in parts of the San Bernardino Mountains, 60 to 70 inches in Idyllwild. Whatever vestige of drought that was before that is gone. Ground zero begins after that year, and last ’05-'06 was below normal, but it wasn’t all that dry of a year. So we are in our first dry year and secondly we have a lot of water from ’05 still in the ground, deep in the bedrock, and the trees are using that.
And I am not seeing any stress in the trees like we had in ’02.
Q: So, you still believe fire is a necessary part of the forest’s ecology?
A: The forest needs to burn with regularity about the same rate as the chaparral, so two or three times per century, and this is based on my research in Baja, Mexico, where there is still free-running fire. They don’t bother putting them out. The forests are open, the fires kill the branches halfway up the trees, they look like umbrellas, and you can look underneath the trees. It’s a beautiful, park-like forest.
Q: The difference in tactics being there are people here?
A: No, I’ll say that differently. The difference is there has been no fires in these landscapes, and there has been on the Mexican side. But you cannot use people and the landscape as a rationale to justify fire suppression because it assumes that suppression actually influences the course of the fires. Once a major fire takes place, it has no effect. All we did was postpone the fires, and we’ve allowed massive regeneration of young trees to fill in the forest and make them as thick as a brick. When they are going to burn, they are really going to burn badly, as they did in ’03.
Q: What should be done about the bark beetle?
A: Honestly, the only way you control bark-beetle attack is by thinning the forest out. Don’t go after the insects. The insects have been with these trees for millions and millions of years, and they reproduce with the trees. That’s the way it works.
Open forests means that trees have less competition for moisture and nutrients. They stay healthy. As long as they are healthy the insects can’t go through reproductive cycles.
Q: What do you hope the firefighting community learned from the Esperanza Fire?
A: I think we need to be more relaxed about it, meaning, first of all, the firefighting community, in advance, rates the structures as defensible or not defensible. And the structure that this tragedy took place, was one that really wasn’t defensible. That’s the sad part of it.
The area that was involved in Esperanza, the stands that burned, a lot of them previously burned in 1974, about 32 years before that, and that’s actually rather young chaparral. The fire, even in the Santa Ana wind, was kind of struggling getting through that. ... It managed to consume it. But within the (Esperanza) fire, there were islands of unburned vegetation, which were far older than 32 years, and this structure was in it. The chaparral was at least twice as old ... so it resulted in much more intense fire behavior, in that small area, and that’s where these people went into.
Unfortunately, data, previous fire history, the forest service does not record fire islands. They really need to start inventorying much more detail about individual fires, not just the limits but the islands within them because that still influences the up and coming fires of the future.
We need to be more proactive with burning. If we had a brush fire in the mountains today, it would be creeping along at slow rates. That’s what we need in these landscapes. Not these wind driven, raging Santa Ana fires, like the Esperanza and virtually every other major fire we have had in recent decades.
The 2003 event is a classic - it was a worst-possible- case scenario weather condition, and you wonder why it’s always happening like that, and that’s because of suppression, not of these big fires, but of the little ones. It’s easy to put them out in good weather so the few that get away are in the worst weather.