Hayman Fire report offers few surprises, more insight

By Bob Berwyn

Long before pioneers congregated along the banks of Cherry Creek to establish the nucleus of what is now downtown Denver, wildfires had burned across Colorado’s mountains and forests. Nevertheless, last summer’s Hayman blaze hit too close to home for many Front Range residents when plumes of smoke and ash drifted downwind into backyards and ball fields across the region.

As devastating as it was for people whose homes were destroyed, the fire also set the stage for renewal and growth. While many news reports emphasized the widespread destruction caused by the Hayman fire, the blaze only burned at a high intensity in about a third of the total area. The flames completely missed some areas within the perimeter of the fire. They burned moderately or lightly in other areas, and this helped to clear away dead undergrowth and make room for new seedlings and sprouts.

All of Colorado’s varied forests, including ma-jes-tic stands of high-alpine spruce and fir; mid-elevation lodgepole, aspen, and ponderosa; and the piñon-juniper stands of the Southwest evolved together with fire, independent of human activity. Fires are an integral part of the landscape.

“Forests need fire to live,” said U.S. Forest Service researcher Mark Finney, one of the leaders of a multi-agency, multi-disciplinary team assigned to study the Hayman Fire. Finney, whose specialty is fire behavior and fire suppression, noted he didn’t find anything particularly unusual about the Hayman Fire, except, perhaps, its severity. Finney said researchers were able to trace the region’s fire history back about seven or eight centuries.

“There was nothing we hadn’t seen other times and in other places,” he said, explaining that such fires will likely recur in the southern Rockies, probably sooner than later. “The threat will be very high. We have good data on fire history in Colorado and New Mexico, and we will have more Hayman-type fires, no question about it,” Finney said.

Finney’s team’s findings were only part of a vast trove of information researchers garnered from their intensive study of the Hayman Fire and its aftermath. A panel of forest ecologists, fire experts, and land managers was formed at the request of Congressman Mark Udall (D-Boulder) last June to identify potential wildfire threats and examine options for reducing the intensity of Hayman-like fires. The panel was also charged with looking at factors, including weather conditions, that could have contributed to the intensity of the fire. Researchers also tried to determine the effects of the fire on previously burned areas and patches of forest where land managers had conducted prescribed burns and other fuel reduction projects.

Udall said lessons learned from the Hayman fire are essential to an understanding of how to reduce fire danger and restore forest conditions. “We should place a high priority on reducing the risk of catastrophic fires to communities in the wildland-urban interface as we work to restore the natural, beneficial role of fire in forest ecosystems. The Hayman fire can be a case study in how we achieve that goal,” he said.

Researchers released a draft report a few months ago and would like to maintain a separation between their scientific findings and the political debate over forest management. However, it’s almost impossible to discuss the panel’s findings without addressing some of the political ramifications. That’s because the federal government is considering several forest management proposals, including the Bush administration’s “Healthy Forests” initiative and two alternate measures aimed at mitigating wildfire danger advanced by Udall and Congressman Scott McInnis (R-Grand Junction).

All the proposals recognize the need for immediate action in the “Red Zone” where residential areas sprawl into the fringes of flammable forests. Federal and state land managers, as well as private property owners, agree that tinder-dry fuels must be removed from  these areas and that structures should be surrounded by non-flammable zones.

Beyond that basic agreement, there are widely divergent viewpoints. Some politicians, generally Republicans, advocate aggressive forest management across wide areas of the landscape that involves logging, or, as it’s euphemistically called, “mechanical thinning.” They claim the draft Hayman report supports their proposal, showing that such treatments can help protect communities and watersheds from wildfire hazards.

Most conservation and land agency watchdog groups are leery and afraid those plans will result in widespread logging at the expense of wildlife habitat and ecosystem health. Instead, the environmental community generally supports proposals such as Udall’s Forest Restoration and Fire Risk Reduction Act, which would establish guidelines for forest restoration and fuel reduction projects, as well as prohibit thinning certain sensitive areas. It also includes provisions to protect old growth and large trees. Udall’s bill focuses on the Red Zone and also cuts red tape for priority projects.

Most of the scientists involved in the Hayman study who were interviewed for this story stated there is no compelling evidence that thinning in the area stopped the fire, though it may have slowed it and diminished its intensity in some areas. However, they also agree that land managers should have all possible tools at their disposal.

Given that large fires like the Hayman blaze can begin many miles away from residential areas, a blanket prohibition against thinning outside the Red Zone would be counter-productive and could hamper efforts to protect communities. Instead, Finney advocates careful site-specific evaluation of various projects aimed at reducing wildfire hazards and toward maximizing forest health.

“There is no clear-cut case that thinning alone, without surface fuels treatment, made much difference,” Finney said of the Hayman Fire, adding, “There is strong evidence that prescribed burns helped knock the fire down.”

Finney stated that it is important for the public to understand the difference between thinning for forest health and fuel mitigation—the removal of small-diameter trees and brush—and thinning that results from timber harvest activities, which generally involves cutting down larger, more fire-resistant trees.

“I hate to see it polarized as a ‘thinning is good, thinning is bad’ debate.” Finney continued. “Thinning for forest-health is not a catch-all, one-size-fits-all solution, but can be part of a larger strategy to re-integrate fire into forest ecosystems on a broad landscape level.”

Some of the scientists involved in the Hayman study are outspoken in their opposition to widespread thinning. CSU Professor William Romme, who headed the team studying the fire’s ecological effects, was one of a group of scientists who wrote a letter to President Bush last September warning that such thinning could have unintended consequences, even exacerbating the fire danger in some cases.

According to the letter, some western forests have burned at intervals of thousands of years and only under drought conditions, These forests have been altered minimally by 20th century fire suppression and are still healthy. Thinning would only disturb, not restore them.

Even though the Hayman report is still in a draft stage, some policy makers have already drawn their conclusions.

“The findings are fairly clear. Landscape-level fuel reduction works,” said Josh Penry, staff director for the House Forests and Forest Health Subcommittee. Penry said the report presents evidence supporting the extensive treatments envisioned under the McInnis plan.

“The Forest Service and the BLM have too many small projects. We saw in the Hayman Fire and other places that small treatments are not effective in rebuffing big fires,” Penry explained. “Now, the question is, how do we go about implementing these landscape-level thinning and treatment projects?” It can’t take six, eight, ten years. We need to give land managers some discretion.”

At the same time, conservation groups caution that land managers must not overlook the potentially adverse effects of thinning in a rush to try and “fire-proof” forests. The development of new roads needed for thinning lead to increased erosion. Studies show that, in some cases, forests laced with logging roads are more susceptible to intense fires than untouched areas.

Udall agrees that land managers need some discretion but argued that lawmakers should also put some sideboards on the agencies rather than giving a carte blanche for thinning. “My fear is the administration is mistaken in pushing the Categorical Exclusion approach,” Udall said, referring to the Republican plans that would cut public input and reduce the amount of environmental scrutiny required for some projects. “That could slow us down even more by resulting in more lawsuits.”

 “My emphasis on the federal level is to focus on the Red Zone,” Udall said. “That path has already yielded some success stories.”

Udall emphasized that prevention and preparation are likely to be more cost-effective than suppression. Also, both regulatory and incentive-based approaches can help insure that future developments are planned with an eye toward making them less vulnerable to fires.

“My other plea to people is to understand that this problem has been a hundred years in the making, driven by well-intentioned policy makers,” Udall said. “While it’s possible to mitigate some of the hazards on a neighborhood level in the short-term, it will likely take decades to address the problem on the landscape level. It’s hard to think on that time scale,” he acknowledged.

Because of the Hayman Fire, public attention has focused on ponderosa pine forests. However, Udall cautions that the public needs to understand that there are other forest types in Colorado that depend on fire, including the lodgepole pine and spruce-fir forests prevalent around some of the state’s high country resort communities. Some of those forests will almost certainly experience high-intensity stand replacement fires, irrespective of any attempts to mitigate wildfire dangers there. P