Wow! A record 16 inches of snow and -19 degrees in October. We must be in Montana! Wildfires are now far from our thoughts as we bundle up after still being in tee shirts only a couple of weeks ago. With our climate extremes, we know that another summer like 2017 cannot be far off. And as we hear reports from California about the levels of destruction occurring from wildfires there, it is never an inappropriate time to take preventive actions.
Fortunately, here in Seeley Lake, there are good examples of how that can be done. From the Seeley-Swan Fuels Mitigation Task Force that has been active in helping coordinate and support fuel mitigation efforts since 2004, to active fuel mitigation committees within homeowner associations, Seeley Lake is providing good demonstrations of how to work together to achieve positive results.
A current example is the success of a recent project the Clearwater Resource Council (CRC) launched in partnership with the Big Sky Lake Homeowners Association (BSLHOA). In summer of 2020, the BSLHOA approached CRC to express their concerns about fire danger in their community. Many properties located in the BSLHOA had not been thinned for years and on some properties, fuels had built up to hazardous levels. The wildfires raging in California, Oregon and Washington fostered a sense of urgency that something needed to be done to stave off future wildfires. In addition, most residents had lived through the Rice Ridge fire and all that it had entailed.
In response, CRC outlined a path forward. Over the past four months, with support from CRC, BSLHOA members that had initially expressed concerns about wildfire danger were able to mobilize the majority of their neighbors. Currently, of the 78 lots on Big Sky Lake, 54 have agreed to engage in the community-wide fuels mitigation project with additional properties having already conducted fuel mitigation and several others tackling this task on their own. Essentially, almost 80% of the property owners are contributing funds and/or sweat equity to reduce the likelihood of catastrophic wildfire in their neighborhood.
For most homeowners, a contractor(s) will be hired to undertake the fuels mitigation work. A Request for Proposals was issued in October, and bids from contractors are due back Nov. 15, 2020. CRC will assist property owners by providing cost-share grants to offset a portion of the fuels mitigation costs. CRC obtains grant funds from the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation as well as other funders to undertake this work.
It is anticipated that a contractor(s) will be selected in the late fall, and work may start as early as this winter, depending upon site conditions.
The fuels mitigation treatment generally requires a crown spacing of 10 feet between trees, reduction in smaller trees/ladder fuels, retention of larger trees and a preference for maintaining ponderosa pine and larch which are the most fire-resistant trees on the landscape and also most likely to remain healthy into the future. By thinning fuels surrounding homes, the intensity of any wildlife entering this area will be reduced, increasing the likelihood that homes will survive the fire and giving fire control agencies a much better chance of combating the fire.
Fires have always been part of this landscape. However, given fire suppression over the last 100 years combined with past logging activities, “natural processes” are no longer in keeping with historical norms. Native Americans burned regularly, keeping fuel loads low in many parts of the Clearwater Valley. Ground fires in these areas were the norm and crown fires were the exception. However, the excessive amount of fuels which have accumulated on the landscape now leads to large expanses of stand replacing crown fires where they would not have occurred historically and the loss of remaining older, large trees in these areas.
The removal and loss of older, large trees is a concern, as such resources now comprise an increasingly small percentage of the forest stock. For example, the recently released mid-Swan Draft Environmental Impact Statement in our neighboring watershed noted only about nine percent of the forest is comprised of large/mature trees, a significant reduction from historical conditions. Knowing where remaining large trees occur can be important to making decisions about where fuel mitigation work may be needed to protect these stands from stand-replacing fire.
In the Clearwater Valley, CRC has employed a survey team to ground-truth satellite imagery which identified potential large trees stands in the Seeley Lake Ranger District. In addition to finding where large trees occur, the team has shown where some stands that would have normally withstood a wildfire have been lost in recent burns. Once forests containing large ponderosa pine and larch are properly thinned, fire can be beneficially re-introduced into these stands to maintain their historical conditions. Thus, fuel mitigation work can play multiple roles in the Valley, protecting homes, reducing the intensity of fire in the Wildland Urban Interface and restoring important stands to conditions that can support future wildfires that will undoubtedly occur.
CRC has undertaken fuels mitigation work for over a decade. It is exciting to work with a homeowners’ association like BSLHOA conducting a project at the neighborhood scale. While managing a larger project with multiple stakeholders may take more time and work, the benefits of such a project will be more far reaching. While individual property owners can reduce their risk of catastrophic wildfire by undertaking fuels mitigation work, the benefits are more limited if adjacent neighbors have properties with high fuel loads. There are also potential benefits of reducing costs of thinning fuels on small lots by combining lots to treat a larger area that becomes more economical for contractors.
It is our hope that CRC can use the cooperative neighborhood model we have developed with the BSLHOA to facilitate similar levels of community engagement in other parts of the Clearwater Valley. Please let us know if you think your neighborhood is ready to launch a fuels mitigation project – we would be happy to help! Contact me at Caryn@crcmt.org.
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