The abnormally wet August and early September put an end to the wildfire risks that Seeley Lake was again facing this summer. The Colt Lake and Big Knife fire starts brought back memories of the Jocko Lakes, Rice Ridge, Liberty, and other fires that threatened the community and produced evacuations, closures, and other impacts. Without this year's timely moisture, these fires could have put the Seeley Lake community in another tenuous position. What can we do to reduce wildfire risks to our community?
There are some actions we can all take that have been documented to be effective proactive measures. Unfortunately, there is confusion over some actions because of misleading information being touted to block some effective actions. Let's examine a few facts and some misinformation. What are known effective measures to reduce wildfire risks to communities?
• Conducting home inspections and correcting problems can reduce the likelihood of a home burning during a wildfire, and is one of the most important things landowners can do to reduce risks to their homes. Homeowners should keep flammable vegetation away from the house. They should remove flammable materials such as woodpiles, or other materials from decks or close to buildings at least during the fire season. Accumulations of leaves in gutters or corners of decks or buildings should be removed. Further, homeowners should make sure that attic vents have a screen mesh in place to keep sparks from entering the building.
• Thinning fuels to reduce fire intensity is a proven technique. In dense forest stands with multiple levels of vegetation, fires during extreme weather events will typically be of high severity and burn as a stand-replacing fire, often producing flame heights that may exceed 100 feet. Treating the forest to thin overstory of trees by removing smaller trees and also reducing the understory vegetation to remove what is known as ladder fuels, an area can be thinned so that it is unlikely to carry a stand-replacing or crown fire. Rather, when fires reach such thinned areas, they typically drop to the ground and burn through with much less intensity and much shorter flame heights. This reduces the amount of heat and sparks produced by the fire that could contribute to houses catching fire.
• My wife and I experienced the effectiveness of such treatments on some property we co-own in New Mexico. The property was burned over last year in the Calf Creek/Hermits Peak fire. When the fire reached our property, winds were up to 60 mph with high temperatures and low humidity. The ponderosa pine forest on our property had been thinned, while that on our neighbor's was not. Our neighbor's land experienced stand replacing, high intensity fires, as shown in the photo looking across our property line. Looking the other way into our property, even with the extreme weather events, we experienced much lower fire intensities as shown in the second photo. A majority of our trees survived, as did the house and other buildings on the property, while nearly all of our neighbors' trees were killed, and they lost their home.
You may read opinions of some that thinning of forests doesn't help with wildfire using the argument that thinning doesn't reduce the size of fires. That may be true, but thinning clearly can affect the intensity of the fire depending on the amount of flammable materials as it moves through the forest. Less intense fires not only allow many trees to survive, it gives firefighters a much better chance of controlling or managing a fire, and reduce risks to firefighters as well.
Is thinning of all forests therefore an appropriate treatment? When forests occur near homes, then thinning from a fuel mitigation standpoint is definitely appropriate. That doesn't mean that all forests across a landscape should be thinned. Historically fires produced varying conditions in forests depending on a number of factors such as elevation, the steepness and direction of slope on a site, local weather and wind patterns, etc. Many low elevation forests, such as ponderosa pine forests, evolved with frequent fires that produced low densities of large trees and with low amounts of ladder fuels- stand conditions consistent with what we restored to our forest in New Mexico, but also appropriate to ponderosa pine forests around Seeley Lake. In contrast, higher elevation, moister forests such as Englemann spruce and subalpine fir stands historically did not burn very frequently. They produced more dense forests that when they did burn, typically did so with high intensity crown fires. From an ecological standpoint, these forests cannot be "restored" like the lower elevation ponderosa pine forests using thinning. However, if you have a home in such forests, thinning an appropriate space around the home to reduce the amount of fuels is a necessary action from a fuel mitigation perspective to protect structures.
• Other fuel mitigation measures include identifying locations that can be treated to provide lines of defense, where fire fighters may be able to stop a fire. These areas can be identified in fire plans, such as the Seeley Swan Fire Plan that helps guide fuel mitigation objectives throughout the Seeley Lake area. These lines of defense can be placed on the landscape so that when fires occur (which they will continue to do), there exist specific locations that fire fighters can use to effectively manage approaching fires. The Auggie Fuels project conducted by the US Forest Service is an example of where a strategically located fuel treatment helped keep the Rice Ridge fire from entering Seeley Lake during a couple of days of extreme fire activity. More recently, a thinned area from the Colt Summit project that was completed a number of years ago helped fire fighters keep the Colt Lake Fire from moving east and impacting private lands along highway 83.
The Clearwater Resource Council has conducted a fuel mitigation program since 2003. We have acquired grants that we administer to assist landowners in conducting fuel mitigation treatments. We have also helped coordinate fuel mitigation efforts within the community by facilitating the Seeley Swan Fuel Mitigation Task Force consisting of representatives from Federal and state agencies, fire departments, Missoula County, non-profit organizations, and landowner associations. We also can provide free home assessments to landowners desiring to reduce the risks to their homes in a wildfire event. More information on CRC's fuel program can be found on our website: http://www.crcmt.org.
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