Fire: A way forward

Last summer when the smoke rolled into the Hoopa Valley National Indian Reservation near Humboldt, members of the tribal leadership responded quickly. They evacuated their most vulnerable residents to the coast, and purchased special air filters to put in homes. They opened two public clean air facilities, installing air conditioners and air filters so people could have a place to escape the bad air. They established an emergency information hot line. They extended the hours at the community clinic. They got the county, the governor and the president to issue declarations of emergency, so that FEMA could help cover some of the quarter-million dollars these measures had cost.

  Clearing 1,700 miles of fuel breaks would be a massive task. But that's the goal of pilot projects created by the Quincy Library Group and supported by the U.S. Congress 11 years ago in an effort to prevent massive wildfires in eight Northern California counties, including Shasta and Tehama. But the once-promising plan has been stalled by lawsuits and timber sale permit appeals, group members say.

Larry Woodfill remembers when fighting the north state's fires was just about everybody's job. Woodfill's dad first put him on a fire line when he was 13, telling the other men his boy was 16. Back then, Woodfill recalls, fire agencies would take all the volunteers they could get. "In those days they would stop cars on the highway and pull people off and have them fight fire," said Woodfill, 72, who lives on South Fork Mountain with a view of Redding. "It worked well."

Where there's raging wildfire, there are often calls from the public for an air show - a sky full of air tankers and helicopters squelching the flames - state and fire officials say. "It's kind of a misconception of the public sometimes - that aircraft are going to be the panacea and save the day," said Dennis Brown, regional aviation safety manager for the U.S. Forest Service in California. But while firefighting aircraft usually are much more visible than the crews laboring below, they need ground support to extinguish fire.

Just because a fire burns through an area, it doesn't necessarily mean that another blaze won't come through a few years later and torch the land a second time. In fact, there are several recent examples in the north state. Sections of the 2001 Oregon Fire in Trinity County burned again five years later when the Junction Fire moved through. Areas in the Six Rivers National Forest burned by the Megram Fire in 1999 reignited June's lightning storms. Similarly, areas torched in 1987 around Hyampom lit up again last summer as the Lime Complex of fires.