Fire: A way forward
The smoke inhalation from long-burning forest fires in northern California extracts a huge, frightening toll on residents’ respiratory health. We measure the ill effects and suggest potential remedies.
The smoke inhalation from long-burning forest fires in northern California extracts a huge, frightening toll on residents’ respiratory health. We measure the ill effects and suggest potential remedies.
This year's fire season is about to rekindle long-running debates about how to prevent, suppress and recover from wildfire.
The smoke crept in during the final weeks of June. From the blazing forest, it reached its ashy brown fingers into Frank Walden's garden, choking his corn and poisoning his apple trees. It snuck under the doorway of his three-bedroom home on the edge of Big Bar. It entered his lungs. It refused to leave.
Deana Schmidt, 61, has lived in Lewiston since 1979. She bitterly remembers the chaos of the 1999 Lewiston Fire, a Bureau of Land Management-controlled burn that escaped containment and forced the evacuation of the town.
But she says the ever-present haze last summer was far, far worse.
Last summer when the smoke rolled into the Hoopa Valley National Indian Reservation near Humboldt, members of the tribal leadership responded quickly.
Tips from the Shasta County Public Health Department.
Flames from last year's Moon Fire almost burned down Mike Boswell's home on Rector Creek Road near Ono.
But ultimately the house was saved by brush thinning his family did on their 20 acres long before the blaze burned through in early July.
Thick underbrush and small trees in the north state's woods have the potential to pay for their own clearing.
Although too small for milling, the trees and brush in the forest's lowest levels can serve as highly combustible fuel called biomass. Crews cut and chip the vegetation, which is then burned in a power plant to create electricity.
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.
The best way to reduce fire danger in the woods close to a town is to put the community in control of forest management.
That's the theory behind a unique program called the Weaverville Community Forest in Trinity County.
Last summer Rayola Pratt experienced the fear that haunts so many in the north state. Wildfire tore through the woods near her home off Rock Creek Road west of Redding.
"From here we could just watch the trees burst into flames," she said.
William Bradford had banked on the timber harvested from a stretch of private forest land his family has owned for the past 50 years as a nest egg.
But the 67-year-old Junction City man watched last summer as firefighters armed with flame-dripping torches, flares and flammable liquid lit his land on fire, eventually scorching 70 of his 80 acres.
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.
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection is so focused on fire that in 2007, the agency switched its identifier, or official nickname, from CDF to Cal Fire. Meanwhile, the U.S. Forest Service sticks to its persona as land managers who happen to fight fire.
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.
Catastrophic wildfire.
It's a term that carries a heavy political load in the debates about how to manage a forest after fire has swept through.
The visual impact of a wildfire once the flames are gone can be just as dramatic as the blaze itself.
Trees transformed into leaning snags. Brush left leafless and black. Still more trees toppled, turned to logs.
The U.S. Forest Service announced plans last November for a 155-acre salvage logging sale, saying the dead trees left on land torched by wildfires near Junction City and Big Bar could fuel future fire storms.
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.
Many environmentalists look back 200 years ago and yearn for the majestic forests that grew before the European settlement of California.
A year after wildfire killed 13 people and blackened hundreds of thousands of acres of forestland - costing nearly $170 million to fight - the north state's woods stand primed to burn again.
Two years after the center and the Redding Record Searchlight reported on the health impact of firefighting techniques, the Forest Service has agreed to consult with local leaders on how fires are fought.
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