Catastrophic Fires

Photo credit: The photo at the top of this page shows trees burning in the 2018 Northern California Camp Fire covering an area roughly twice the size of the Elliott Forest. When this page was first written in May 2020, Wikipedia said, "The Camp Fire was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history." Now those words are obsolete, and the 2020 fire season burned much larger areas of California and Oregon's public forests.

OSU's Elliott State Research Forest Proposal ignores the Elliott's fire history and assumes an ever increasing amount of flammable carbon can be stored in the forest. This predictably tragic experiment will almost certainly end with the same sort of explosive fires we saw in Oregon's other public forests in 2020 ... or in the Elliott State Forest area in the 1800s.

Dr. Bob Zybach is a scientific expert on Oregon's fire history: his research has had a particular emphasis on Oregon's coastal fire history and the Elliott State Forest. Here are some of his thoughts, written after the 2020 Labor Day forest fires.

The broad arc of Oregon's fire history explains why this year's catastrophic wildfires have converted our public forests into unprecedented firebombs. What were once green trees filled with water, have now become massive stands of pitchy, air-dried firewood.

For thousands of years ancestral Oregon Indian families kept ridgeline and riparian areas open for travel, hunting, fishing, and harvesting purposes. They cleared ground fuels by constant firewood gathering, root harvesting, and seasonal fires.

These actions created widespread systematic firebreaks in a beautiful landscape characterized by foot trails, grass prairies, southern balds, huckleberry fields, camas meadows, oak savannah, and islands of mostly even-aged conifers.

Following the historic 1910 firestorms, the US Forest Service established a nationwide network of fire lookouts and pack trails backed up by rapid response fire suppression. This system became remarkably effective over time.

From 1952 until 1987, for 35 years, only one forest fire in all of western Oregon was greater than 10,000 acres: the 1966 43,000-acre Oxbow Fire in Lane County.

But since 1987, the past 34 years, Oregon has had more than 30 such fires, with several larger than 100,000 acres.

The 2020 Labor Day Fires alone covered more than one million acres, destroyed over 4,000 homes, caused 40,000 emergency evacuations, killed millions of wild animals, and thickly blanketed the state with an acrid, unsightly and unhealthy smoke for nearly two weeks.

What changed to cause this dramatic increase in catastrophic wildfire frequency and severity?

The problems began in the 1960s, with apparently well-intentioned national efforts to create large untouchable wilderness areas and cleaner air and water on our public lands.

The single biggest turning point in how public forests are managed happened on December 22, 1969: about 50 lawyers in Washington, DC created the Environmental Law Institute, and a short distance away congress simultaneously passed the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA).

Next, the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the 1980 Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA) provided the growing environmental law industry with a way to be paid by the government for challenging nearly every attempt to log or otherwise actively manage public forests.

By the 1980s, the artificial creation of Habitat Conservation Plans (“HCPs”) and the listing of spotted owls as an Endangered Species laid the groundwork for today’s fires.

The 1994 Clinton Plan for Northwest Forests might have been the final nail in the coffin. The subsequent never-ending environmental lawsuits, new Wilderness and HCP creations, access road decommissionings, and fruitless public planning exercises have created tens of millions of acres of massive fuel build-ups and “let it burn” policies that have decimated our forests and wildlife.

A predicted result has been ever larger western Oregon forest fires. More than 90% of these large- and catastrophic-scale fires have taken place in federal forestlands, which represent less than 60% of Oregon’s forested areas.

Lessons from the 1902-1929 Yacolt Fires, 1933-1951 “Six-Year Jinx” Tillamook Fires, and the 1987-2018 Kalmiopsis Wilderness Fires are clear: unless removed, the dead trees resulting from these fires will fuel even greater and more severe future fires.

It will be interesting to see if we can learn from Oregon's fire history and take the prompt, decisive actions needed to avoid the clearly predictable coming firestorms.

A Worrisome Conclusion

A particularly disturbing thought comes from where the OSU research proposal would attempt to store the most carbon on the forest’s west edge near the coastal towns of Reedsport, Winchester Bay, Lakeside, Hauser, Glasgow, Allegany, and North Bend.

All of Oregon’s worst catastrophic fires have been fanned by strong eastern winds, so OSU’s plan puts these towns at risk of being destroyed similar to how Paradise, California was wiped out in 2018 -- and how the Oregon towns of Talent, Phoenix, Rainbow, Blue River, Detroit and Gates were destroyed in 2020.

The OSU plan for the Elliott is a recipe for certain disaster, based on the forest's own history and on the well documented fire history of the entire Douglas Fir Region.