on the cover / By Malcolm Terence

Our Fire, Our Fight

I watched last spring as Harling and John Gibbons, a retired USFS burn boss, led a crew from Orleans/Somes Bar Fire Safe Council (OSB FSC) as it lit off an eight-acre underburn near residences to maintain an existing fuelbreak. They started at the top and laid strips of fire gradually downhill on contour. There was much flame and smoke, but an OSB FSC monitor carefully watched temperature, wind speed and relative humidity to keep the operation safe and contained. The burners’ work removed the low brush but did little more than singe the conifer and hardwood overstory. Harling says another, similar burn in five years will help keep the structures safe.

One problem, he says, is “when you’ve got a clearcut on the adjoining Forest Service land, you have to do more work on your place for it to withstand increased fire behavior. We’ve seen stepped up activity by local volunteers — 30-some at Wiegel’s, 15 at Toz’s (another neighborhood that was threatened.) Until our biggest landowner, who owns 95 percent of the land around us, agrees with our priorities, there will be slow progress toward our mutual goals.”

At a recent OSB FSC meeting several locals agreed that the agencies needed to spend less on wildfires and more on advance preparation like the spring burn I saw. They agreed that the summer’s costs — over a million dollars a day for months — were a political leverage, and even discussed approaching Congress to investigate and intervene.

Creek Hanauer, a local resident, started daily e-mailed dispatches to tell what was really happening in the spread of the fires because his neighbors complained that the agencies were non-transparent and even deceptive in their dispatches and weekly public briefings. The agency dispatches, for example, rarely mentioned intentional ignitions or slopovers.

He also complained about the out-of-town management teams that rotate away and are replaced every two or three weeks by a new team of managers, all ready to patronize the locals. “I’m tired of kindergarten every time there’s a new team,” he said. “People get tired of hearing, ‘You know that fire can be a good thing.’”

Creek got a standing ovation from the 20 locals at the OSB FSC meeting for his dispatches. He still lives just upriver on the South Fork Salmon from where Kate George chambered that round in her carbine that afternoon in 1977. She would be proud of his work.

Malcolm Terence lives along the Salmon River, not midslope, and his home has been made defensible for fire thanks to years of work by Salmon River Restoration Council, Orleans/Somes Bar Fire Safe Council, several out-of-town fire crews, his neighbors and his wife. He last fought fire on a Forest Service crew in 1987.

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