news story / By Heidi Walters

Friendly Fire Fight

The Backbone Fire, in a way, might be a good symbolic place to test this new, more communicative approach by Six Rivers N.F. It’s burning within the footprint left by the 1999 Megram Fire, a hot, severe — and severely politicized — fire that consumed 125,000 acres and wasn’t snuffed until November, when the rain came. That conflagration produced fodder for academics, environmentalists, land managers and fire fighting tacticians to mull for years to come.

The Forest Service blamed the severity of the Megram Fire, sparked by lightning, on masses of fuel left by a 1995 windstorm that blew down or snapped off hundreds of trees. It wanted to salvage first the blowdown logs, and later the Megram fire leftovers; both plans were thwarted by environmental lawsuits. Masten, the Hoopa Valley chairman, said in a phone conversation Monday afternoon, after he’d met with Kelley, that he was concerned that the Megram Fire, and the previous blowdown, had left a lot of fuel that could aid the spread of the Backbone Fire to his reservation. So far, the wind has been kind — blowing west to east, away from the reservation.

“But there’s nothing stopping it, if it comes our way,” he said. “And our main concern is air quality.”

He remembers the Megram Fire. “It was very intense,” he said. “The fire was in a wilderness area, so they couldn’t use vehicles to fight it, and the nearest they could take equipment was on the reservation.”

The Megram Fire did come onto the reservation, Masten said; he thinks the Forest Service should’ve fought it more aggressively before that happened. The smoke made a lot of people sick with asthma and other conditions. “We had to move people to Eureka,” he said.

This time, said Masten, the Forest Service is taking a more aggressive approach — lots of helicopters and hotshot crews — even though the area in which the Backbone is burning is steep and hard to reach. It’ll also be tricky because there are Hupa cultural sites in the area. Masten said Kelley took note of those concerns.

“There’s nothing the fire could harm,” Masten said. “No structures. But these are sites where our people, the heads of our ceremonies, go to pray and to gather medicine. And it’s important that there not be equipment in there.”

Hoopa Valley Tribe fire crews will aid in the fire fight, Masten said. And the tribe, and other locals, will get some ear-time with the fire managers.

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