Cooperation fuels western firefighting
It is a surrealistic scene – a subdivision of homes silhouetted against the night sky by leaping flames – yet it is one that has become increasingly common on American newscasts. Last year, the nation watched as residents of Los Alamos, N.M., evacuated their city, and other wildfires burned even wider swaths throughout the country. According to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), between January and mid-October 2000, U.S. wildfires swept 7 million acres, destroying more than 850 structures and costing nearly $900 million for suppression.
As is always the case with wildfires, the majority of damage occurred in the West, where fuel and climate combined to turn localized fires into raging blazes. With shifts in fuel loads, enormous fire-prone territories and growing populations, the western states are facing wildfires more frequently, and firefighters are struggling to contain their scope. However, mutual-aid agreements have sparked a new level of effectiveness.
Encroaching danger
The growing scope of western wildfires is rooted in fuel management, or lack thereof, and in changing demographics. Nevada, where more than 2 million acres of wildland burned in 1999 and 2000, illustrates the impact of both problems.
Not long ago, Nevada was primarily shrubland – salt desert scrub at lower elevations and sagebrush higher up. Westward, along the California border and at Lake Tahoe, old-growth pine forests dominated the region.
Each of those areas was fairly fire resistant, for different reasons. In the sagebrush rangelands, for example, the brush was patchy and therefore unable to sustain a fire. In the forests, there were plenty of pine needles and cones to burn, but the trees were large enough to survive the fires that swept them every five to seven years.
Now large, destructive fires are common in both places. In the forests, mature trees have been harvested, allowing the buildup of small trees and fine fuels that allow fires to sweep through vast areas with awesome intensity. Additionally, much of the sagebrush steppe burns every few years, or even annually, and, as a result, the sagebrush itself is vanishing. More than half has been lost in many areas, perhaps permanently.
In the absence of the sagebrush, cheatgrass – an annual grass that appeared in the West late in the last century – has invaded and now dominates millions of acres of former shrubland. Cheatgrass is more likely to burn than was sagebrush, and thousands of acres of it can burn in an hour. Additionally, its great seed production and early, rapid growth means that the grass comes back thicker than ever after burning.
To further complicate matters, Nevada’s population has been one of the fastest-growing in the nation, with nearly all the growth concentrated in areas that are increasingly fire-prone. Last year, two-thirds of the state’s more damaging fires were in the Spring Mountains near Las Vegas or along the 100-mile Sierra Front in the eastern foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where residential construction is breaching the wildland borders. To a lesser extent, the same thing is happening near Elko, where a modern gold mining boom has created a huge increase in population.
As urbanization continues, and as the urban-wildland interface grows, so, too, does the probability of structure loss during wildfires – and the problems of safety and priority for firefighters. “The new houses keep getting bigger,” says Bruce Van Cleemput, assistant fire chief for the Tahoe Douglas Fire Protection District. “We have 26,000-square-foot, single-family residences going in now. A cabin here may be over 5,000 square feet.
“Three or four people on an engine aren’t effective against [house fires of that size] except at a very early stage, and a Type 1 structure engine out in the country on a dirt road with 150-foot flame lengths and no turn-arounds is an uncomfortable situation,” he explains. “You are obligated to protect your people and the investments of other departments that loan you their best.”
Resources spent on protecting houses are resources that cannot be spent fighting the wildfire itself, says Rik Kajans, division chief for the Truckee Meadows Fire Department, which was consolidated with the Reno Fire Department last summer. “The fire grows while we protect the houses,” he notes. “Every truck at a house is one less truck out on the line.”
Come together … right now
Even with wildfires that do not approach homes, western firefighters can be quickly overwhelmed by the expansiveness of the terrain. As a result, many agencies have signed mutual-aid agreements to ensure the most effective response possible.
The Truckee Meadows Fire Department covers 550 square miles near Reno, and another 6,000 square miles of Washoe County, where it has jurisdiction over private lands. “With so much ground to cover, we have to help each other,” Kajans says. “We have to respond across state lines, … so we have cooperative agreements based on the `closest resource’ concept.”
The concept of mutual aid is simple, Van Cleemput says: “If you need the help, we are sending it to you. And we get it back when we need it.” Nevertheless, finalizing the actual agreements can be complicated.
Alan Kightlinger, fire chief for the Elko Fire Department, notes that cooperative agreements are rarely achieved overnight. The process is time-consuming but also needs to be conducted in a timely manner. “We’ve learned the hard way that we prefer to do this in the off-season, so that we take our shots when the snow is on the ground rather than when the smoke is in the air,” he says.
With mutual aid comes versatility. Along the Sierra Front, for example, agencies share a single dispatch system, and strike teams of five engines may include water tenders, four-wheel-drive units, and engines with high water storage and pumping capacity for large structures. Ideally, teams are made up of wildland engines, which can fight fire on the move, and municipal engines, which are designed for stationary attack.
“We can use federal resources such as air tankers, lead planes, helicopters and hand crews on our fires because they use us for hazmat, propane, vehicle and structural situations,” Kajans says. “The BLM, for example, is prohibited by policy from responding to structures. So we fill in the voids by working together. It is usually a unified command situation because we now share legal agreements and communications.”
Coordinated communications systems are key to successful mutual-aid efforts, according to Van Cleemput. He notes that, along the Sierra Front, geographic areas are linked to specified command frequencies, which in turn have pools of reserved tactical frequencies, including air-to-ground. Additionally, three fire [networks] are issued so that everybody, regardless of affiliation, is in touch.
Joint training is equally vital, Kightlinger says. “You have to get to know the other agencies and get things like Red Card (certification) and pack test (physical fitness qualification) issues out in the open early,” he explains. “If you are a municipal department that trains during the off season, you need to establish cross-recognition with the federal agencies that rely on seasonal employees and training.”
Today, mutual-aid agreements are so pervasive that any one fire in Nevada or rural northeastern California is likely to elicit response from the U.S. Forest Service, the BLM, the Nevada and California Divisions of Forestry, various city and county fire departments, local volunteer fire departments, landowners, loggers and perhaps a few mining companies. (During the heavy 1996 fire season in northern Nevada, public resources were stretched so thin that mining companies were using their own equipment to protect their operations. Impressed by the sight of the world’s largest grader and 10,000-gallon, off-road water trucks punching a line through the sage, the BLM subsequently formalized a cooperative agreement with the companies. The agreement included the distribution of compatible radio equipment; “ride along” exchanges; training about the special hazards at mines and the demands of wildfire fighting; and formal commitments to timely debriefing after fires.)
The public puzzle
During a wildfire, agencies are without the manpower or equipment to devote to residents whose homes are threatened. That means that, during the off-season, in addition to monitoring fuel loads and amassing the aid they might need, agencies are urging residents to learn about fire prevention and safety.
The Sierra Front Wildfire Cooperators, along with county extension agents, has aggressively promoted the concepts of readiness and defensible space. “In this region, the public has to protect itself,” says Kajans, who estimates that 90 percent of his department’s wildfires now involve structures. “There is no way to have enough manpower and equipment. The extension programs have been very successful, but drive anywhere on the outskirts of town, and you’ll see some real nightmares.”
According to Kajans, the nightmares point to the necessity for local governments to establish “enforceable and doable” regulations. “We have fallen behind that curve,” he says. “It has to be thought out ahead of time. A Los Alamos fire where lots of homes burn gets people’s attention, but then a few slow seasons go by, and it is forgotten. Local planners must think of those hot, windy, August days and prepare in advance for what can happen to their public.”