Fire, Friend and Enemy

The drawing above, based on photographs, shows one terrifying aspect of forest fires.

PROGRESS, BUT STILL A PROBLEM

A. A. BROWN.

IN 1947, in all parts of the United States, 200,799 forest fires burned over 23,226,000 acres an area the size of Indiana and caused tangible damage amounting to more than 55 million dollars to timber, farm homes, barns, towns, schoolhouses, places where men and women make their living and children have their being.

The damage to young tree growth, soil, watersheds, recreation areas, and wildlife cannot be converted readily into dollars, but it could easily add an equal amount to the loss we suffered from wild-land fires in just one year. Besides that, the work of controlling the fires to keep the damage from amounting to a more disastrous total cost landowners and taxpayers nearly 35 million dollars.

The record for 1947 is enough to show that fire on our wild lands is a big and important problem. Yet for the country as a whole the 1947 record was not unusual; in many past years it has been much worse.

Forest fires remain a problem despite the great progress in dealing with them. It is a complex problem, because man-caused fires result from people's activities and habits: The man from the city, for instance, does not easily change his smoking habits when he goes into the woods. So, changing people's smoking habits becomes a part of the task.

It is complex, too, because the inflammability of forest fuels varies with weather and seasons from conditions where it takes great skill to get a campfire to burn, to conditions where a single spark explodes, as in a powder keg. So, prediction of fire danger and understanding of weather and forest fuel has become a part of forest fire-control activity.

It is complex because the value of our public forests depends on public use; as the desirable uses increase, the liability from fires generally increases. So, skillful regulation of public use also becomes a fire job.

It is particularly complex because successful fire fighting calls for quick action, yet forest fires usually start it places far from fire hydrants and paved streets.

Finally, it is complex because of the nature and behavior of uncontrolled fire. Many aspects of fire behavior arc not yet fully understood, and big fire: continue to defy man's efforts to control them at will by even the best of the methods that have been developed.

THE HISTORY Of forest fires varies in detail from one part of the United States to another, and it is closely interwoven with our history of development. In most of our forest country it was an unhappy aspect of the conquest of the wilderness.

It is enough in this introductory survey merely to point to the use of fire to clear land when this country was young, to the big and intense fires that followed the early logging operations on millions of acres and held back a new timber crop, the awakening of citizens of half a century ago to the destruction to forest wealth that was taking place, the creation of the national forests and the enactment of many State laws designed to prevent fires and protect forest lands, and the banding together of responsible timberland owners into forest fire-protective associations in the West.

From such points of history two facts emerge : Despite a general change in attitudes about fires, the careless use of fire still persists among habits in parts of the country and remains a constant threat to the forests. Also, wherever forest lands exist, there has been a history of forest fires that have influenced the present-day forest. To the initiated, some of the things that past fires have done are clearly evident in every neglected forest tract. A forest fire may be small and it may be forgotten next year, but its effect on trees may persist for a long time. The continuing effect of fire in the forests is probably the most important single reason that forest fires, even small fires, concern everybody.

Fires such as those that occurred in 1910 in Idaho, which wiped out several million acres of virgin timber in a few days, have not since been repeated, thanks to the progress made in protecting forests since that time. But big and destructive fires are still possible, even though not on so vast a scale remember the 245,000-acre Tillamook fire in Oregon in 1933, or the fires in Maine in 1947, when a thousand homes were destroyed.

SYSTEMATIC FOREST-FIRE CONTROL, as we know it now, began in the West about a half century ago, when the possibility of controlling fire damage seemed almost like trying to control storms and floods and the other great forces in nature. Nevertheless, people realized that every fire started as a small fire and that if action could be taken quickly enough it need not turn into a ruthless giant. Earlier, the chief concern in fighting forest fires had been to protect human life and property; systematic forest-fire control concentrated on the problem of protecting the forest itself.

From the start the forest fire fighter has needed equipment to make his efforts count. At first he depended entirely on the simple tools at hand or improvised with such things as a pine branch or a wet burlap sack. Generally he could not depend on using water. Much of the story of progress in controlling forest fires is the story of the development of more and more effective fire-fighting tools and of increasing mechanization of the slow and strenuous hand work that fire fighting has always called for.

The old problem of how to get to a fire soon enough has been solved in the back country through the use of airplanes and parachute jumpers; elsewhere better roads and faster motor equipment now play a decisive role. We also have portable pumps and tank trucks, which can apply water quickly to small fires within reach of any roadway; radio communication, which enables a widely dispersed fire organization to work together as a team; plows and bulldozers, which can establish quickly a fire line or furrow a barrier strip around the fire.

The application of systematic planning and scientific methods, described in succeeding articles, is reflected in the records for the national forests. The annual area burned has decreased from more than 5 million acres in 1910 and 2 1/2 million acres in 1919 to a level of a million acres in the equally bad fire years of 1926 and 1929. Then, following the organization of the Civilian Conservation Corps, the burn resulting from the extreme drought years of 1931 and 1934 was held to half that amount. In 1947 the burn on the national forests was recorded at 475,000 acres, only slightly below those years, but with an average since 1935 of less than 300,000 acres. Of significance too is size of the area burned by each fire. Before 1930, the average was more than 100 acres; between 1931 and 1940, it dropped to about 40 acres; since 1940, the average has been 31 acres.

Such results would have been regarded as highly successful and satisfactory as late as 1930. But needs and values have been changing rapidly; the commercial value of the national forest properties and the income they produce has more than doubled since 1930. The public importance of adequate protection of all forests from fire has increased similarly. No longer can even a destructive 5,000-acre forest fire (which would be far too small to be recalled in the forest history of 20 years ago) be regarded as anything short of a disaster.

In short, no longer have we any place in America where a big forest fire is not immediately destructive of some more of the wealth on which this country has been built.

A. A. BROWN, a Kansan, was graduated in forestry from the University of Michigan. He entered the Forest Service in 1922 17, Montana as a forest assistant. He later served on the Coeur d'Alene National Forest in Idaho, and as assistant forest supervisor on the Helena and Jefferson National Forests in Montana. In 1935 he was placed in charge of a forest fire-control planning project for all the California forests and in 1937 was made chief of fire control in Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming. He was made chief of the Division of Fire Control in Washington in 1947.