BAD BUSINESS; YOUR BUSINESS

R. F. HAMMATT.

On suitable areas and under well-planned use and control programs, fire may be a good tool in sound, longterm management of land and resources. H. H. Chapman, professor emeritus of the Yale University School of Forestry, declared that the proper use of fire, and not complete fire prevention, is the only solution of the problem of future forestry in the South. R. Merton Love and Burle J. Jones, of the California Agricultural Experiment Station, say that if governed burning is followed by revegetation and controlled grazing, some California brushlands can be converted into grasslands that produce more meat, hides, and wool.

But those statements do not hold for wildfires. Wildfires are bad, a scourge to man and beast.

Consider what happened in Maine, for instance: In four fateful days in the fall of 1947 some 50 small wildfires, fanned by strong winds, seared a quarter of a million acres and took 16 lives.

Another instance: In the decade that ended in 1940, more than 2,100,000 wildfires swept forests and fields in the United States. That was at the rate of 575 each day. Those fires blackened an area more than seven times the size of Maine and all the other New England States. According to estimates made several years ago by the Association of American Railroads, the total amount of labor it took to put out those fires could maintain a right-of-way wide enough and long enough for nine trains to travel abreast from New York to San Francisco.

Destroyed by wildfires in those 10 years were billions of little trees that might have become forests when forests may be more sorely needed-10, 20, 50 years hence. Killed were enough big trees to keep all our daily and Sunday papers in newsprint for 11 years; or enough large trees, if made into 5-room houses, to wipe out the entire 1947 housing shortage of the United States, as estimated by the National Housing and Home Finance Agency, and leave some left over.

Trees hoary with age offer evidence that wildfires also occurred centuries ago. In Great Forest Fires of America, John D. Guthrie tells of basal scars that record conflagrations in California's big tree forests as far back as A. D. 245. Venerable Engelmann spruces still bear scars from fires that swept Colorado's mountain slopes in 1676, 1707, and 1781, he reports, and white spruce trees register wildfires that must have covered around 200 square miles in Maine 2 years before the frigate Old Ironsides was launched at Boston.

As calamities, great wildfires rank with floods, famines, and earthquakes. Such calamities may not have been so important when Indians formed the only and a sparse population in America, when they used fire as an aid in collecting acorns and grasshoppers for food, and when forests seemed inexhaustible. But many conditions have changed since then, and chronicles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reveal what seems to be ample justification for the statement.

Those chronicles tell us, for example, that 160 lives were lost when the Miramichi fire of 1825 roared across 3 million acres in New Brunswick, and that 1,500 people were killed by flames and smoke and crashing trees when the Peshtigo wildfire of 1871 wiped out whole settlements as it ravaged a million and a quarter acres in Wisconsin.

Headstones in a forest-fringed cemetery at St. Maries, Idaho, tell of the death of 74 fire fighters who were trapped and burned in northern Idaho and western Montana by raging walls of flame that jumped wide rivers and laid waste a strip of mountain country 20 to 35 miles wide and 120 miles long. That was in 1910, after wearied men had brought 90 large wildfires and 3,000 small ones under control, despite months of high temperatures and low humidities. Then came sudden winds and catastrophe.

High temperatures, low humidities, and sudden winds also set the stage for the Tillamook wildfire of August 1933. In 11 days it roared through 267,000 acres of the finest virgin forests in Oregon, and burned timber equal in amount to the entire lumber cut of the United States in 1932.

But the damages wildfires do are not confined to the timber killed and the homes destroyed. Pocketbooks also suffer.

The 1947 Pellegrin fire, for instance, was in a mixture of brush and grass that may have seemed quite worthless to the casual passerby. But the burning of this range forced ranchers to find other feed for 500 cattle for 6 months. And it threatened heavy winter losses among a herd of deer that for years had attracted hunters and their dollars to California communities.

Farmers who manage their woodlands for maximum returns on a long-time basis, and who like to go hunting now and then, know that even surface fires often weaken cash-crop trees so they are more easily thrown by the wind. They know, too, that those fires can kill young trees and destroy coverts and nests of game birds and small-game animals.

Fishermen report that wood ashes in streams sometimes kill large numbers of trout. Sportsmen say it is not uncommon for whole coveys of bewildered quail to turn back into fires from which they have just fled, then drop in the waves of heat and gas before being touched by the flames. Fire fighters tell of rabbits that have been blinded and of deer with feet so badly burned in hot ashes that they were easy prey for varmints.

There are many more small wildfires than big ones. Many people think small fires do no damage, but they are mistaken. Even small wildfires generally set in motion events that are often more far reaching and of greater importance than the immediate and direct damage done by their flames.

One such event was the destructive flood that occurred in Salt Lake City on August 19, 1945.

George W. Craddock, of the Intermountain Forest and Range Experiment Station, says this flood came during the night. From a city cemetery, he adds, it washed out more than 300 tombstones and many bodies. It spread debris, silt, gravel, and mud over streets and sidewalks. It clogged storm sewers, invaded garages and basements, cracked foundations, soaked food and furniture.

It was a man-caused wildfire that pulled the trigger on that flood. It burned only about 600 acres in grass-and-brush-covered foothill drainages north of the city. It was put out 11 months before the flood came. But by destroying the cover and impairing the power of the watershed to retain moisture, Craddock believes, it was definitely responsible for damage estimated at $347,000.

Studies by M. W. Talbot and C. J. Kraebel, of the California Forest and Range Experiment Station, reveal that water furnished by brush- and forest-covered mountains is essential in irrigating more than a million acres of high-value croplands in southern California, and in meeting domestic and industrial needs of some 4 million persons.

With about 50 percent of the population of the State, they say, southern California has only 2 percent of the water supply in California. Despite this shortage, however, they point out that it has serious flood problems. Kraebel recently said that many reservoirs in the south coastal basin of California have lost approximately a fourth of their capacity because of siltation, and some of them have been completely filled with debris. Because of this situation, he added, flood-control agencies that operate in Los Angeles County have already spent upwards of 200 million dollars for flood-control works and estimate that 100 million dollars more is necessary.

These works are designed to cope with heavy storm run-off that is greatly accelerated when wildfires burn steep brush-covered slopes.

The need for works of this nature and for more help in stopping man-caused wildfires before they can get started is illustrated by what has happened in many places at different times. Typical on a small scale is the aftermath of the Frankish Canyon wildfire of September 16, 1935.

Only 225 acres were burned in that canyon then, but foresters believed trouble would come to the San Antonio section, near the city of Upland. So the burn was sowed with wild mustard. The possible courses of floods were traced by Clark H. Gleason, Jr., who made a survey of potential flood hazards. Warnings were issued. When those went unheeded, the Forest Service built a small emergency basin to catch at least some of the expected debris.

Winter rains started before the mustard cover crop had grown enough to retard much run-off. The rains were ordinary in both amount and intensity, but they rolled down Frankish Canyon in three mud-and-boulder-laden floods. The floods wrecked homes, garages, pipelines, lawns, and trees. Neil F. Meadowcroft and Gleason estimated damage caused by this fire-induced flood at 47 thousand dollars, and expressed the opinion that it would have been much greater had it not been for the 10,000 cubic yards of debris caught by the hastily built catchment basin.

FIRES CAN START in many ways. According to official records, a bay horse feeding under a power line in a mountain meadow switched his tail into a slack wire at 1:14 p. m.

The resulting shock killed the horse and at the same time set his mane and tail on fire. This ignited the dry grass and spread over 55 acres of timber before the fire was brought under control. The reason the horse came in contact with the power line was that an insulator had been broken and the crossarm burned off, so that the line sagged within a few feet of the ground. Because the insulator had been reported to the power company as defective more than a year earlier, the fire was listed in the records as a wildfire due to man's negligence.

This listing was in line with two long-time Nation-wide averages. First: Although lightning starts 10 percent of wildfires, 9 out of 10 are man-caused. (The figure is higher in some parts of the West . but lower in most of the South.) Second : Of every 9 man-caused wildfires, negligence and carelessness are responsible for 7, all of which could have been prevented if everybody had been careful.

Loggers say that the sun started one fire they put out. Smoke began to curl upward, they say, when the rays of the sun were focused by a bottle of kerosene (used to clean saws) onto a punky log. That is the only authenticated case of its kind I have found to date.

It is a matter of record, however, that friction of a steel cable wound around a stump started the disastrous Tillamook fire; that many wildfires are maliciously set to satisfy pet peeves, to draw crowds and create excitement, to make jobs during depressions; others are started in misguided attempts to kill chiggers, spiders, and snakes.

Incendiarists start close to 28 percent of all man-caused wildfires, but farmers and ranchers are largely responsible for 16 percent.