Smoke from prescribed fires is unavoidable, such as this 2007 fire near Vernal, Utah. Photo courtesy Bureau of Land Management
With May skies overhead a crystalline blue native only to New Mexico, a column of smoke rises from the forest west of Highway 15 near Silver City. Tourists and road bikers—blurry flashes of taut calves, colorful jerseys and high-tech helmets—stream up and down this road that cherry-stems through southwestern New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness.
But no one seems to bat an eye at the smoke as it billows and stretches across the tops of not-too-distant trees. Rather than obstructing the view—outlooks across the wilderness beckon from pull-offs along the road—the smoke seems a natural part of the landscape.
“The communities around here are fairly receptive to having some smoke in the air,” says Craig Cowie, fire and vegetation staff officer on the Gila National Forest, which covers 3.3 million acres. In the Gila’s three wilderness areas, he says, forest managers often allow lightning-caused fires to burn to accomplish management objectives such as reducing fuel loads and aiding plant species that rely on fire for regeneration. Managers refer to the practice as “fire use for resource benefits.” Prescribed fires are those intentionally lit for many of those same objectives: to improve wildlife habitat and timber stand health, reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires and also help forests maintain resilience to insect and disease outbreaks. The U.S. Forest Service uses both types of fire to encourage healthy forest ecosystems, but to the public, they are largely indistinguishable—it’s usually only the smoke that matters.
“We work with the communities to let them know the reasons we’re trying to get the fire back into the ecology, back into the ecosystem,” Cowie says. “Having to do that requires having a little bit more smoke in the air than normal.”
The agency works closely with the state air quality bureau to ensure they don’t ignite burns at times when inversions might settle smoke into the valleys. The Gila’s prescribed burn program is substantial—some 24,000 acres are burned each year. And nearby communities have been supportive of the forest’s endeavors to return fire—and by default, smoke—to the Gila. Officials work with the public early in the planning process and have long emphasized education and the value of fire use.
“[Sometimes] we have to shut a fire down for a couple of days because of too much smoke in the community,” Cowie says. “But probably the main thing is making sure we’re doing the best job possible in the notification of communities.”
Nationwide, smoke from forest fires is a nuisance. Disappointed tourists retreat from vistas obscured by haze and locals grumble when the heavy smell lingers over their neighborhoods. Undoubtedly, the scent of smoke in the air evokes a sort of primal fear that homes may be destroyed or lives lost. While scientists and forest managers have long recognized that healthy forest ecosystems also include fire, the public has less readily accepted smoke as a vital part of the forest landscape. But it turns out that the best way to mitigate the effects of smoke on communities, public health and air quality—and to help people understand the consequences of dwelling in and around forest landscapes—might be to return fire to the forests even more regularly.
NATIONAL STANDARDS
With the passage of the 1970 Clean Air Act, air quality was high on the nation’s environmental agenda. That law mandated health-based air quality standards and required states to adhere to them, which forced a change in how certain activities were conducted. Peter Lahm, the Forest Service’s fire and aviation program manager, says the agency was already working on smoke management programs in the 1960s and 70s. “At that time, the use of prescribed fire was increasing, and timber slash disposal and site preparation burning was fairly active.”
Then, in the late 1970s, the Southern Forest Fire Laboratory released the Forest Service’s first smoke guidance document. In 1990, Congress amended the Clean Air Act to address regional haze issues. Eight years later, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released an interim air quality policy related to wildland and prescribed fires. The hope was to protect public health while still allowing fire to function within forest ecosystems. Most states today have developed smoke management plans regarding air quality and regional haze, and currently, the Forest Service uses a 2001 document drawn up by the National Wildlife Coordinating Group’s Fire Use Working Team as its planning guide.
Lahm, who was one of the guide’s authors, points out that rather than offering a new approach, the guide assembled information that was previously available. “There were some new sections in the guide, but overall smoke management efforts were well underway…prior to the publication,” he says, adding that the biggest challenge was addressing EPA rules and regulations, which continue to change and evolve.
LOCAL CONTROL
When planning for prescribed fires, each forest must file a smoke management plan. That document outlines burn procedures, lists the method of public notification, describes how firefighters will reduce emissions and identifies sensitive facilities in the area (such as retirement homes). Once smoke plans are in place, Forest Service officials check in with local or state bureaus concerning air quality and meteorological conditions. According to Peter Biscay, air quality specialist with the San Joaquin Valley Unified Air Pollution Control District in California, managers also estimate acreage and the basic vegetation type so the district can calculate how many tons of emissions will be produced.
In the San Joaquin Valley—smack dab between Stockton and Bakersfield—the valley’s air suffers from high levels of both ozone and fine particulate matter such as dust, dirt, soot, smoke and liquid droplets. Regional air quality experts and regulators are grappling with how to reduce the impacts of emissions from forest fires, which remain something of a wildcard when it comes to the valley’s air quality. Unpredictable from day to day, never mind year to year, fires “dwarf what emissions exist down in the valley,” Biscay says.
Two years ago, the district signed onto a plan to reduce ozone emissions—which can affect respiratory functions even in healthy populations—in the valley, Biscay says. His job is to study how to reduce the impacts of emissions from prescribed burning, particularly on poor air quality days.
The Forest Service already employs a host of techniques, but Biscay’s feasibility study outlines additional ways in which officials can cut emissions. These range from the use of air burners—metal boxes with engines that blow a curtain of air over the top of a fire, helping reduce emissions in sensitive areas—to reducing fuel via chipping or mechanically removing forest debris.
Southern California’s 2008 wildfire season wreaked havoc on air quality. This year, the district is especially eager to promote other activities—in particular prescribed burning—on good air quality days, Biscay says. Doing so will reduce those catastrophic wildfires that impact air quality so negatively, he says.
The final study—due out this summer or early fall—will include a handful of recommendations. In particular, the district would like to see increased federal funding for prescribed burning as well as other non-burning alternatives.
The district is also changing its legislative platform in order to lobby against certain conflicting federal regulations and Forest Service policies that essentially prohibit burning on clean days. According to the agency, as long as wildfires are burning elsewhere, firefighters cannot be assigned to prescribed burns, even if a smoke management plan has been completed and filed and air quality conditions are agreeable. Additionally, he says, regulations that prohibit the harvest of downed logs for power generation can thwart efforts to clear fuel loads that feed wildfires.
Finally, the document includes a summation of mitigation measures the district would like implemented. These include biomass reduction through grazing, fuel and power generation, grinding and wood chipping as well as conversion into forest products.
Asked what the public’s responsibility is when it comes to national forests, fire and air quality, Biscay jokingly cites Smokey Bear: “We don’t want any fires that aren’t planned—so prevent wildfires.”
SMOKE POLITICS
Nudging the public to understand and accept its role in preventing wildfires is one thing. Convincing communities that fire—and by default, smoke—has a place in a healthy forest ecosystem is quite another. In northern New Mexico, the communities and the forests are intertwined, and the connections are intimate. Santa Fe, Los Alamos and Espaņola sit within sight of the Santa Fe National Forest. People have lived for generations in the smaller towns that dot the forest, gathering firewood, grazing cattle or sheep, and otherwise relying on the forests for income. Chimayo, Cordova and Cundiyo lie at the fringe of the Pecos Wilderness, while the Santa Fe’s western expanse surrounds remote towns such as Coyote, Llaves and Cañones.
“I found out that here in northern New Mexico, it can get real political,” says Orlando Romero, who worked for the Forest Service in California before working as a burn boss on the Santa Fe National Forest for twelve years.
“People will go to their senators, representatives [and complain about smoke] and it will get to the forest supervisor, and the forest supervisor has to make a decision,” says Romero, who today works for the Forest Guild, a Santa Febased community forestry program. “If you’re burning a big burn, and you’re in the middle of it, and they tell you to shut it down, it’s going to be costly.”
He recalls a lightening-strike fire in the Pecos Wilderness that was contained for about a week before jumping a line. “It was just smoke. It wasn’t hurting people, and there wasn’t any way it was going to get into the valley,” he says. Firefighters weren’t worried, but by then the fire was outside the wilderness boundary. “It got political, and the forest supervisor went to me and said, ‘What’s it going to cost to shut her down?’”
Romero’s answer: $3 million. Despite budget constraints, the agency shelled out the cash to put out the fire.
No matter how great the ecological need might be to undertake a burn project—and despite the planning and safety measures managers employ—political pressure remains a very real concern. “The trust is gone, I hate to say that,” says Romero. “So they need to build that back.” The erosion of trust stems at least in part from the prescribed fire that blew out of control in Los Alamos in 2000, burning 50,000 acres, destroying 200 homes and causing some $130 million damage at the nuclear weapons laboratory.
For Romero, the key to earning and maintaining the public’s trust lies with small burns—planning for fifty- to 100-acre fires throughout the spring or fall rather than attempting huge fires that are thousands of acres in size and susceptible to growing out of control.
“I figured we need to come up with a solution to get them used to smoke,” he says. So within his district, he started instructing staff to conduct day-long burns of less than 100 acres each. “We tried to be consistent,” he says. “Up front, we would talk to [people], and we might get a little flak the first or second times, but after a while people accept it.”
If managers burn regularly every year, he says, smoke becomes part of the seasonal landscape, and people aren’t as quick to worry or complain about its effects. If winds shift, and the fire has to be extinguished, little harm is done. “Maybe you only burned fifty acres, but you’re okay, you controlled it.” Blow a large fire, he says, “and you’re shot, probably for years.”
Though the tendency is to think big, these small, consistent fires not only get the public used to the idea, but Romero says they are sufficient to get the work done.
“Our district was doing burnings throughout the spring and fall, and we’d over-accomplish every year, and we got along fine with the public.” Other districts on the Santa Fe took a different tack, and it wasn’t always successful: With 1,200 acres as the target, they would wait until conditions were right to do the entire burn at once. That sometimes meant waiting two or three years.
A few days before burning, burn bosses need to touch base with key local people. “In small communities I found out that if they get [the information] from a trusted person, they always want to hear it from that same person,” he says. “We had several fires shut down because that one person wasn’t there telling them what was going on.”
Healthy forest ecosystems, fire and communities are an “uneasy trio,” says Zander Evans, the Forest Guild’s research director. “How do we move to a place of comfort? That’s a little bit tricky because fire is so unplanned, changeable and potentially destructive.”
By its very nature, fire makes people uncomfortable. And while most people won’t experience a big fire, he says, a lot of people are affected by smoke. Educating the public about the role fire plays within a forest ecosystem as well as helping them protect their own homes can allay the public’s fears, he says.
But people who live near forests also need to accept that smoke is a part of a healthy forest’s ecosystem. Making smoke a seasonal ritual might help communities acclimate to smoke. “It might still be annoying,” Evans says, “but it becomes part of the routine.”