STOPPING WILDFIRES IN CALIFORNIA
It seems like wildfire is always in the news somewhere in California and the rest of the West. The latest entry in our local paper here in Santa Barbara reprted that wildfire could be costing the state as much as $13 million per day and that it had “burned through nearly $300 million in just the past six weeks.” (That’s more than $7 million a day.)
With that in mind here is a post I wrote for the precursor of this blog a few weeks ago. It is still pertinent and will be as long as headlines such as those just quoted above are “news.”
RANCHES SAVE SANTA BARBARA’S NEIGHBOR FROM WILDFIRE
Santa Barbara, California (where I live) is being threatened by a wildfire again. It seems this happens almost every year here and in many communities throughout the West. And sometimes the fire is more than a threat. In 1990, the Painted Cave Fire came roaring down the mountain and through the neighborhoods near my house burning 500 homes and causing at least $250 million dollars in damage. It took that fire a mere two hours to travel the 5 miles from its point of ignition into town.
Last year another huge fire, the Zaca Fire, rained ash on our community for more than four months as it burned a quarter of a million acres of forest and brush. In 2004 a fire called the Gaviota Fire threatened homes along the coast north of town. Then a second Gaviota Fire burned the same area in 2007 while the Zaca Fire was raging on the other side of town.
Shortly after this year’s version of the annual conflagration, the Gap Fire, was transformed from a smoldering quarter acre to a wind-whipped fury gobbling acres by the thousands, my neighbor had his kids and a few valuables packed in his car ready to leave at a moment’s notice. The kids were terrified and crying as the air filled with smoke and stories of how fast the Painted Cave Fire had burned down the mountain and into town. Those kids, and plenty of the rest of us, were saved from what could have been a horrific repeat of the Painted Cave fire by a force that has no doubt saved us before, but may not be around to save us in the not-too-distant future.
STOPPING A FIRE WITH A RANCH
That force was identified by the local left-wing rag, the Santa Barbara Independent, which mentioned something that rarely garners any ink in the mainstream media, much less in the “alternative” press. In a news story, reporter Ray Ford told how cattle pastures and lemon and avocado groves stopped the Gap Fire’s run toward town more than once. They stopped it because the groves were irrigated and too moist to burn, and, in the pastures, “grazing has kept the dry fuel down to a manageable level.”
Ford wrote that the ranches created, “an almost perfect buffer between the urban buildings and the wilderness above.” That “they were the biggest weapon against this inferno,” and they “played drastic roles in stopping the fire’s spread to urban areas.”
Ford also quoted County Fire spokesman Captain Eli Iskow, who added, “The fire was actually almost completely stopped when it hit some of these orchards.”
“It would be a great plan to put orchards all through fire country.” And,…
“…agricultural land will either stop a wildfire or, at the very least, slow it down to a crawl.”
Ford illustrated how well ag land manages to slow a fire by reporting that, on one ranch, “only two acres were lost because long-term grazing reduced the brush.” And therefore the fuel load.
In that same issue of the SBI, in an opinion piece on the Gap Fire entitled “Don’t Pet The Burning Dog” Nick Welsh, author of a column called the “Angry Poodle” added to Ford’s assessment of the value of the ranches in keeping the Gap Fire from turning into a disaster. Welsh said that ranchers “deserve a serious pat on the back and a kiss on the cheek.” and added, “If and when this fire is out, we’ll better understand just how well the City of Goleta (Santa Barbara’s neighbor) was protected by its green belt of orchards and ranches that separate its urban sprawl from its smoldering backcountry.”
The SBI is a liberal rag, however. So, after experiencing the brief moment of clarity described above, Angry Poodle Welsh did what liberals always do. First, he blamed George Bush for the fires, and then he concluded that the solution to the problem of recurring and worsening fires in the West is for the government to spend more money by increasing the U. S. Forest Service budget (and our taxes) so it can increase the pay of USFS fire fighters.
MAKING THE WEST MORE VULNERABLE TO WILDFIRE
But wait a minute. According to both Welsh and Ford, without the ranches, the fire fighters, well-paid or not, wouldn’t have been able to save the urban areas of Goleta and perhaps Santa Barbara as effectively as they did. Instead of writing that we need to pay higher taxes so we can give more money to the Government, and especially the Forest Service, Mr. Welsh should have been writing about how we can help keep the ranches in business and functioning. In order to do that, he could have written about how the Forest Service and a variety of environmental groups are putting ranches out of business around the West and thus making huge areas of this region more, rather than less, vulnerable to wildfire. (Notice that we’re having more fires lately?)
Welsh could have told us how the Forest Service (USFS) decided in 2005 that decommissioning three grazing allotments in the Big Sur area would have no significant impact, and he could have added how various environmental groups have pressured the USFS to close down additional allotments in the Big Sur area and throughout the Los Padres and National Forests, and across the West, for that matter, in a campaign to eliminate grazing on all public lands. If what Welch and Ford tell us about the effectiveness of ranches in stopping the spread of wildfire is true, this anti-ranching campaign has already increased the vulnerability of the West to catastrophic wildfire by several orders of magnitude. (Better buy some more fire extinguishers if you live near any kind of public land!)
Big Sur was experiencing a huge wildfire as I wrote this, and many of the abandoned grazing allotments in that area are near the coast where populations are concentrated. I’d say the impact of removing a major impediment to the spread of catastrophic wildfire in such a place is more than significant.
Last, but not least, the Angry Poodle could also have told us that an organization of Forest Service Employees, the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (FSEEE), openly advocates the removal of all grazing from Forest Service Lands, and that members of this group try to force FSEEE’s policies on the agency they work for with a variety of tactics which include, among others, intimidating scientists whose studies threaten their political agenda. That is happening, I will remind you, in another story unfolding on this blog, the case of the extirpation of the threatened spikedace from the Verde River in Arizona by policies advocated by these same environmental groups and implemented by the U. S. Forest Service.