8 March 2003
John Litton
4822 West Avenue M-8
Quartz Hill, CA 93536
To: THE SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY BOARD
Ref. The Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS)
The Giant Sequoia National Monument Management Plan
I have been asked to comment on the Management Plan. More specifically I have been asked to comment on the use of fires suppression as an “effective management tool” in the new Giant Sequoia National Monument. When asked to respond, my first questions were, “What do you manage in a National Monument? Isn’t it protected from exploitation?” But then I realized this was not a true National Monument.
I’ve been working for the U.S. Forest Service as an aviation manager and supervisory aerial firefighting pilot for over eight years. In the realm of aerial firefighting, my expertise is as a Leadplane Pilot for contracted airtankers, and aircraft commander of large smokejumper aircraft. It is from this background that I give my observations and opinions on this issue of wildland fire suppression.
NO wildland fires have ever been put out by aircraft. The inclusion of aviation into the fire suppression business was to provide a rapid “initial attack” response to slow the advance of small fires by the use of chemicals (retardant) in support of ground firefighters, or by the use of smokejumpers. Not all tactics and resources work well (if at all) on each incident. It should be no surprise to anyone in the Forest Service or BLM that we are totally ineffective in stopping wildland fires when they reach a certain stage. A century of fire suppression has created problems, but maybe not those one might expect. Forest Service records show that for the last one hundred years, the average number of acres burned per ten-year period has not significantly changed. But active suppression has created the environment for hotter fires that literally scorch the earth. In other words, if we had done nothing from 1900 on, we would be in better shape environmentally than we are today. We certainly would be better off financially. Last year, fire fighting expenditures in the Forest Service alone reached $1.6 billion dollars (less than $350 million had been budgeted). The cost-benefit ratio was so dismal that Washington has stepped in, dictating changes in policy to a culture that has, until now, had a blank check. In a recent television interview, former Interior Secretary Babbitt, referring to the Arizona firestorms of 2002 stated, “One hundred years of fire suppression has created a complex long-term problem and logging is not the answer.” From my nearly 2000 hours of flight experience over fires in the western United State, I totally agree.
Any experienced wildland firefighter will tell you that people don’t put out fires; the weather does. This was abundantly clear as one watched the fatigued men and women trying to “suppress” the Show Low fire in Arizona last year. Their words to the media were that they would do what they could to protect life and property, and wait for the weather to change. When I hear “thinning” is being considered as a national or regional policy, I cringe. Thinning creates a negative weather pattern for a stable forest ecosystem. Thinning opens a forest to wind, reduces the local relative humidity, dries everything out, and makes it more prone to burn and burn hot. The process of thinning also severely damages the forest floor as one can easily see from the air. In the Sequoia National Forest, ground damage is particularly destructive to the root system of the Giant Sequoia. In my experience, many of the hottest, fastest moving, and most destructive fires have been associated, either partially or entirely, with past or present logging operations. Not all of these fires started on public land.
Probably the most common statement from leadplane and airtanker pilots is, “This needs to burn.” The forests of the Sierra, as well as all others west of the Rockies, need to be allowed to burn naturally to regain a natural balance. Other statements uttered daily by firefighting pilots, such as “What is the objective here?” express frustration with ineffective tactics and wasted resources. Fortunately this year, management began to listen, think, and evaluate just what we are really doing and what we are really accomplishing. We are risking lives needlessly in those situations where we know we can do absolutely nothing – and we can do absolutely nothing most of the time.
Some will say that the public expects us to be there, and we have been. But in far too many cases it has all been for show. Some will say that we must do everything we can to protect private-sector jobs that depend on forest products. The USDA is driven by Congress to produce a “crop” to keep mills alive one more year. The men and women of the Forest Service Fire and Aviation community risk their lives to “Protect the Land…..” for the public only to have it cut down later. The motto of the Forest Service, “Protecting the Land and Serving the People” leaves much to be desired if the only “people” to be served are private industries. If it’s a welfare program we’re supporting, we could probably double the pay of every out-of-work logger and save two billion dollars a year in lost forest revenues alone without cutting a single tree on public land. A $1.6 billion fire suppression year would be back to $330 million or less. A true healthy forest initiative would allow the forest to manage itself.
