Man-Made Fires

by WILLIAM B. GREELEY

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FOR forty-three years my yardstick of progress in American forestry has been smoke in the woods. The United States is only part way along the road to forest safety. The yearly toll that fires take — in timber, water, soil, wild life, crops, farmsteads, and even whole communities — is a staggering national loss.

Woods fires in this country burned 9,975,750 acres in 1953. About 10 per cent of the 154,160 fires were traceable to lightning, loggers, or railroads. Perhaps one fourth of them were started by careless campers and smokers. The rest were set deliberately.

Farmers in Southern and Border states each year set fire to their woods to “green up” forage for cattle or to uncover oak and beech mast for razorback hogs. Others, just as regularly, burn the woods to clean out litter on the forest floor before boxing pine for turpentine. The frontier legend that fire rids land of chiggers and snakes, or that it keeps boll weevils away from cotton, has been handed down into the thinking of succeeding generations of Americans with destructive results.

In 1953 the state of Florida reported 4,327,748 acres of woodland burned, Mississippi reported 773,620, Georgia 401,573, Kentucky 900,313, Missouri 957,379. Eleven Southern states, not including Virginia, accounted for 79.6 per cent of the nation’s forest acreage burned and 70.6 per cent of its woods fires.

Nor can other sections of the United States be smug. Indelibly fresh in the minds of all New Englanders is t he fall of 1947 with its ten-day avalanche of lire which roared through Bar Harbor, Maine, and other areas of the state. Sixteen people died. Hundreds were injured. Hospitals, schools, churches, homes, farms, and 175,000 acres of green timber burned. Man’s carelessness in tending burning trash piles and smoldering town dumps was to blame.

East and West, these forest fire disasters follow the same pattern. They come in the fall or late summer after months of abnormally dry weather. ‘Then for a period of two or three days the relative humidity of the air drops from its normal 50 or 60 per cent to perhaps 10 per cent. The thirsty air sucks moisture out of humus, leaves, twigs, and shrubs. The great sponge of vegetable matter over the earth, as well as the soil itself, is relentlessly robbed of hoarded moisture.

When air humidity drops so low, all that is needed fora holocaust is a strong wind. A burning cigarette flung from an automobile, a smoldering trash fire, a road crew clearing a right-of-way, the friction of a steel cable drawn over a punky log any of these can provide the spark that ignites disaster.

Touched by a dicker of flame, the parched woods explode. Fires that would normally burn slowly through ground litter race faster than men can run.

In most forest regions, the Fnited Stales Weather Bureau now forecasts fire weather much as it does the coming of frosts that threalen crops or storms along the coast. State fire codes and commercial insurance policies on logging camps and equipment require shutdowns in the woods during periods of acute hazard.

A case in point is last autumn’s explosively dry situation from New England to Texas. Governors of many states closed the woods to hunters and picnickers. Slowly, and at bitter cost, we are learning the technique of forest protection. How bitter that cost can be, I learned in 1910 as a voting ranger assigned to the job of protecting the forests of North Idaho and Western Montana. I learned it in terms of hardship, sweat, danger, and human lives.

For two dry months we had held the fire line, stopping more than 3000 small fires and trenching in nearly 100 big ones. Then disaster struck. As air humidity dropped and winds reached gale velocity, hell broke loose through the Bitter Root. Range and Coeur d’Alene.

Flames leaped the miles of trench we had built and sent crews of fire fighters fleeing for their lives. One crew of fifty men crowded into an abandoned mine shaft. Their ranger leader held wet blankets over the mine entrance as flames roared by outside. Another crew, isolated by tire, survived by stretching out face down on a bald granite knob while the smoke and gases of burning timber rolled over them.

A stifling mass of smoke hid the sun, and the western sky appeared to burn with a yellow glare. Fires raged uncontrolled tor one full day. Then rains and snow in the higher mountains drenched the flame. Seventy-eight fire fighters died in that holocaust. Seven homesteaders and prospectors were trapped and burned. Whole towns were wiped out. Three million acres burned and eight billion feet of timber were lost. on see the scars today.

Sometimes the terrific natural forces that constitute “fire weather” can be overpowering. Cloquet, Minnesota, a forest industry city of 10,000, was leveled in 1918 when smoldering clearing fires fanned by a mile-a-minute gale broke loose and raced over a quarter million acres of powder-dry Minnesota forestland. Fiery cinders from flaming cutover lands around the city showered down on Cloquet. In less than live minutes buildings were afire all over town. The people of Cloquet, clutching whatever valuables they could carry, clambered aboard boxcars, coaches, and ore gondolas and rode out of town to safety.

Elsewhere in Minnesota that night hundreds perished as forest fires swept over farms and villages across seven counties. More than 100 died when flames overtook a panic-stricken crowd of fleeing people caught in a traffic tangle on a narrow road out. of Kettle River. Many residents of Moose Fake village survived by wilding into the willersof Moose Lake.

A monument, erected near that spot, tells the story: “ Moose Lake Fire, on October 12, 1918, one of the several terrific fires which wore burning simultaneously driven by a sixty-mile wind, swept the Moose Lake region. Of the 435 persons burned to death in these fires, some 200 perished in and about this town.”

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TODAY an army of 50,000 professional fire control men, backed by a quarter of a million woods-wise loggers with a mighty array of fire-light ing machines, stands ready to defend America’s forests. Widely deployed OUT 573 million acres ol woodland, this force of forest protectors has watch and ward of nearly one t bird of all t he land in our country — a domain as large as fourteen New Englands.

Forty-five divisions of this army operate under state direction. Other divisions are commanded by ten regional foresters of the Federal forest Service. Many more are organized by lumber and paper companies, industrial tree farms, and associations of woodland owners who make common cause against fire.

Like all modern armies, the cohorts of forest protection are mechanized. Their radar screens are 4000 mountain watch posts or lookout towers keeping vigil above the treetops. Precise instruments that record hour-to-hour changes in air moisture and water content of twigs and underbrush on the forest floor provide the intelligence.

For heavy artillery, this army of woodland protectors relies upon trucks equipped with water tanks and power pumps and bulldozers capable of cutting wide swaths through brush or young forest. The jeeps or pickup trucks rigged with water tanks, pumps, and plows do the lighter jobs. Lookouts, patrols, crew foremen, and rangers maintain communication with radio.

Aviators and paratroopers are part of the defense team, too. Since World War I, planes have been used to locate fires in the woods and give dispatchers a bird’s-eye view of the situation. Planes move men and supplies to hot spots on the forest front. In rugged, inaccessible mountain areas skilled smoke jumpers parachute in to halt fires while they are still small.

For a close-up of modern-day methods, drop in with me to the Central Dispatching Office of Mike Webster, supervisor of forestry in my home state of Washington. At four o clock in the afternoon during one of late August s hot dry periods we iind him planning the next day’s strategy. He is surrounded by maps dotted with colored pins.

Each color denotes a forest fire “trenched in,” “probably controlled,” or “on the loose and dangerous.” Pins with brightly colored flags represent pump trucks, bulldozers, and crews on the fire line. A pile of radiograms carries the day s intelligence from each of the twenty-two district forest lire wardens. Like a meteorologist’s map, these reports spot the stale with noon readings of atmospheric humidity, water content of forest fuels, wind direction and velocity.

State Supervisor Webster studies recommendations of his district wardens critically, checking them against late weather reports and the present lire situation in each area. In the next, room he examines an up-to-the-minute weather map and discusses weather trends with the expert who made it.

Under state law it is the supervisor’s responsibility to shut down logging camps whenever the forest fire hazard becomes critical. It s serious business, even for a few hot summer days, to cut off the number one industry of the state, thereby dein ing regular employment to thousands of lumberjacks. However, if the hazard is great there can be no hesitation.

When all the reports are in and analyzed, the orders go out: “Shut down Mason, Kitsap, Thurslon, and Lewis counties for two days. Grays Harbor and Pacific counties will be on notice; if humidity drops, shut them down. Put Clallam and Jefferson counties on hoot owl shift (5 A.M. to noon) for three days. Everything else is clear. District wardens will order immediate shutdowns if unprcdicted hazards develop.”

By seven o’clock that evening every logger in the hazardous areas of Washington has his orders and knows what he must do for the over-all safety of the forests that provide his livelihood.

Loggers play a vital role in forest defense. The woods are where they make their living. Fire fighting is a job they know well. They detest it, but scarcely a fire season passes in which loggers are not called into action against the common enemy — fire. They form the auxiliary striking force, by far the most powerful. ‘The warden in charge can call in as much power as he needs. The loggers mov e in with their mighty bulldozers, huge water tankers, portable pumps, and rugged, fire-trained men. It is up to them to overwhelm the fire.

This, in varying pattern from state to state, is modern organized forest protection. In one form or another it is provided for 90 per cent of the forest land of the nation. Maintaining, training, and equipping this woodland protection force costs more than $55 million a year. Over two thirds of the money comes from state, county, and private sources.

Tragic lessons learned in Maine during 1947, when lire fighters and equipment could not be sent across state lines, led to a new legislative approach to the forest protection problem. And in 1949 Congress created the Northeastern Interstate Forest Fire Protection Compact, authorizing any two or more of the New England stall’s and New York to unite for effective control of forest fires. The participation of adjacent provinces in Canada is invited. All seven Northcastern states have ral ified t he compact. A fire danger index has been devised to aid in determining when weather conditions require closure of forests. When occasion demands, the commission’s secretary acts as regional dispatcher and mobilizer of men and equipment on critical fire fronts. Of the many agreements bet ween states, this is the first designed to save forests from fire. The Northeastern treaty, with its international scope, opens up new horizons of cooperation in conservation.

One of the most striking changes in recent years is the intensity of protection planning and preparedness on industrial tree farms. Some industrial forest tracts are equipped with access roads and tank trucks to the point where almost every square rod of timber can be reached with a stream of water. With their own equipment and trained fire fighters on the job, these organizations have whipped the normal fire hazard.

Another change, equally important, results from a more careful scientific disposal of slash and forest leftovers. Pulp, fiberboard, soil conditioners, ethyl alcohol, and even food for livestock, are made from wood once left to burn or rot. Conversion of these leftovers into commercial products creates extra dollars and frees the land of heaps of inflammable material on which forest fires have fed all the way from Maine’s Penobscot River to Puget Sound.

Notwithstanding many advances on the protection front, thousands of woods fires every summer are si ill shameful evidence of our incapacity as a. people to live with our forests. Old habits of woods burning die slowly and levy a terrible tribute upon the struggling forestry of the country. Four and a quarter million acres of forest and range were burned in one of the Southern slates last year. These were chiefly fires set to improve the forage and left to run at large. One of the lumber cornpan it’s in another stale was so disheartened by the loss of pine plantations systematically carried on for several years that it has abandoned the effort to bring ils lands back into productiveness. And out in the Pacific Northwest a stubborn farmer ignored the state law which requires burning permits, misread the weather signs, and chose a day of falling humidity and rising wind to clean up his back forty. His fire destroyed 15,000 acres of fine young Douglas fir on his neighbor’s tree farm.

To the hazard of old customs and traditions of firing the countryside is added the mounting hazard of city folk who stream out on the highways, pleasure bent, and toss burning cigarettes along the roadside. This menace grows with every new mile of public road and every additional car turned off an assembly line. It steadily penetrates more deeply even into the most inaccessible forest areas of the Far West. Of what avail the skills of the forester, the carefully laid plans for sustained yield over future years, and the promising research in forest, genetics, when our effort to grow trees constantly runs into this inert barrier of public ignorance and heedlessness? Three and one-half per cent of our annual timber crop still goes up in smoke. The lumber consumed in this yearly sacrifice to Baal would build 125,000 new homes.

The battle for the forests of America has become a major challenge to our national capacity. It is a battle in which public education and cooperation are essential allies of the organized services and their master minds. There is no effective control of forest fires except at the grass roots of popular understanding and action.

We can make America safe for f ree farms only by making every citizen take personal responsibility for keeping fire out of the woods.