“WE BURNED EVERYTHING THAT WOULD BURN”This was sheepherder P. Y. Lewis’s comment about coming out of the Sierra Nevada in the fall of 1877 with his band of sheep. Lewis and hundreds of other sheepherders burned the mountains of California for forty years after the Gold Rush. They weren’t alone. Miners, loggers, cattlemen, and hunters burned both carelessly and
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deliberately. For many of them it was just economic good sense to get rid of trees and brush that were in the way of mining, logging, cattle or sheep. However, by the 1880’s smoke was becoming such a nuisance that it was said that a farmer near Yreka could smoke his hams by hanging them out of the window of his ranch house. Even mountain people could see that some controls were needed. As early as 1849 the territorial legislature sought to prevent and suppress wildfires, but with little success. In 1885 the state legislature created the first Board of Forestry. Reports to the board from counties throughout the state told of severe damage from uncontrolled fire. It was 40 years after the Gold Rush, and the Sierra foothills were thick with brush and young trees that were ripe to burn, just as they are today. Much of the central and southern Sierra was open forest created by decades of burning, but the northern forests were a patchwork with large areas destroyed by fire and logging, and other areas as thick as ever. In southern California orange groves and vineyards were destroyed by floods caused by heavy rains on burned watersheds. The Board functioned into 1893 and reported many problems caused by widespread burning in the mountains.These problems added to the concerns of wildlife, forestry, and preservation groups and resulted in growing national pressure to reserve forests from the public lands. Over 200 forest reserve laws were introduced in Congress, but all failed to pass. At the end of the session in 1891 another land disposal law was passed by both houses and sent to conference committee. An obscure committee member, William Holman of Indiana, succeeded where the likes of John Muir had failed. He managed to insert a new Section 24 in the bill authorizing the President to set aside forest reserves. Even though this was against the rules of both houses, the members were eager to get home and passed the revised law. It was signed by President Benjamin Harrison on March 3, 1891. He began proclaiming forest reserves later that year.C.FORESTS AND MEN“You have locked up our forests!” This was the cry throughout the mountains of the West. When Congress passed the 1891 Act, it caused millions of acres of forests to be reserved from the public lands, but it failed to provide for their management. No one could legally use the reserves. Finally, after much complaint and debate Congress passed the 1897 Organic Act, which provided for the protection and use of the forest reserves, which are today’s national forests. Then the question arose: who would manage these millions of acres of rough forest land? The answer was obvious— political appointees, of course. Ministers, retired businessmen, and political hacks were made forest supervisors— some of them were effective, most of them were not. There was also a sprinkling of local cowboys and woodsmen who did the day to day field work. These men became known as “rangers.” Some of them were like “Barefoot Tom” Lucas of the Angeles Reserve, who sported a beard to his waist and was noted for killing grizzly bears. Others, like clean-shaven R. L. P. Bigelow, spent most of their time in the High Sierra driving bands of illegally grazing sheep off the reserves. All of them began the slow process of building ranger stations out of logs, stringing telephone line from trees, constructing and maintaining trails, and building crude lookouts on remote mountain peaks. In 1905 many of these men formed
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Introduction to the I-Zone3-3the nucleus of a new professional agency— the Forest Service. Congress could legislate forest reserves, but it took strong men to make the reserves a reality.D.THE PRESIDENT’S BEST FRIENDThe two men grunted and strained until finally the taller man with the sweeping mustache applied a hold that the shorter, stocky man could not escape. The shorter man, President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, gasped, “Enough.” The taller man, his best friend, Gifford Pinchot, let him up and both men laughed. This was the kind of action that often went on between the two men— wrestling, boxing, rowing, sailing, and rugged outdoor sports. They were both well-connected, wealthy easterners who loved the outdoor life, and both were dedicated to the cause of conservation. Pinchot was the first American forester, the head of the Bureau of Forestry, and a man who believed the answer to American forest problems was professional forestry. In 1905 Teddy Roosevelt managed the transfer of the forest reserves from the graft-ridden General Land Office to the Department of Agriculture. In the same act, the Forest Service was created to administer the reserves, and Roosevelt made Pinchot its first Chief. However, friendship was not the main reason for Pinchot’s appointment. He was a highly-intelligent, hard-driving man, who could charm his supporters and irritate his enemies, of whom there were many. Historians are split on Pinchot, some believing he was a great leader, and others that he was a self-serving autocrat, but there is no doubt that he was the inspiration that galvanized the new Forest Service into unusual performance. He was convinced that wildfire had to be controlled. He also knew that a series of wildfire disasters in the Lake States and the Pacific Northwest had captured the public’s attention. Therefore, he made control of fire the first priority for the new agency and a reason for expansion of the national forests.E.FIREFIGHTING IN THE GOOD OLD DAYSRound up a few cowboys or loggers and a stray tourist or two, give them axes or shovels, and head for the smoke— this was fire suppression in the early days. There were no roads, no aircraft, no bulldozers, no radios, no tank trucks, no chainsaws, and no set methods to fight fire. A ranger or guard might be on a fire for a month before he finished “cold-trailing” it. Fortunately, these early firemen had strong support from their wives and families. Fire control was a man’s game and would be for decades to come, although women also made their mark. Wives of rangers and guards often cooked at fire camps, dispatched firemen, answered the telephone while minding the baby and the livestock, and even fought fire in a pinch. A 1915 photo shows two Forest Service wives ready for the fireline dressed in white blouses, black bloomers, and canvas leggings. In 1912 Hallie Daggett applied to the Klamath Forest for a job as a fire lookout. This was unheard of, but the ranger forwarded her application and reported that she “was not afraid of anything that walks, creeps, or flies ... and is a perfect lady.” With that kind of recommendation she got the job as a Forest Guard at an annual salary of $840. Hallie was on the job in June, 1913, and for 14 seasons thereafter. She was followed by many other women lookouts, and some of these became the best in the business. In the Sierra Forest, rangers and users went to Chief Clerk Julia Shinn, the supervisor’s wife, because she pretty much
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Introduction to the I-Zone3-4ran the outfit. She also created some of the first standard fire rations. According to Julia, 40-cent coffee went twice as far as the 25-cent kind. F.THE ARMY AIR PATROLIn the late winter of 1919, a major in the U. S. Army just returned from France walked into the bar of a hotel in San Francisco. He saw another major sitting at a table, walked over, introduced himself, and asked if he could join the major. Thus began a conversation that had a lot to do with the first large-scale use of aircraft in fire control. The first major was Coert DuBois, regional forester for California, and the other was Henry “Hap” Arnold, in charge of the Army Air Service in California. Other talks in Washington, D. C. resulted in an agreement that the Army would fly over the national forests of California looking for forest fires. Pilots and planes operated out of March and Rockwell Fields in southern California and Mather Field near Sacramento. It was very tough duty, flying at altitudes of up to 11,000 feet without oxygen, in cranky aircraft whose engines needed overhaul after only 100 hours flying time. Crashes were frequent and several pilots and observers were killed or injured during the three-year experiment. Careful record keeping showed that fixed lookouts did a better job of fire detection, except after lightning storms when detection from aircraft was unmatched. Several firsts were recorded by the Army Air Patrol before it ended in 1921. The patrol was used for reconnaissance on several fires, for transporting overhead from one unit to another, for dropping supplies to fire camps, and for making the first water “bomb” runs on a test fire.G.“STOP THE FOREST FIRES!”In 1924 the former Chief of the Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, was leading a drive to put private forest lands under Forest Service regulation. His most prominent opponent was the current Chief, William Greeley, who believed in cooperation, not confrontation. When Senator Charles McNary of Oregon asked Greeley how he could get a cooperative forestry bill through the U. S. Senate, Greeley said, “Stop the forest fires!” “All right,” said McNary, “but first we have to build a fire— under Congress.” Greeleyhelped by packing the hearing rooms with fire witnesses. When it was all over Congress had passed the Clarke-McNary Act, which established cooperation in forestry and fire control between the federal government and the states and private individuals. It wasn’t the first time that the threat of wildfires spurred Congress into action, nor would it be the last, but it was probably the most important. Among other things, the act provided matching funds for forestry and fire control, and soon California was the greatest beneficiary of this funding. In 1927 Governor C. C. Young established the Division of Forestry and took advantage of matching funds to start the Division on its way to the top rank among firefighting agencies. The Clarke-McNary Act became the foundation for forestry on private lands and for fire control by the states. The act also silenced a long-standing controversy over who would manage private forest lands.The Ravenna and San Gabriel Fires burned 135,000 acres in the Angeles National Forest during September 1919 and revealed flaws in large-fire organization and a lack of cooperation between fire agencies. They were followed by three years of huge fires on the Santa Barbara Forest, which burned a total of 250,000 acres. Then, the drought of
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Introduction to the I-Zone3-51923-24 set the stage for the worst fire season in California history. Before the 1924 season was over a million acres had burned, and many mountain communities such as Quincy, Susanville, Ft. Jones, and Alleghany had barely escaped the flames. The last fire was another San Gabriel Fire in the Angeles National Forest, which burned 50,000 acres and had far-reaching consequences. A public Board of Review was held which resulted in splitting the Angeles into two forests, the second being the San Bernardino. The Angeles Supervisor was transferred to the wilds of Arkansas, and a long-range program of road development in the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains began. Other severe fire seasons followed in 1926 and 1928, making the twenties the worst wildfire decade in California history.H.NINETY DAYS IN 1933In 1932 there were more than a million unemployed young men wandering the roads and railroads of the United States. After Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election in November, 1932, the Forest Service began working on a plan to enroll young men into labor camps. In the previous winter the state of California had successfully run 30 such camps employing 3,000 men on fire hazard reduction and road projects. The planners thought in terms of 25,000 men, but in December Roosevelt said he wanted 250,000. Roosevelt upped the ante at a cabinet meeting on March 9, 1933, when he said, “I want 500,000 men in camp this summer.” There was near panic in Forest Service headquarters and Congress. However, by March 29th a labor camp bill was passed by Congress, and it was signed by Roosevelt on March 31st. Roosevelt not only wanted a half-million men, he announced one Friday that he wanted to see maps showing the location of all 1,300 camps by the following Monday. The maps were on his desk bright and early, and the first camp opened on June 1, 1933. The program became known as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and it employed and brought discipline to 2 1/2 million American young men. They planted millions of trees, fought thousands of fires, and built thousands of miles of roads and trails, thousands of buildings, and hundreds of recreation areas. It was the most successful of Roosevelt’s depression measures, and it got underway in just ninety days. It’s impossible to imagine anything like that happening today. California had more camps than any other state, averaging 75 during the thirties. The CCC had two major benefits for firefighting. First, it had an unlimited supply of initial attack and follow-up forces. The supply of manpower was so great that despite dry conditions during the thirties there were low annual wildfire losses. The second benefit was the construction of hundreds of lookouts, ranger stations, crew stations, roads, and trails for all of the fire agencies. The CCC also built the Ponderosa Way, a road and firebreak planned for a distance of 687 miles from the Kern River to the Pit River. Twenty-four CCC camps and many other labor camps worked on the project, which was never finished. However, sections of the old road and the facilities built by the CCC are still in use today, over sixty years later. The CCC prepared all fire agencies for more difficult times ahead.Technology improvement continued during the thirties with new and better bulldozers and much-improved tank trucks. From this time on tank trucks became the unit around which fire crews were built. The Pacific Northwest Region of the Forest
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Introduction to the I-Zone3-6Service also developed portable radios for fire use that were so successful that the Army adopted them. Dropping supplies by parachute was developed in the late thirties, but attempts to bomb test fires with five-gallon cans of water failed. I.FLASH WARNINGS, SMOKEY THE BEAR, AND BALLOON BOMBSCalifornia during World War II was overcrowded and short of gasoline, tires, and manpower for firefighting. Boys were hired to replace men, and by the end of the war prison-inmate fire crews were introduced for the first time. The first all-woman fire crew was recruited in Soledad, California. Many fire lookouts became Aircraft Warning Service stations calling in “Flash Warnings” whenever they saw an aircraft. In 1944 Smokey the Bear was introduced to make the public aware of wildfire. The first posters showed the enemy as fire starters. That threat became real that same year when the Japanese began launching 70-foot tall balloons armed with five bombs each designed to start forest fires. Many of the bombs were carried to Western states, but no fires were started because fire season was over by the time the westerly winds began to blow. However, a balloon bomb landed near Bly, Oregon and killed a woman and her five children, the only people to die from enemy action within the United States.J.AIR ATTACKThe postwar period saw the first major change in firefighting since the advent of the bulldozer, tank truck, and fire crew. This was the introduction of aerial attack. In 1939 the Forest Service and U. S. Army chose the helicopter over the autogyro for development. When the war started the Army took over and by war’s end there were three helicopter models in use. In late 1945 tests were carried out on the Angeles Forest, and by 1947 the Bell G47B helicopter was ready for use in scouting and transporting firefighters and equipment. By the early 1950’s the helicopter had been adapted for hoselays and water drops. Helitack crews followed soon thereafter.Operation Firestop, a fire research project, brought together several approaches to air attack, but the major breakthrough was in December 1953. Douglas Aircraft Co. was testing a new passenger plane, the DC-7, when the pilot dumped ballast of 1,300 gallons of water at 190 miles per hour. The drop left a strip of water a mile long and 200 feet wide. The company notified Los Angeles County Fire Department and further tests were carried out in cooperation with the Angeles Forest and CDF. Operation Firestop took over and the air tanker was born. However, it was Joe Ely, Fire Control Officer of the Mendocino Forest, who first put research into action. He formed a squad of crop dusters into the first operational air tankers in 1956. Within two years, more and larger air tankers were in use.K.A NEW AGE BEGINSThe modern era of wildland firefighting can be said to have begun in 1961 when the Bel Air Fire burned 484 homes. The intermix of forest or brush with housing had long been a problem in California, and fires had burned homes almost every year. However, before the Bel Air Fire there were few occasions when wildfires burned 100 homes.
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Introduction to the I-Zone3-7Afterwards there were many, and the entire state was affected. In 1961 Mariposa County lost 106 homes to the Harlow Fire. In 1964 174 homes were destroyed by wildfires in Napa and Sonoma Counties. During the 1960’s over 2,000 structures were destroyed by wildfires. Then, in 1970, disaster struck throughout California when fires burned nearly 600,000 acres and 722 homes, and killed 19 people. Some areas, like Wheeler Springs, had burned repeatedly. Major fires burned there in 1917, 1932, 1948 and 1985, and either threatened or actually burned part of the town of Ojai each time. Wildfire had become a major threat to life and property in California.The fire agencies responded in 1972 with a state-sponsored task force that identified problems and solutions. Suppression capabilities were increased and cooperation between agencies improved. Firefighter deaths in the Loop Fire of 1966 and the 1970 fires caused Regional Forester Douglas Leisz to institute a Safety First program, which eliminated Forest Service fire-related deaths for ten years. The program used a “bottoms-up” approach that resulted in field participation in and support of new fire qualifications and suppression strategies. Techniques of fire safety for wildland residences were developed (and ignored by most wildland residents and developers). Prescribed burning and fuelbreaks were used more and more in fire protection each year, but results were mixed. Despite improvements in the tools and methods of firefighting, the fire agencies lost ground. The reasons were increasing development in wildlands, north or east (Santa Ana) winds, heat waves, and drought. L.BACK TO THE FUTUREThe years between 1980 and 1995 brought the worst wildfire disasters in California history. Between 1960 and 1990 California’s population doubled from 15 to 30 million. Estimates were that one million people lived in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada by 1990. Everywhere people wanted to live with natural surroundings. This was not a new phenomenon, but the scale of the urban/wildland intermix in California was far beyond anything anywhere else in the world. Drought and associated extreme fire weather provided the other ingredients that spelled disaster. Severe fire seasons became the norm rather than the exception. It is tempting to recite the long list of devastating wildfires that occurred during this period, but there is not space to do so. Suffice it to say that very large forest, brush, and/or structural wildfires occurred in 1980, 1981, 1985, 1987, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1993 and 1994 through 1999. Two wildfire situations deserve special mention. The worst structural wildfire disaster in California history occurred under an east wind in the Oakland Hills on October 20, 1991, when the Tunnel Fire burned 3,354 residences and 456 apartments and killed 25 people. The worst lightning fires in California history occurred in August and September of 1987. Most of the fires started on August 30th and eventually grew into 77 large fires, which burned 710,000 acres, mostly national forest land. This was the worst wildfire loss ever suffered in one year by the Forest Service in California.Important changes in wildfire management occurred in the late 1970’s and 1980’s, not the least of which was the change in terminology from fire control to fire management. This assumed that in the future the public would be more concerned with managing fires than controlling them, an assumption yet to be confirmed.
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Introduction to the I-Zone3-8The most important wildfire management event since 1914 was the eight-year FIRESCOPE research and development program, which was coordinated by the Forest Service and included federal, state, county, and city fire agencies. Common organization, wildfire terminology, communications systems, mapping, and training for all fire services were developed and standardized. The Incident Command System, Multi-Agency Coordination System and Central Operations Coordination Center came from this effort, as did new uses for computers and telemetry. These innovations were first tested in southern California, and by 1995 were in use throughout the United States and in many other countries.ICS placed emphasis upon fire teams, with highly-qualified people as members of each team. This resulted in more efficient use of skills, but every plus has a minus. Unfortunately, fire teams de-emphasized responsibility for large fire suppression at the local level, at least within the Forest Service. Other important changes included improved physical testing of firefighters and mandatory use of personal protective equipment. These changes led directly to the exclusive use of trained crews, since pick-up crews were often not physically qualified, trained, or properly equipped. The need to coordinate crews, aircraft, and other services resulted in the establishment of an interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, which dispatched aircraft and crews from all over the country during widespread wildfire outbreaks. As a result of these changes and declining funding, a trend toward centralization of wildfire suppression services intensified. It is too early to tell whether or not this trend is good for wildfire suppression.Another task force looked into the wildfire problems in 1981 and issued much the same kind of report as those that went before. Meanwhile, reams of information on how to make residences in wildlands fire safe were published. Some communities such as Incline Village prepared comprehensive fire-safe plans and began carrying them out. Others that are much more at risk have yet to move on this issue. Some counties have required developers to provide fire safe plans, but others are far behind. The basics of living fire safe in the wildlands are known. Now they must be applied, which is easier said than done. Los Angeles County wanted to ban shake roofs in the early 1900’s. After 90 years that small but important step has yet to be accomplished. A call for extensive prescribed burning of forests and chaparral to reduce fuel loads seems sure to fall short unless ways can be found to finance and maintain such a large program. The outlook is for more fire disasters during droughts, heat waves, and winds from the north or east.
Frankie, California obviously has a history of fires.
:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: